We're all here

If you squint

31 years ago a spacecraft called Voyager 1 completed its mission to explore the outer solar system along with its twin, Voyager 2. For years before the mission ended, Carl Sagan and his Voyager teammates begged NASA to take a photo of the Earth once the spacecraft left Neptune. They knew IF the photo was taken, Earth would look like nothing bigger than a pixel in the frame, perhaps even unnoticeable. From that distance we would appear as just another star. Finally after years of work, NASA agreed and on February 14th 1990, Voyager turned itself towards the inner solar system, and opened and closed its shutter for a final time. The sunlight reflecting off our planets atmosphere was the last light Voyager 1 ever collected in its camera.

Months later when NASA finally got the data back, the photo showed several stripped bands of sunlight stretched across the frame and nestled in one of the sunbeams was an almost imperceptible speck of light. It was us.

Of course this famous image became known as the Pale Blue Dot.

In 1968 When Apollo 8 took the iconic Earthrise image it was the first time we’d really seen ourselves as what we are, a planet in space. The Earth looked beautiful, but lonely surrounded by darkness. That image even played a huge role in the dawn of the environmental movement. It scared people to see us so engulfed in silence, so vulnerable. So, when Voyager 1 captured an image of us from 3.7 billion miles away, it shifted our perspective so profoundly it’s even hard to grasp now, 31 years later. The Pale Blue Dot photo transcended us being surrounded by darkness and silence, we were minuscule, barely noticeable. A few billion miles further away and you’d not know we were even there. That’s a hard fact to contend with. But I think it makes our insignificance just that much more meaningful. It is miraculous that we exist at all. Our eventual blending into the background isn’t a bad thing, it doesn’t negate our existence, it connects us to everything else we cannot see but we know is there.

While the team never planned to have the photo taken on Valentines Day, I think it’s really perfect that it was a day that’s (supposed to be) synonymous with love. This year has brought out love from all of us in ways we could never have prepared for. This last year it’s felt more tenuous and fragile to just exist as a human. Almost a full year ago, we all collectively went inside to protect each other, out of love and compassion. I’ve seen how the conversations have changed online, despite the most contentious stressful political year of our generation, we reached out to each other, we comforted each other, we’ve shown love. Not Valentines Day CVS knock off plastic tasting chocolates love, but deep human love.

To look at this Voyager photo now feels very different for me after surviving 2020. It’s different because before when I used to look at this photo I saw how fragile and special we all are, but now I feel it-just how lightly we are here together.

Today can be simply Valentines Day, or it can be a day that we remember what it means to be human on this planet. How lucky we are that we get to build spacecraft to travel to the depths of our solar system and snap a photo so that we can see ourselves so small and grand and together.