25th July 2013

Earth and the Moon viewed from Saturn

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured these colour images of Earth and the Moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion km) away. In the photographs, they appear as mere dots – Earth a pale blue and the Moon a stark white, visible between Saturn's rings. It was the first time Cassini's highest-resolution camera captured them as two distinct objects.

Perhaps one day, in the not-too-distant future, this view will be experienced by human eyes. Looking at these images, we are reminded of Carl Sagan's famous quote, from his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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 aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

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