FOR TO CONTEMPLATE


In August 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 passed as close to Neptune as it was going to get. Carl Sagan suggested to NASA that the craft turn around and take a sort of ‘family photo’ of our solar system — that is, to attempt to take a single photograph that included every planet revolving around our sun. According to William Poundstone’s biography, Sagan hoped that a photograph like this “might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition”.

There was no scientific value to be found in such a photograph — at least, not any obvious value — so Sagan’s suggestion was refuted by many of his peers. In fact, NASA thought that turning Voyager around to take a shot of the planets might lead to accidentally pointing the craft’s camera at the sun, which would likely burn out the imaging system.

In the end, Sagan got his way by suggesting that NASA wait until Voyager passed Neptune altogether, and there were no planned photographs left to take. That way, if the imaging system was damaged, there would be no loss to the original mission. What Sagan hoped for — the family photo — turned out to be impossible. Gathering all of the planets into a single frame didn’t work — they were too widespread. On top of this, Mars and Pluto would be too faint to register in the image. Mercury would be wiped out by the glare of the sun. Earth would probably be no larger than a single pale pixel in the image.

On Valentine’s Day, 1990, some sixty images spanning the planets and the gaps between them were taken. Poundstone writes: “Through a chance artifact of the imaging system, the Earth pixel appeared in the midst of an illusory ’sunbeam’.”

Sagan wrote:

The aggregate of our joy and our 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 siner in the history of our species live here — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

-- do deeply shallow