Kevin Milne: The Pale Blue Dot - a thought provoking image

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. 

Images often convey more meaning and information than can be held in a sentence or two, an image often provoking more emotion or deeper thought. 

Kevin Milne saw one such image earlier this week – an image of the Earth, taken in 1990, from 6 billion kilometres away: The Pale Blue Dot. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
That'd be Jack, take it from me, put a couple
of grand in an envelope and leave it at home
somewhere safe, says Muzz. If technology goes down or we
have another weather event, you are going to be helpless
to do anything.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Jack.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
If you lose your phone, you are temporarily cactus Jack.
What's going to happen in a power cut? Says Tracy. Jack'
says Land, I sincerely hope you have a few hundred
bucks stashed in your underdraw for emergencies. You are very,
very vulnerable with your alliance on a machine. I know,
I know, I know all of this, and yet I
haven't done it.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I just just, first of all, like the day to
day convenience is there for me, and that kind of
trumps everything. But I can see that maybe in the
same way that I should have, you know, water stashed
for an emergency at home and all that kind of
thing you're supposed to do, I should be having a
little emergency, you know, a little emergency envelope somewhere as well.

(01:03):
I think that probably makes a lot of sense. Anyway,
ninety two ninety two is our text number this morning.
If you want to get in touch Jacket the talks,
he'd be dot co dot NZ Kevin Milners with this morning, Kevin.
How many cards do you have in your wallet? Do
you reckon?

Speaker 3 (01:17):
You've actually got? I know five? You've made me actually
go to my wallet and have a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Five is not too bad, that's pretty.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, well I've got I've got two different credit cards,
one for business and one for personal. How do you
get around that aspect you would have you'd be set
up for business and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, yeah, but I just I just I just keep
my receipts, you know, I email a receipt to myself
or something like that. But but honestly, I don't have
too many kind of business expenditures, you know, so right, Yeah,
but I mean and and honestly, I the number of
times and I know this is bear as well. There's
a convenience, you see, when it comes to payWave. But
when it comes to payWave instead of like I could

(01:57):
get the card out of my wallet and insert it
and that would save me money. But I'm seduced by
the convenience, and so I just I just use my
phone as well, which is a shock.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
I totally agree, an agree. And as for the listener
who says, you know, kick cash around because if the
whole system goes down, you'll be stuffed, well, of course,
if the whole system goes down, I'll be surprised if
you can use cash either, well, because it won't be.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
Yes, it won't be.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
To a certain degree, right, Like I remember being in
I was in Hurricane Sandy in New York. Do you
remember Hurricane Sandy when and it hit New York and
like the half of Manhattan lost power and all of
that thing or you know, it was and it was
all you know, it was pretty pretty dramatic, and you know,
there were hundreds of homes last and all that kind
of stuff, and you know, dozens of people were killed.

(02:49):
It was. It was a pretty serious storm. And I
remember as as the storm was kind of bearing down
on the East Coast, I went to a cash machine
and I got out like a thousand dollars cash or something.
And I remember this is Manhattan, the center of the
financial world. It lost power for a you know, significant

(03:09):
period of time, and I relied on the cash that
I got out, and I remember thinking, Man, I'm so
glad I did this, and so it's curious that I mean,
clearly I need to, you know, learn my own lesson there.
I suppose you set myself up for an urgency. Even
if you're gonna if you're going to live your life
in a wallet free world, you probably probably want to

(03:29):
have a little bit of a backup plan at home,
don't you. I think it probably makes.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
More Yes, my feeling is that if the system goes down,
you know it as dramatic as that much. Yeah, you know,
it's going to be difficult for stores to take in
cash because they won't be able to record it, you know,
and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I can
just imagine stores were just shut down.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, yeah, I think you could well be right. Well,
let's hope we don't get to that stage. But it
does sort of feel like an inevitability at some point,
doesn't it.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Hey, Jack, just very quickly going back to last week,
and you pose the thought whether New Zealand, New Zealand
invent the rotary clothesline? Oh yes, in fact, in fact
Australia did.

Speaker 4 (04:10):
Oh and you may be aware of hills hoists, Oh yes,
well a huge yeah, so most of most of Australia's
rotary clotheslines were hills hoists.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
I don't think that many of them came over here.
But yeah, so we can't claim that unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Okay, yeah, oh well, well, I mean if she was
on the other foot, I'm sure there would be some
claiming going on in in mind anyway, given you you
want to talk about a dot this morning?

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Yeah, this seems odd, but during the week I got
to watch the movie about one of yours and my
favorite painters, Robin White Grace A Prayer for Peace. An
image I'd never seen before, known as the Pale Blue Dot,
pops up on the big screen at the start of
the movie. Jack, does the pale blue dot mean anything

(05:01):
to you?

Speaker 2 (05:01):
It does? I know exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Actually, ah, yeah, yes, well, let me explain to the listeners.
The pale blue Dot is an image of planet Earth
taken in space in nineteen ninety by the unmanned NASA
Space Probe Voyager one while it was on its way
out of the Solar System. But NASA technicians managed to

(05:23):
turn its cameras around back at the Earth. So the
pale blue dot is a picture of planet Earth taken
from over six billion kilometers away. As you can imagine,
the techies had to zoom in an awful lot before
they could see Earth. When an image of Earth emerges,

(05:45):
it is a minuscule point of light, a tiny dot,
less than a quarter of a single pixel on the picture.
The image shows us like no other image, how tiny
and alone we are in the black vastness of space,
and why we have a responsibility to preserve pale blue dot,

(06:08):
the only home we've ever known. Astronomer Carl Sagan put
it this way. Look again, at that dot. That's us.
Honor everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever
heard of. Every human whoever was ever lived out their
life there. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,

(06:32):
every creator and destroyer, 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

(06:52):
of our species lived there on a moat of dust
suspended in the sunbeam. If you haven't seen the Pale
blue Dot, listeners, I recommend that you google it for
a fraction of a dot for an image captured from
over six billion kilometers away. It said an awful lot

(07:16):
to me.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, well, said Kevin. That was poetic, that was beautiful.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
It really was, Carl Sagan. Yeah, well, Calagan can take
the credit for all that. In fact, his speech goes
on a little bit longer than that, and that's Worth's
reading in its entirety too. But I just wanted to
get across what he was saying. He was the guy
actually who instructed or asked NASA if they would try

(07:42):
and turn the cameras around at that distance and get
it shot. Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
It's funny, isn't it. You know how that the astronauts
have that thing. And it's sort of a bit of
a cliche almost with astronauts when they come back to
Earth and they're asked by people, are you know what,
did you have any kind of profound revelations in your
time up in the up in the black Nothing? And
even for those astronauts have just been you know, orbiting

(08:07):
Earth in the International Space Station so relatively close to
Earth compared to the distance from from where that photograph
was taken, they always say, oh, man, you just realize
once you're up there, how trivial our divisions are, How trivial,
like the idea of nation states, and how actually borders
me nothing?

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Like?

Speaker 2 (08:25):
We are all in this together. And that's it's always
the sentiment they reflect. Just as soon as you get
up there, you're like, hang on a second, I'm I'm
I'm a resident of planet Earth, a citizen of planet
Earth before I am you know, an American or a
Russian or a Frenchman or anything else, you know, And it.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Makes division that those divisions seem ludicrous.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
It does, doesn't you know.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, as Sagan puts it, we all live on a
motive dust spended in a sunbeam.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
It is beautiful.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, so I have. I think I would have thought
that pale blue dot is one of the two most
famous photos of the Earth as a whole. No, it's
a better way to put that. So there's that. And
do you know earth Rise?

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yes, it up on my wall.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Clearly you and I are of similar taste, given because
it's currently up on my wall. My wife wasn't terribly
happy about it. I don't think she shares my kind
of astronomical interest. But yeah, I have earth Rise at
the top of our at the top of our stairs,
and when you're climbing up the stairs at the same
residence you see a photo of earth rise, which is
that amazing photo of the Earth taken with the with

(09:46):
the moon in the foreground. That incredible. So it gives
you the yeah, it is, it is.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
It's a phenomenal photo. And again that raises what the
astronauts say when they get back. It's not what I
saw out there. It saw That's how I reacted when
I saw Earth when I was out there, And I
think we feel the same way when even when we
travel around the world. One of the great things is
not what we see when we're traveling, it's how we
see New Zealand once we're a long way away from it.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, you're totally right. It's all perspective, isn't it. Hey,
thanks so much, Kevin, love your work, really appreciate it.
Ah And it's not just me here, Rods just flicker
said Texas say it was profound Kevin, excellently done. Love
your comments. This morning heats and heaps and heaps of messages,
basically everyone scolding me for not having a backup plan
if I want to go one hundred percent digital. I'll
get to more of those in a couple of minutes.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks' b from nine Am, saturday or follow
the podcast On iHeartRadio