This essay is from a larger draft I am working on.
On February 14, 1990 NASA engineers turned the Voyager 1 spacecraft back toward our home planet for one last look. Approximately 4 billion miles away and 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, Earth can be seen floating off in the distance as an infinitesimal point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixels in size. It was this picture that astrophysicist Carl Sagan made famous, he saw the pale blue dot and reminded us,
