But when we took the picture, there was something about it that seemed to me so poignant, vulnerable, tiny.

And that is to turn the cameras on one of these spacecraft back to photograph the planet from which it had come.Īnd clearly, there would not be much scientific data from this because we were so far away that the Earth was just a point, a pale blue dot. And after they swept by the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune systems, it was possible to do something I had wanted to do from the beginning.

Why the title?ĬARL SAGAN: Well, I was an experimenter on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. That’s always the first question that every interviewer asks an author. He is Co-founder and President of the Planetary Society and author of the new book, Pale Blue Dot, published by Random House. Carl Sagan is the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science and the Director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And so where does that leave us? Astronomer Carl Sagan might say it brings us back to our roots as explorers and may drive us to become interplanetary, even intergalactic wanderers. If we don’t destroy it, maybe a stray asteroid will. There is no guarantee that our boring little rocky planet will be around forever. But in the words of Carl Sagan, “We live on a routine planet near a humdrum star, stuck away in an obscure corner of an unexceptional galaxy which is just one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”Īnd if you think that sounds depressing, consider this. We’d all like to think that we’re pretty much the center of attention, the center of the universe. Here’s Carl Sagan on Science Friday recorded December 16, 1994. We talk about US space policy, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the place of humans in the universe. And as you’ll hear, the development of a movie called Contact was still just in the planning stages. His famous book Pale Blue Dot had just been published. And that’s why we’re taking this opportunity to take another listen to this classic conversation with Sagan, recorded 25 years ago this month.

As we make our way towards the end of the year, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at the big picture, and I mean really big.įew people could put the cosmos in perspective better than the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

Carl sagan tiny blue dot