The Pale Blue Dot.
In 1977, NASA launched a spacecraft called the Voyager on a one-way mission to take pictures of the planets and our solar system. [1] Thirteen years later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, scientists from NASA sent a message to Voyager. They instructed the spacecraft to turn around and take a panoramic picture of all the planets before leaving the solar system.
By then, Voyager was 3.7 billion miles away from the Earth and traveling 40,000 miles per hour away from the Sun.
Obviously, you can’t take a picture of all the planets in a single shot, so Voyager begins to take a succession of 60 images.
Each image is 640,000 pixels.
Each pixel takes 5 1/2 hours to reach Earth.
And you thought you had terrible reception. It took months for the entire image to make it back to Earth.
Here’s the picture they received from the Voyager:
Maybe you see the picture and think, “Excuse me — it took us months to get that?” I don’t know about you, but this is the type of picture I delete from my phone.
The pink and green bands in the picture are rays of sun reflecting off of Voyager. And if you look closely, you’ll notice that suspended in one of the beams of sunlight is a tiny spec.
It’s small enough that when I first saw the picture, it looked like a spec of dust on my computer screen.
However, that tiny spec is actually a picture of the Earth from 3.7 billion miles away.
Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, commented, “Everyone who has ever lived, lived out their lives on that pale blue dot.” He called it “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Now, I don’t know what comes to your mind when you see a picture like The Pale Blue Dot.
The first time I saw the picture, it made me feel very, very small. It made me realize that my life (and yours) is just a brief moment on the pages of history — that everything takes place on this speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Some have observed that the universe seems vastly disproportionate to man's needs. This observation is one reason why many scientists believe that life could exist beyond our solar system.
But, consider this: What if the universe is so vast because it is not merely designed to sustain life but also to declare the glory of God?
If the universe is nothing more than a living space for humanity, it is far more extensive than necessary. However, if the point of the universe and all of creation is to declare the glory of God — the one who both made it and sustains it — then the universe is just the right size. [2]
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[1] The first time I heard this story was in a sermon by Louie Giglio. See video Indescribable | Pastor Louie Giglio.
[2] John Piper, Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnpiper/status/585789778890743809?lang=en
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