BELL: Meanwhile Voyager 1
is still kind of
cruising out there,
getting farther and farther out,
and a number of folks
on the team,
including Carl Sagan,
had this idea that before we
have to shut the cameras down,
let's turn around,
look back towards the sun
and let's take a picture
of our solar system
unlike any that had
ever been taken before.
And there was actually opposition to it.
PORCO: They just didn't want to do it.
They couldn't get their heads around
what would be the point
of taking a picture
of the Earth and Jupiter
and so on
because they're just going to be
little points of light.
So Carl being Carl
actually went all the way
to the NASA administrator
and got him to direct the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
to take this series of pictures.
SMITH:
Absolutely zero science in it.
Absolutely none.
NARRATOR:
From a unique vantage point,
nearly four billion miles away,
Voyager 1's cameras turned homeward
to take family snapshots.
It was Valentine's Day, 1990.
[music playing]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
When we did our portrait
of each of the planets,
I was the first person
to look at the pictures
and I knew every blemish,
and so I could pretty quickly go
blemish, blemish, blemish,
and I thought, well,
where's the Earth?
Where?
How could we... you know?
And then I realized
there was a lot of...
there were a lot of streaks
of light in that image,
and I realized finally
that the Earth was sitting
in one of those rays of light.
You know, I just sat there for a while
just kind of realizing wow,
that's the Earth, you know,
that's Voyager looking back at the Earth,
and then once I had sort of recovered,
I started calling people.
I called Brad.
Brad, we got it,
called Carl, Carl, we got it.
Called my dad.
[laughs]
STONE: And so this is a
different kind of milestone
than the scientific milestones we've had.
One that is really symbolic...
PORCO: I'm an imaging scientist,
so I first realized,
oh, this didn't turn out
the way we thought it
was going to turn out,
and my first impulse is to take my hand
and wipe away the dust,
because there was some dust on it.
Well, one of the pieces of
dust that I wanted to wipe away
was the Earth.
But it didn't matter because
in the hands of Carl,
he turned it into an allegory
on the human condition.
CARL SAGAN: And the next slide.
The Earth in a sunbeam.
And in this color picture
you can see that it is in
fact less than a pixel,
and this is where we live,
on a blue dot.
On that blue dot,
that's where everyone you know
and everyone you ever heard of
and every human being who ever lived
lived out their lives.
I think this perspective
underscores our responsibility
to preserve and cherish
that blue dot,
the only home we have.
