THE PALE BLUE DOT.

Photo by olivia maia on Unsplash

Look very carefully at the picture attached to the bottom of this paragraph. It does not come close in aesthetics to many pictures taken by an average smart phone. But there's an interesting story behind it. One that makes it more significant than 10,000 spectacular HD selfies! 

source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

On the 5th of September, 1977, NASA launched a robotic spacecraft, named Voyager 1, on a one-way mission into space. Its primary assignment was to drive by Saturn and Jupiter to collect and send back information about those planets as it made its way out of our solar system.

It successfully did this and sent interesting data and pictures of these planets. Adding to our collective knowledge of our universe. However, this post is about one other unscheduled picture it took some 13 years into its flight. 

On the 14 of February, 1990, NASA remotely instructed the spacecraft to turn its camera to the direction of our planet and capture one last image before powering down its camera. They knew whatever picture it would capture wouldn't be of much scientific significance, seeing that all planetary objects will be so small from that distance. 

The image below is one of the images sent. It's a simple, bland image with plenty significance.

Look very closely at this picture. Do you see that small, slightly shiny spot on that brown ray band? Yes, that pale blue, almost insignificant dot... That pale blue dot in that picture is a snapshot of our earth home from 3.7 billion miles away; standing in of the darkness of a minute fraction of outer space. 

Follow the red dot...

To garnish these thoughts, here are he words of one of the leading scientists behind this project, Carl Sagan:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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."

I'm not really going anywhere with this post. But, musing along these lines and the truths of the Christian faith weigh heavy. Just in case you don't get it, let me help you paint it. 

Critical to your faith as a Christian is that, the powerful entity that brought into being this ever expanding, marvellous universe, came into this plane as the historical, first century Jewish carpenter; Jesus of Nazareth! 

More incredible is to conceive that, that God lives in men, now.

(PS: In the light of the expanse of what is created and what exists, 'big dreams' aren't so outrageous after all).