When Voyager 1 was preparing to leave our solar system, NASA ordered the probe to turn its camera around at the request of Carl Sagan to take a photo of the Earth, which, due to the billions of kilometers between the probe and our planet, would merely be a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. It's a sobering reflection of our place in the universe, and hey, it's also a decent title for a movie.
Noah Hawley, creator of Fargo and Legion, is preparing to direct PALE BLUE DOT and Variety reports that Jon Hamm (Mad Men) is currently in negotiations to join Natalie Portman (ANNIHILATION) in the film. PALE BLUE DOT will follow a "successful female astronaut who, after coming back home from a mission in space, starts to unravel when confronted by her seemingly perfect life. The film explores the theory that astronauts who spend long periods of time in space lose their sense of reality when they return home." Portman will play the head role, with Jon Hamm set as a fellow astronaut who Portman's character aggressively pursues after returning to Earth. As the upcoming second season of Legion has already wrapped and with the fourth season of Fargo not shooting until next year, it's expected the production on PALE BLUE DOT will kick off this spring.
Here's Carl Sagan discussing the Pale Blue Dot photo during a speech at Cornell University in 1994:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Jon Hamm will next be seen in BEIRUT on April 11, 2018, but you can check Natalie Portman out in ANNIHILATION right now.