The Pale Blue Dot
Writer: Sarah Meek
Editor: Sarah Lindquist
Photo from Nasa.com
On Valentine's Day in 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of the Earth from a distance of about 4 billion miles away. This image has become known as the “Pale Blue Dot.” In the photo, the apparent size of our planet is less than a pixel encircled with bands of sunlight that seem to be reflecting off the camera lens. In the vast darkness of outer space, our planet that has always felt so huge is represented by a tiny little blue dot. Every person you have ever known inhabits this dot. Every pet or plant or object you have ever touched or seen or loved lives on this speck floating in space. There is something both terrifying and relieving about that fact for me.
The terrifying part for me is how pointless our lives seem if Earth is that small. If everything fits into a dot the size of a pixel on our screens, why do we do anything, how do we mean anything? We put so much pressure on every choice we make but the Pale Blue Dot helps put that in perspective. I have come to learn this is the best way to go through life. Being able to know that if every choice can fit inside that dot I can make mistakes and learn from them too. It’s ok to mess up, everyone does. I have been described as a perfectionist by my friends, and while this means I put a lot of effort into everything I do, it also means I tend to see mistakes as my own personal failures. Not taking everything so seriously and learning to enjoy my life has helped me be able to do more things that make me happy, like help open a chapter of Hopelessly Yellow, without the stress of everything having to be perfect.
The relieving part comes when you zoom out and realize every problem can fit into that small speck. I, like most, have spent countless hours crying or stressing about assignments, relationships, my future, and at times it feels all consuming. When I stare at that dot, I don’t think of these stresses, I think about my friends and my family, the people who have always been there for me, whether I needed someone to comfort me through a hard time or something smaller like advice on what top to wear. I think of the concerts I’d do almost anything to relive, the traveling I have been lucky enough to experience, and that rewarding feeling after watching something you put so much effort into coming to fruition.
It is terrifying realizing your whole life, along with every single life, can fit into one tiny dot. It is just as freeing to realize that is the ‘beauty of life,’ as cheesy as it may sound. There are so many things we appreciate, all in a small blue dot. The decisions or mistakes we make may feel like the end of the world, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing can be that serious if it can fit in that tiny dot right?
