On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward the Sun from six billion kilometers out and photographed the Earth. Our planet, just twelve hundredths of a pixel, is what Carl Sagan called "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
It took eight years and six separate requests to get that photograph approved. The Voyager team turned down each of Sagan's requests on sound grounds: engineering resources were scarce, and aiming the cameras that near the Sun risked destroying them. Underneath all of it, the image had no obvious scientific value. There was no case for taking any risk at all.
Thirty-six years on, the Pale Blue Dot stands as a symbol of humanity's exploration of the cosmos because it gave us perspective on what we thought we already knew. The same photograph that records how far we had come also shows how little of the universe we fill. Sagan knew an image can do something a measurement cannot.
I started Genetics of Design to make the Pale Blue Dots that nobody has been able to justify. We take scientific data from other fields and plot it in ink, looking for the images those measurements cannot make on their own.
Nabil Azamy
The Pale Blue Dot photograph was taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, at a distance of about six billion kilometers from the Sun. The version here is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, reprocessed by NASA in 2020 for the picture's thirtieth anniversary. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
