The “Pale Blue Dot”. An infamous photograph taken by Voyager 1 at 40.5 AU (astronomical unit) away from earth. But I’m aware that not everybody on this planet have seen this picture. Let’s assume that you have never seen this photograph too before. How can you analyze it as a visual “art”? How are you going to be able to (sort of) decipher it’s meaning? Well, semiotics might be able to help you in a way or two (literally two: Saussure and Peirce)
Semiotics is literally a study of sign, derived from Greek words semeion (sign) and logos (study of, knowledge of) which first declared “semiology” but later known also as “semiotics”. Two widely known names related to this field of study are Saussure and Peirce. Saussure’s semiotics is an approach that breaks down signs into two components: signifier and signified. A signifier could be described as something that interacts with the subject who sees the sign and a signified could be described as the concept that kind of popped up in the mind of the subject after sensing (seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.) the signifier. Since the approach breaks a sign into two components, this model is called dyadic. Peirce on the other hand breaks a sign into three components: representament, object and interpretant. It is easy to take an educated guess that Peirce’s approach makes triadic model. Since the title of this post bounds us to Saussure’s approach, let’s just forget about Peirce’s (after all Peirce’s approach is so much more complex, kinda lazy to do things his way lol).
Applying Saussure’s semiotics, you can take a look at the signifiers contained in the photograph. Why the signifiers first? Because that component of the sign that you can point out and speak about objectively, unlike the signified concepts which tend to be kind of more subjective. For example when you and your friend read the word “tree” (signifier) written on a paper in front of both of you, both of you see exactly the same word using your eyes as sensors but your concept/imagination of a tree (signified) inside your mind might be different than your friend’s. Back to the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph, the signifiers are:
- dominating black background
- three major spectrum: dark yellow on top, followed by dark green and dark red below
- a pale blue-white-ish pixel/dot in the region of the dark yellow spectrum (top)
- the image’s poor-quality/resolution
From the obtained signifiers you can move on to the signifieds which are:
- the vastness and emptiness of some kind of space
- the visible light spectrum that travels through the space
- the presence of an object in that region of space
- the photograph most likely was taken using an analog camera
Now that you’ve known both the signifiers and signifieds, you might have different interpretations of meanings from me but I am strongly sure that both you and me can relate this constructed sign to weird sensations; a feeling of significance and insignificance at the same time, a sense of the photograph’s importance to the viewers, and even questions like “why bother? what’s up with that dot? does it really have to be there? does that dot even matter? what should we do then?”. Do you agree on those points? If you do, then congratulations because those intriguing things are what the creator of this image wants you to feel. A kind of contemplation mixing around statements and questions, if you will. This image is a sign of anxiousness, loneliness, insignificance and introduction to a whole new perspective of things. To blow the final punch to you, as a sign of approval to the conclusion we obtained and to give you something to think about and contemplate, let me present to you the legendary speech tightly linked to this photograph:
“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 coupe 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 on in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of view of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes, settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” — Carl Sagan.
