A New View of Earth: It's Not Special
Jamie Green, Slate
About 30 years ago, Carl Sagan pointed two different cameras toward the Earth, to see what we could see.
The first camera was strapped to Voyager 1, the probe that left Earth in 1977 for a tour of the outer solar system (also carrying with it the famed Golden Record that bears recordings of human music and whale songs, among other messages, for potential extraterrestrial listeners). In 1990, 13 years after Voyager's launch with the probe now out past Neptune, 4 billion miles away, Sagan directed the camera to turn back toward Earth and take...