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 Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot After many years of exploring our solar system and as it neared the very edge NASA gave the Voyager 1 spacecraft one final job. To photograph the earth and other planets from this never before seen vantage point. On February 14th 1990 the spacecraft turned around and over the next few months made 60 photographs recording the various planets. One image shows a tiny pale blue dot less than a pixel wide, it’s a photo of the earth. In a 1996 speech astronomer Carl Sagan shared his thoughts on this image. “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 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 posturing, 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. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” Photo: NASA  The Polar Bear Clause “Most of us would probably have difficulty recalling the statistics that flowed so persuasively throughout Al Gore's elegant film, An Inconvenient Truth. The drowning polar bear was another matter. The bear was the film's saddest sight and the thought of the North Pole's most powerful creature struggling to span the ever-increasing distances between Arctic ice floes was eloquent proof of photography's ability to carry an argument across another of nature's great expanses. I'm talking about the gap that exists between the brain and its even more influential partner, the human heart. Al's flow charts made you think about global warming but it took the bear to make you feel the heat of the argument.” “The 11th Hour” Movie Review by Sandra Hall Sydney Morning Herald, October 8th, 2007 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/08/1191695776749.html Photo: Google  Images That Change The World “Images That Change The World” has been my mission statement for many years. Today I believe even more passionately in the power of great images to talk to people’s hearts and affect change. I am therefore looking for opportunities to work alongside scientists, educators and environmentalists to help illustrate their discoveries and make them easier for people to understand and appreciate. In Sydney I have been helping the Manly Environment Centre and scientists from Macquarie University’s Marine Mammal Research Group studying this year's Humpback Whale migration. I look forward to more opportunities to partner with scientists and environmentalists studying the effects of global warming and climate change. Of particular interest to me are glaciers, volcanos, high mountains ranges and the Polar Regions. Photo: David Jenkins
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