A Winter Grave

In 1990, as NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to leave the solar system, Carl Sagan — a member of the mission’s imaging team — asked that the camera be turned around to take one last look back at Earth. The image it captured of our world, as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, became known as ‘the pale blue dot’.

Later, when considering that speck of dust in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, he wrote: ‘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.’