As Voyager 1 was approaching the edge of our Solar System, Carl Sagan convinced the team at NASA to rotate the probe and send one last photograph back. A photograph portraying the earth as a tiny blue dot contrasted against the emptiness of space. This photograph wasn’t taken for purely scientific reasons, but had a deeper significance which Sagan elaborated on in his book Pale Blue Dot:

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. 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 Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

From February 14, 1990:

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