On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, succinctly sums up why this picture is so magnificently important, and it’s this recording that the Library of Congress has chosen to preserve: Even with the earth’s mighty circumference of some 25,000 miles, even with more than 7 billion humans living on it, in this picture it’s little more than a speck of dust. That almost indiscernible orb is our planet. Four beams of light from our sun cut through the center of the picture.Īnd hovering in one of those four rays, if you squint your eyes just right and look closely enough, you’ll see a faint, barely perceptible pale blue dot. The vast darkness is pierced by innumerable small specks of light, revealing stars in the distance. It primarily shows the immensity of space.

In fact, the subject of this picture was captured from a distance of 4 billion miles. While every other picture in my office was taken a few feet away from the subject, the Pale Blue Dot was photographed from a bit farther back. And I believe it is the single most important photograph taken in the history of the world. You see, the photo of the Pale Blue Dot hangs in my office. It’s the recording of “Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan. Among this list were some familiar sounds like Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” Mariah Carey’s omnipresent “All I Want for Christmas is You,” John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the theme song for the Super Mario Brothers Game- which immediately took me back to many Saturday mornings trying to save Princess Peach and collect as many gold coins as possible.īut there was one recording that I was especially excited to hear had been selected. Listening to the radio a couple weeks ago, I came across an interview discussing the 25 recordings the US Library of Congress had selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry this year.

Pale blue dot