The complete name of the book is called “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” and it was another non-fiction book released by Carl Sagan (the famous astronomer and scientist) who wrote a series of books on science and space, and is most famous for his works, Cosmos and Contact. The name of the book is based on a photograph taken by the space explorer spacecraft, Voyager 1. Carl Sagan had pushed for the spacecraft to take a photograph when it was at a huge distance from the earth, a distance of 3.7 billion miles. In this photograph, the Earth seems nothing more than a Pale Blue Dot in the midst of empty space, and this is all that mankind has got.
Carl Sagan also described this photo in a speech he was giving, with these starting words: “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 book takes a look at previous theories of the geocentric Earth-centered universe, and how that was the idea that could not be challenged, with torture awaiting those who dissented. Slowly, that idea was overturned and we started learning about reality, about our true size in the enormity of the universe, starting with the scale of the solar system, and then continuing with the idea of how to explore the planets in the solar system. Carl Sagan also talks in detail about the Voyager program. The book also has some great photos of the Solar System, courtesy of NASA.

Chapters

Wanderers: An Introduction
You Are Here
Aberrations of Light
The Great Demotions
A Universe Not Made for Us
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?
The Triumph of Voyager
Among the Moons of Saturn
The First New Planet
An American Ship at the Frontiers of the Solar System
Sacred Black
Evening and Morning Star
The Ground Melts
The Gift of Apollo
Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting This One
The Gates of the Wonder World Open
Scaling Heaven
Routine Interplanetary Violence
The Marsh of Camarina
Remaking the Planets
Darkness
To the Sky!
Tiptoeing Through the Milky Way

Contact is famous as a science movie starring Jodie Foster, released in 1997. The movie was a great science fiction movie, earning more than $140 million worldwide, and won a Hugo Award. The movie was based on the novel by the same name, published in 1985. In fact, Carl Sagan had been working on a story for a film on the theme of Contact ever since 1979 along with his wife Ann Druyan, and had been working on the idea with Warner Bros., but the movie never got made in that timeline, and hence Carl Sagan started working on a book on the same idea, and released the book in 1985. Years after the book, the idea for a movie was again taken up, and after a change of directors and script-writers, the movie was finally released in 1997. There are differences between the book and the movie, with the number of travelers being different, the detail of the machine (the machine had to be detailed much more thoroughly in the movie version), as well as whether there is hope in the end.

The book takes up the story of contact from extra-terrestrials, but this is not the Independence Day or Encounters of the Third Kind kind of contact, this is more about the kind of contacts that scientists think will happen; through the twin model of mathematics (the only universal language in which people can communicate through), and through radio waves from outer space, which is what scientists are looking for through the SETI and other similar programs.
The book is about Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, who is the director of “Project Argus,” a project in a large number of radio telescopes in New Mexico have been dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Then suddenly, one day, they receive a signal that seems to confirm that there are indeed other intelligence sources in the galaxy. The signals contain a blueprint for building an advanced machine without disclosing what the machine will do. The design are in excess of current capabilities and require a huge effort.
Eventually, the machine is built, and it takes 5 passengers to the center of the Milky Way through a number of wormholes, where the passengers seemingly meet people who were part of their life such as close relatives (these are in fact the senders of the message who have taken this form). However, when the travelers return to earth, the journey of many hours seems to have been done in 20 minutes, video footage has been burned out, and they are faced with a skeptical Government machinery, suspected of fraud. The one possible ray of hope is mathematics, with a message encoded inside the further section of Pi.

Carl Sagan (Wikipedia) died in 1996 of cancer, dying relatively young at the age of 62. Carl Sagan was one of the people who did a huge amount to popularize the concept of science, especially related to space travel. His most popular work to date remains Cosmos, which was also made into an incredible 13 part TV series in 1980 (Cosmos: A Personal Voyage), that has so far been seen by 600 million people (including a large number of children). I remember being fascinated by the series when it used to come on TV when I was a child; there is a certain fascination of the heavens that draws people to it, especially children. The series should be made essential watching for school going children all over.

The book is based on the series, and is considered a companion to the TV series. It is one the best-selling books in the area of science, while typically science books do not sell as well. The book is divided into 13 chapters, and follows the TV series to a large extent, but there are certain variations (typically when Carl Sagan has already written about something in an earlier book, and it is explained in detail in the TV series). The various chapters are:

Introduction
1. The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
2. One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
3. The Harmony of Worlds
4. Heaven and Hell
5. Blues for a Red Planet
6. Travelers’ Tales
7. The Backbone of Night
8. Travels in Space and Time
9. The Lives of the Stars
10. The Edge of Forever
11. The Persistence of Memory
12. Encyclopaedia Galactica
13. Who Speaks for Earth?
Appendix 1: Reductio ad Absurdum and the Square Root of Two
Appendix 2: The Five Pythagorean Solids
For Further Reading
Index

If you want to buy the series on video, click on this link.

Foundation and Earth did not satisfy avid readers of Asimov (and fans of the Foundation series). After all, it was still only covering a period midway during the 1000 year period that was required to establish the second Galactic Empire, and neither covered the period after that, nor did it cover the period required for the establishment of Galaxia. Asimov’s widow Janet revealed after his death that Asimov was unexpectedly somewhat of a loss after Foundation and Earth to write about what happened post that period. He ran out of ideas, and hence went back to detail the Foundation periods in more detail, with Prelude to Foundation, and Forward the Foundation. Further, Foundation and Earth did not have a very gripping continuous story line, almost with individual stories tending to a final end (that was supposed to establish the robotic theme that combined the Robot Series, the Foundation Series, and the Empire Series).

Foundation and Earth covers the time period immediately after the decision by Trevize in Foundation’s Edge to use the basis of Gaia for building up a true Galaxia. However, he continues to have doubts, and is not sure whether he has made the right decision. He decides to continue searching for Earth, sure that the fact that Earth has tried to remove all traces of itself means that once he found Earth, there must be something there that would help him confirm his decision. So he sets out on an expedition along with Golan Trevize and and Bliss (a representative of Gaia) and travel to a number of planets, trying to get traces of the location of Earth.
They reach Comporellon, where they are imprisoned since the local inhabitants want to get control of the advanced gravity ship. In this case, Trevize literally manages to sleep his way out of this problem, and manage to get out of the planet. From Comporellon, they get the location of Spacer worlds (the first time Spacer worlds are mentioned in the Foundation series).
Next they reach Aurora, the most powerful Spacer world in its time, now a planet without humans and Spacers. They have an adventure here when wild dogs almost manage to pin Trevize down and only Bliss manages to save Trevize by using the power of Gaia.
They next land in Solaria, a world which was the most isolated of the Spacer worlds; with the inhabitants of that time even then refusing to meet each in person, instead meeting only through videographic depiction. The inhabitants have developed a great power called transducer lobes which allows them to channelize natural energy into great use, and live in big estates alone (and are now hermaphrodites, capable of handling reproduction alone). The 3 travelers land in the estate of one of them called Bander, who explains their history and eventually wants to kill them. They only manage to escape when Bliss reluctantly kills Bander (she blocks his energy use and that fries his brain since energy is still coming in but is blocked from going out). They also encounter the young child of Bander, Fallom, who will be killed since she is immature and cannot handle the estate. They manage to escape the robots sent to investigate the death of Bander and take Fallom with them.
They still have a Spacer world to go to, and reach Melpomenia, where they need to wear suits since the atmosphere has long vanished. They find a building with the coordinates of all the spacer world, and also encounter a moss that seems to grow on their suits and manage to kill it by using their blasters and then escape the planet without carrying the moss with them. These coordinates give them a way to find the likely location of Earth since they are able to possibly find the position of Earth at the center of these coordinates.
They next go to a Binary sun system from the above process, and reach a watery planet revolving around a star called Alpha Centauri. The inhabitants are friendly, but they soon discover (through a lady who has had sex with Trevize) that they are being poisoned. They also learn that there was an attempt to restore Earth’s soil (as mentioned in Pebble in the Sky), but it was abandoned. There was also an attempt to terraform the planet of Alpha, but that was also left half way. They also escape from Alpha, but are pretty sure that they are close to Earth now.
And finally they reach the Solar System of Earth, first seeing huge gas giants including one that has large rings around it (just like the legend), and the third planet has a very large satellite. They have found Earth, but Earth is radioactive and does not support any life. They find themselves getting pulled to the Moon, where they eventually find R Daneel Olivaw, who explains that he called them here. He explains the whole history of how he has been guiding the human race for 20,000 years now, including the settling of Alpha Centauri, the creation of psychohistory, the setting up of Gaia. But he is out of time, his brain does not last long and creating a new one does not help. He wants to combine with Fallom, with her long life as a Spacer, it is enough to ensure that Galaxia is setup; Galaxia is the only way to safeguard the Galaxy against aliens from other Galaxies.