The Pale Blue Dot, By Joel Achenbach - 1512 Words

People often think about how vast, or how important the Earth is, it is the domain of the human race. Where they strive to be the best, compete against others, world powers against another. But, in the vast reality of the cosmos, the Earth, is nothing more than a tiny little â€Å"pale blue dot.† Described none other than Carl Sagan, â€Å"The Pale Blue Dot,† reveals the scary reality about the placement of the human race in the â€Å"enveloping cosmic dark.† In his quote, Sagan uses pathos and logos about this reality, opening a deeper understanding that beyond the planet Earth, humans are nothing more than insignificant. He has revolutionized the way that people view our home, and the cosmos around it. Joel Achenbach starts his Smithsonian article†¦show more content†¦They also took advantage of the gravitational pull of these reducing the time and fuel to travel through the solar system, it was like a sling-shot effect. The Voyager satellites were lau nched in 1977, Voyager I mission was to study Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager II, Uranus and Neptune. The mission brought back stunning evidence that the people behind the mission didn’t anticipate for. Io, for example, was the discovered to have massive geological activity (the only other orbiting object besides Earth). The Voyager’s recorded nine eruptions during their brief orbit (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, News and Archives). In Carl Sagan’s show, Cosmos, he mentions that Voyager captured lightning on the dark side of Jupiter (Sagan Ep. 1). This is just one example of many scientific break throughs that the Voyagers have documented. Even up to 2012, mission control is still receiving signals from the Voyager satellites, as of August 25th, 2012, Voyager I surpassed the heliopause of the solar system (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, News and Archives). Once the Voyagers completed their primary mission of encountering the outer gas giants, â€Å"as Voyage r I was heading toward the outer reaches of the solar system, Sagan was among those who persuaded NASA to aim the spacecraft’s camera back toward Earth, by then billions of miles away.†