Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

After a series of disasters threatened public support for the United States space program, astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan addressed the topic of interplanetary travel in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Published in 1994, Pale Blue Dot is a nonfiction book for general audiences. The hardcover included many color photographs of stars and planets, paintings, and diagrams. This guide is based on the 1997 Ballantine Books paperback, which does not include images.

Summary

Pale Blue Dot aims to both educate and inspire its readers. Half the book is a history of planetary science from the first humans to the early 1990s, with an emphasis on discoveries about the solar system since the publication of Sagan’s book Cosmos in 1980. Special emphasis is given to NASA’s Voyager program and its groundbreaking studies of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The rest of Pale Blue Dot is a philosophical inquiry into the value of space exploration. In the wake of the Challenger explosion, repeated failures to find evidence of life on other planets, and changing priorities among the public, Sagan looks to justify continued multi-billion-dollar missions into space.

One justification, Sagan argues throughout, is that the more we venture into the solar system, the more we learn about Earth and ourselves.