Mankind is unable to hold this beautiful globe in the palm of the hand, but that doesnt mean it cannot be embraced.

As the Voyager 1 spacecraft completed its primary mission to explore the Solar System, it was instructed by NASA, after a suggestion by Carl Sagan, to turn around for one final time and photograph the planets as it departed from them forever.

One image Voyager sent back, on February 14th, 1990, showed the Earth as a pale blue dot.

It is this grainy image taken of the planet at a distance of 4 billion miles which, for many, has defined our place in the Universe.

This remarkable view of the Earth is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light.

By coincidence the Earth lies totally centre of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the picture so close to the sun.

On October 13, 1994, Carl Sagan was delivering a public lecture at his own university of Cornell. During that lecture, he spoke the following words

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being
who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer...every teacher of morals..every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, howfervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Dr Carl Sagan - October 13th, 1994

Carl Edward Sagan, Ph.D. (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrochemist, and author. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5th, 1977. Its original mission was to visit Jupiter and Saturn; and it was the first probe to provide detailed images of the moons of these planets.

It is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth.

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