Carl Sagan asked NASA for a favor. Turn around Voyager 1 (not Star Trek) and have it take a few pictures as it cruised past Saturn on its way out of the solar system. So they flipped the camera around and snapped a few shots including one famously called the pale blue dot. It is a fuzzy photo with a few streaks of light in it. In one of those streaks of light is a single pixel-sized bluish dot lovingly and simply called earth. It prompted many a talk and even a book out of Carl Sagan and now has prompted a series of online videos including this one.
It includes some cool shots of Utah. This video went on to prompt a NASA run off using the same music and voice over by Carl Sagan.
Both are very good. NASA has better video though, the gift of money I suppose.
The voice over is selections of Carl Sagan reading his book titled “The Pale Blue Dot”.
There is another video that is set to text that has not been cut and pasted that is also very good.
As I got into it I kept finding better and better videos. There are many good ones. I figured this was a good place to maintain a record of them so that if by chance someday in the future I seek them I will have them stored somewhere.
The cool thing about the second video is that it isn’t actually made by NASA.
Reid Gower was tired of NASA having all of these ineffective videos and recruitment techniques so he made this video. When he published it, he basically told them that they needed to use it because a. it is awesome and b. it actually is interesting and thought provoking.
So while it has NASA advertising, it was actually made for free by someone who believes in the cause.
Awesome huh?