54 pages • 1 hour read
Carl SaganPale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Pale Blue Dot
The titular image of Earth as a "pale blue dot," taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, serves as a guide for reading the book and a way to frame our thinking about Earth and the solar system. It is a powerful symbol of humanity as a small group of fragile organisms who exist only because of miraculous circumstances and will continue to exist only if they work together for a common goal: the preservation of their world and the further discovery of others. Sagan compares the human experience looking at the “pale blue dot” photograph to an infant seeing themselves in a mirror for the first time. For Sagan, Voyager 1’s photograph elicits a new level of recognition, the moment when we can finally understand humanity in the context of the universe and realize just how insignificant we are in comparison to the endless stretches of space and time (3). It has been taken up by others for similar reasons—for instance, by Al Gore at the end of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth—and has inspired other images, such as NASA’s 2013 Cassini portrait.
Christopher Columbus
While Columbus is a historical figure discussed in the book, he also functions as symbol. He stands for all “first” discoverers in human history and his image bestows robot probes with historical reverence by associating them with people who opened the door to a new frontier. Sagan repeatedly refers to the firsts of the Voyager program as versions of Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies. He uses the fact that the names of the shipbuilders of Santa Maria are lost to history to justify not crediting the engineers of the Voyager probes. He refers to the fact that many of Columbus’s ships were lost and a third of his crew died as an acceptable sacrifice for reaching new horizons. He invokes the promise of treasure as motivation for Columbus, in contrast to NASA, to strike out into the unknown, and he compares Mariner 2, which is still orbiting the Sun, to Santa Maria, imagining what it would be like if it, too, still existed. NASA even launched its SETI program on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival. By repeatedly comparing these programs to Columbus’s story, Sagan claims that these events, too, will one day become historical symbols used to enshrine future discoveries. It also simultaneously confirms Columbus as a heroic figure while ignoring atrocities committed by his men and the ensuing genocide of indigenous peoples. In the time since Pale Blue Dot was published, Columbus has lost some of his power as a symbolic figure and visionary pioneer.
22nd Century
Sagan cannot predict the future. However, he has a lot of faith in the breakneck pace of technological innovation, and so he often gestures to a future when we have discovered more planets, fly to Mars in a day or move asteroids safely. He predicts that more planets will be discovered and that humans will land on Mars by the end of the next human generation. He also mentions the end of the 21st century as a goalpost for the next propulsion engine or the reverse of global warming. But most of the time, Sagan uses “the 22nd century” as a motif for a magical future when everything we can think of now has been invented and perfected, when the appropriate safeguards have been installed to ensure that the technology is reliable and fair, and when human governments have evolved to usher in an era of world peace and multinational collaboration. Whether or not Sagan means the 22nd century as an accurate prediction is unclear. Sagan is imagining a time when his technological optimism comes true.
