Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Animated

Back in 1990, Voy­ager 1 snapped a pho­to of plan­et Earth from a record dis­tance – 3.7 bil­lion miles away. And there we saw it, our home, Plan­et Earth, a small blue dot almost swal­lowed by the vast­ness of space. This image inspired the title of Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which cap­ti­vat­ed mil­lions of read­ers then, and still many more now.

A quar­ter cen­tu­ry lat­er, The Pale Blue Dot con­tin­ues to give cre­ative inspi­ra­tion to many, includ­ing film­mak­ers who have pro­duced ani­ma­tions that sync with Sagan’s nar­ra­tion of a famous pas­sage from his book. The lat­est ani­ma­tion comes from a class of stu­dents at the Rin­gling Col­lege of Art and Design, locat­ed in Sara­so­ta, Flori­da. Give it a watch. It will help you put every­thing in per­spec­tive.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Won­der, Thrill & Mean­ing of See­ing Earth from Space. Astro­nauts Reflect on The Big Blue Mar­ble

Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar Sys­tem: For Kids and Adults (1977)

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)