VOYAGER 1990 - Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan - CASSINI 2006

No dia 14 de fevereiro  de 1990  tendo completado sua missão primordial, foi enviado um comando a Voyager 1  para se virar e tirar fotografias dos planetas que havia visitado. A NASA havia feito uma compilação de cerca de 60 imagens criando neste evento único um mosaico do Sistema Solar. Uma imagem que retornou da Voyager era a Terra, a 6,4 bilhões de quilômetros de distância, mostrando-a como um "pálido ponto azul" na granulada imagem.

Sagan disse que a famosa fotografia tirada da missão Apollo 8, mostrando a Terra acima da Lua, forçou os humanos a olharem a Terra como somente uma parte do universo.

No espírito desta realização, Sagan pediu para que a Voyager tirasse uma fotografia da Terra do ponto favorável que se encontrava nos confins do Sistema Solar.  by Wikipedia

A imagem capturada pela Voyager 1 inspirou Carl Sagan a escrever um Livro

O Pálido Ponto Azul! ........Isso ocorreu em 1994.

Numa conferência em 11 de Maio de 1996, Sagan falou dos seus pensamentos sobre a histórica fotografia

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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, how fervent 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.

A photo from the Cassini spacecraft shows the mighty planet Saturn, and if you look very closely between its wing-like rings, a faint pinprick of light. That tiny dot is Earth bustling with life as we know it. The image is the second ever taken of our world from deep space. The first, captured by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, stunned many people, including the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who called our seemingly miniscule planet a "pale blue dot" and "the only home we've ever known."

(Clique no título e veja imagem da sonda Cassini)