Of Specks & Men

Is the Earth Merely a Pale Blue Dot?

According to the usual story of the Middle Ages, people at that time thought the earth was flat. They did not actually think that, but they did believe that the sun went around the earth and that the earth stood still. And then Copernicus and Galileo came along and enlightened everyone. Man was dethroned from the center of the universe. And then even our solar system was discovered to be a mere mediocrity in an average galaxy, only one galaxy among trillions more. A photograph taken by Voyager One on February 14, 1990, from 3.8 million miles away, showed the earth as, in the words of Carl Sagan, a "pale blue dot" within the darkness of deep space. We inhabit "a mote...