Chapter 1

Question 0

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,xiv(b)

Answer 0

For all its material advantages, sedentary life has left us edgy and unfulfilled…the open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.

Question 1

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,xiv

Answer 1

When the climate was congenial, though, the food was plentiful we were willing to stay put. Unadventurous. Overweight. Careless.

Question 2

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,xvi

Answer 2

“Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.”

Question 3

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,1

Answer 3

Voyager 1&2, 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, traveling 40,000 mph, in Feb. 1990 was directed to snap 60 pictures of The Pale Blue Dot

Question 4

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,3

Answer 4

Apollo 17, the last journey of humans to the Moon, took the iconic frame-filling Apollo photograph of the whole Earth

Question 5

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 5

Answer 5

Q:why is the PBD cerulean blue
A: partly from the sky(atmosphere), partly from sea.
Q: but water in a glass is transparent (which absorbs more red light than blue) and a short line of sight through air seems perfectly transparent?
A: in 10s of meters of water, red is absorbed out, and what gets reflected to space is mainly blue.
The more distant an object is, the more bluer it seems. Air scatters blue light better than it does red.

Question 6

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot,6

Answer 6

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.