There’s a big world we live in, considering that all of our actions, all of the places, cities, countries and seas, all of the events in history, all of the movies and documentaries, and all of our memories are related to it. But even so, our planet is literally just a tiny dot in the solar system when viewed from far away.
It has been proved by NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe since 30 years ago. On February 14, 1990, the probe showed us how fragile our planet really is by taking a photo of it from a staggering distance of 3.7 billion miles away:
While it looks just like a tiny blue dot, there you have nothing else than our beloved planet Earth. You could say that all of the wars, achievements, inventions, and disasters humans had ever witnessed are on that pale blue dot. Whether we like it or not, Earth is just a tiny outpost in an outrageously big Universe.
We only have one planet
Candy Hansen from the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, reminds us how critically important the “pale blue dot” is for us all:
And we need to remind ourselves again that there’s one planet that is hospitable to humans. Even if we colonize the moon or Mars one day, neither one of those bodies is really going to be able to support seven billion of us. So, we need to take care of this planet.
Voyager 1 launched shortly after its ‘twin’, Voyager 2, back in 1977. The difference in time was of only several weeks. The two probes had the mission of exploring the solar system’s giant planets. Therefore, they flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Today, February 14, 2020, we are celebrating 30 years from the moment Voyager 1 took the photo of Earth from space. We should prove to ourselves how deeply in love we are with our beautiful planet.
