A Dot
By I was really struck by this photo of Venus through Saturn’s rings:
Venus is the dot.
It reminded me of a time, not too long ago I guess, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sight of our planet from space put our lives in a bit of perspective. A lot of Americans saw this and realized we were this amazing fragile ball floating an endless sea of nothingness.
These images of Earth from space helped spur the U.S. environmental movement of the 1970s, which did so much good.
I wonder if any such image in our media-saturated uberironic brains could make any such impact today. Or would we just tell a joke and write it off as ironic in some vague and poorly defined way. I’m skeptical.