The Pale Blue Dot: Inspiration
The Pale Blue Dot is an iconic photograph of Earth taken on Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
There is no better way to sum up why we became a B Corp. Arguably, there may not be a better speech in the history of the World. Sustainability, social impact and good business practices can all derive lessons from this timeless work.
Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot - Official.
“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.”
Commitment to Preserving Our Home
Carl Sagan’s The Pale Blue Dot and the image it was inspired by is inspiring and humbling in equal measure. This B Corp month we are looking again at how we are moving toward this ideal.
Deal more kindly with one another: Transparency, honesty, support and growth shares for the foundation team. The strength of the pack is the wolf. The strength of the wolf is the pack.
Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot: Net Zero by 2028 or sooner. Exceed 110 B Corp certification score by 2025. No single use plastic. Read more about us here.
The Business Case for Sustainability
A recent article by the world economic forum highlights not just a sentimental case but a business imperative for taking care of the only home. Approximately half of global GDP is moderately or heavily dependent upon nature. Marketing and video content production are traditionally heavy on waste. We need to change this.
Responding to climate risk
There is no doubt that the challenge is great — it is perhaps the greatest challenge humanity has ever or will ever face. The good news: the solutions are available to us.
The priority solution is faster emissions reduction and credible steps by all actors in our economic system to accelerate the speed and scale of a clean transition. Human emissions is the swiftest lever to postpone or avoid critical changes to Earth systems.
“The Earth is where we make our stand”
Transcript
“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.”
About the Photographer
Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977, just days after its twin — Voyager 2 — on Aug. 20. Because it was on a faster route to the mission's first encounter, at Jupiter, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977. (This was the reason for the order of their naming.)
Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on Nov. 12, 1980.
After snapping the Pale Blue Dot and other “family photos,” — at 05:22 GMT, Feb. 14, 1990 — Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever. Mission planners wanted to save its energy for the long journey ahead.
In August 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space. It’s now the most distant human-made object ever.
The image was processed by JPL engineer and image processing enthusiast Kevin M. Gill with input from two of the image's original planners, Candy Hansen and William Kosmann.
Video: As seen in 2014's COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey
Written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter
Cosmos Studios, Inc., Copyright © 2013
Passage written by Carl Sagan for the book Pale Blue Dot published by Random House,
Copyright ©1994 Democritus Properties, LLC
