Nearly 4 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 snapped a photo of our home planet. This photograph became known as "The Pale Blue Dot", referring to the tiny, barely distinguishable dot on the right side of the image. That tiny dot is Earth.
For many people, this singular image completely changed the way they view themselves, their planet, and their reality. Earth seems so incredibly big to each and every one of us, yet it is so very small. We are so very small. Here is that photograph, taken 35 years ago, showing how small and fragile we truly are:
The photo is unaltered, without even an arrow to point out our tiny planet, once again showing how insignificant Earth appears from only a few worlds away. You might be able to make out three diagonal sunbeams (one purple, one green, and one orange). Earth is on the right side of the image in the middle, within the visible orange sunbeam. You might need to zoom in. You can barely see it... and that's exactly why this image is so important. You can barely see the entire planet.
The United Nations currently estimates that the world population was around 5.3 billion in the year 1990, meaning there are 5.3 billion people living on that dot in this photograph. If we were to send another spacecraft out there to take an updated photo, everything would look essentially the same, only with 3 billion additional people living on that dot. That's right. 8.3 billion (8,300,000,000) people — including you — live right there, right now.
There are more than 5,500 planets that we have officially detected around other stars, with hundreds of billions of other planets estimated to exist in our Milky Way galaxy alone. We have not yet found another world on which humans could survive without a spacesuit. So far, Earth is the only known habitable world within our technological reach.
We must take care of it. We must look after it. We must not let it go to waste. The Pale Blue Dot is all we have.
