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We come to your inbox today looking slightly different. Same Pale blue dot, new updated visual brand.
Perhaps this is a good moment to tell you a short story about why we are called Pale blue dot. Join us as we take a 3 minute detour into outer space 🔭
In case you didn’t already know, the name ‘Pale Blue Dot’ came from a photo of Earth taken over 30 years ago - in 1990 - by the Voyager 1 space probe. This space probe was on a mission to study the solar system, not take photos of Earth, but following some persuasion by astronomer Carl Sagan and his team the photo was eventually captured - just before the camera shut down for the final time.
This photo, shown below, was taken from a distance of around 6 billion kilometres. The space probe had been travelling into outer space for over ten years. If you look closely, in the orange-hue sunbeam on the right, you can see it: a very pale blue dot. That’s our entire world, suspended in the dark expansion of space. Out of the 640,000 individual pixels in the frame, Earth takes up one.
Image NASA/ JPL
It is bewildering to see Earth, and all the chaos and familiarity we experience, represented in one small pixel. In his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote:
“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.
“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 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…”
This pale blue dot really is all we have. Together we need to protect it, avoiding the trappings of posturing, self-importance and delusion. To protect it we also need more people building businesses and creating movements so more people come together on this mission.
Our cosmic insignificance is also a stark reminder of the importance of looking after each other. Sagan wrote: “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”. When it comes to starting a business, looking after one another is equally as important as building something that outlasts us all.
The actual process of capturing the Pale Blue Dot image is inspiring too. Securing the photo required commitment, a team, vision and resilience. The commitment of a ten year space probe journey, and the vision of Carl Sagan and his team, knowing the impact it would have. NASA’s Candy Hansen, who helped plan the image, later told National Geographic it wasn’t an easy road: “We’d gotten turned down a bunch of times, but then finally in 1989, realising that really, this was the last-ever opportunity, we got permission to go forward with this observation.”
We are living in a moment where we have less than a decade to save the climate. It is our last ever opportunity we have to protect this pale blue dot. And to get there, it requires exactly the same thing this photo needed: team work, resilience, commitment and working together for something bigger than ourselves. We are honoured to support the entrepreneurs brave enough to make a stand and we hope this new brand helps tell their stories.
A huge thank you to Revolt - who tirelessly, cheerfully and with great care built a brand that we believed in and could reflect the talent and ambition of our portfolio.