I Am
Written on Dec 24th, 2007
In 1977, the same year I was born, NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft with a mission to explore our solar system. It is still operational, and is located some 9.3 billion miles from the sun. At that distance, light (including radio waves) takes nearly 14 hours to reach our planet. By comparison, light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to get to earth. 17 years later, as voyager passed beyond the edge of our solar system, engineers at NASA turned the Voyager 1 spacecraft around, pointed it towards earth, and took a few shots of our planet. This is one of them. We’re that little speck on the right. Pretty humbling. In that same year, Dr. Carl Sagan, an astronomer, gave a talk where he first presented this rare photo of Earth. Here’s what he said. We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you […]
