This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on October 25, 2026, read 1998
Neil deGrasse Tyson called it “The Book of Carl”: “Pale Blue Dot” (in German: “Blauer Punkt im All”). The name refers to the small blue dot in one of the most famous images taken by Voyager 1. It was taken from a distance of “billions and billions” of kilometres (six billion, to be exact) and shows our Earth. Not even a single pixel, with a hint of blue. If you look very closely.
For me, this image has a similar meaning to AS11-44-6642 – the photo distinguished by the fact that, apart from the photographer, literally every other human being was in front of the camera. Behind Michael Collins, there was not a single person left.
“Pale Blue Dot” is an image that shows every human being who was alive at that moment. Every single one of them is in front of the camera. And – apart from the probe itself – practically everything we have ever created.1 And it shows how small all of this really is in the grand scheme of things.
If I had to choose five books from my shelf that I would be allowed to keep, this one would go into the box first. I don’t want to write any more about it. I’m now carefully putting it back on the shelf.
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Okay, you can be very pedantic here: one or two of the probes already launched at the time were probably not in the picture. ↩