Transcription
Foreign. T was a long way from home. I thought it might be a good idea just after Saturn to have them take one last glance. Homeward from Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far-off suns.
But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having. It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. It was a first chance, perhaps also our last for decades to come.
So here they are: a mosaic of square is laid down on top of the planets and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it's just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture—not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves.
From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small on the scale of worlds; humans are inconsequential—a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
Consider