Chapter 1, You Are Here, Chapter 2, Aberrations of Light Summary and Analysis

In February 1990, Voyager I was speeding away from the Sun at 40,000 miles per hour. It suddenly snapped sixty pictures. Voyager I and II have explored four planets and sixty moons but were not built to travel past Saturn. Still, they are triumphs of human engineering. Pictures have been taken of the earth from the moon, where there are no signs of humans or their machines. Humans are too small and inconsequential.

However, Sagan wanted to risk exposing Voyager to the Sun's rays, which would possibly burn out its vidicon system, in order to take a picture of the earth from much farther away. In 1990, the photos were taken, small squares full of stars and tiny dots of light, mostly lost to the glare of the sun. In...