Letters | The pale blue dot

The earth is immense. Even in one’s lifetime, itis not possible to visit every corner of the globe. There are so many countries, islands, cities and towns.

In days gone by, traveltook a long time and was often hazardous. During the Age of Discovery, the great explorers and adventurers took months, even years, to travel to distant continents and countries across the oceans. Nowadays, travel is much faster.

But even in this modern era, it would take you more than a day to fly around the globe. Voyager 1 was launched on September 7, 1977,to study the outer solar system and interstellar space. Travelling at an astonishing speed of 61 000 km an hour, it has now left our solar system and is all alone in interstellar space.

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The pioneering spacecraftis now an incredible 26 billion kilometres from Earth — the farthest any man-made object has ever been. So far away, in fact,that communication between the spacecraft and Earth takes a whole day. Surprisingly,the instruments are still working even after almost 50 years.

But sadly, scientists have had to shut down some ofthe instruments to conserve power. Voyager 1 has sent a lot of data and images of our solar system and interstellar space back to scientists on Earth. It has also sent us pictures of Saturn and Jupiter as it flew by these two giant planets.

Forthe first time, we saw vivid pictures of Saturn’s rings and volcanic eruptions on Jupiter. One ofthe mosticonic pictures it sent back to Earth was the “Pale Blue Dot”. It was a picture of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, at a distance of 6 billion kilometres, at the request ofthe late Carl Sagan.

It shows the earth as an insignificanttiny blue dotin the vastness of space. In our eyes,the earth is immense, butin cosmologicalterms itis a mere speck. It cannot even be seen from deep space.

Yetthis same “pale blue dot” is teeming with life.How can a tiny speck in the universe have so much life, while the vast universe supposedly has none? A conundrum of cosmic proportions. The earth is all we have.

We cannot even go to our nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri b,for help. Though the habitable exoplanetis only 4,25 light years away, itis virtually impossible to getthere. A cosmic paradox.

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