About
The only home we’ve ever known
Dying Pale Blue Dot is a data-driven attempt to make one thing impossible to ignore: how human activity is changing the only world we know that carries life. Every number here is real, cited, and traceable to a primary source.
In 1990, at Carl Sagan’s urging, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back toward Earth from six billion kilometres away and photographed our planet as a single, pale blue pixel — “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Everyone who has ever lived spent their whole life on that dot. It remains the only place in the universe we know to support life.
We are also changing it, fast — warming the air, acidifying the oceans, thinning the ice, emptying the wild world, and filling the sky and sea with what we throw away. The evidence for this is not hidden. It sits in the public archives of NASA, NOAA, the IPCC and dozens of research bodies. But it is scattered, technical, and easy to look away from.
This site pulls that evidence into one place, presents it honestly, and cites every figure — so you can feel what the data says, and then check it for yourself.
Our promise — the TRUST RULE
Nothing on this site is invented or projected-as-observed. Every number traces to a real primary source, missing values show as “—” (never a fabricated 0), and the few projections and scenarios are always clearly labelled as such — never dressed up as measurements.
What the site tracks
cited data series
34
domains
6
countries mapped
213+
data refresh
daily
34 cited series, six domains
Climate · Oceans & Ice · Life · Waste & Plastic · Air · and the hopeful counter-trends (renewables, EVs, protected land, the healing ozone layer). Each series carries its source, its unit and its full history — from NASA, NOAA/GML, the Global Carbon Project, CSIRO, NSIDC, NASA GRACE, WGMS, FAO, WWF/ZSL, UNEP-WCMC, the IEA, Ember, the Met Office and IQAir.
Most refresh automatically every day from their primary source; the handful without a clean public feed are held at their cited baseline rather than guessed. Two near-real-time anchors — this week’s CO₂ (NOAA Mauna Loa) and this month’s global temperature (NASA GISTEMP) — update within hours, so the top of the site is always today’s number, not last year’s.
Plus curated, science-anchored panels
- 9 planetary boundaries — how many of Earth’s safe operating limits we’ve crossed (Richardson 2023).
- 10 climate tipping points — thresholds that don’t reverse, on a shared warming scale (Armstrong McKay 2022).
- 9 per-degree impacts — what 1.5 °C vs 2 °C locks in (IPCC SR1.5).
- 4 global coral-bleaching events + ocean deoxygenation, and an 800,000-year ice-core CO₂ record for context.
- An interactive data globe & world map, a footprint calculator, the Earth Midnight Clock, and an AI “Earth guide” grounded in the same cited data.
All of it is exposed as an open, documented API and a public provenance ledger — this is a promise you can audit, not just a claim.
Who’s behind it
I’m Vikram Bharwani— a technologist at heart, a strategist by profession, and an eternal student of how the future is built. By day I lead technology for UK & Ireland banking at NTT DATA; I also advise and invest in startups, sit on the board of the Global India Business Corridor, and still write code most nights because I can’t help it.
Most of my work is about what humanity can build next — quantum computing, AI, the frontiers of what’s possible. But the more time I spend imagining our future, the harder one fact becomes to ignore: all of it happens on a single, fragile world. Every person who ever lived, every idea and invention, every triumph and heartbreak — on that one pale blue pixel.
I built this site because the data on what we’re doing to that pixel is real, public and alarming, and yet it’s scattered across archives most people will never open. I wanted one honest place that gathers those numbers, cites every one of them, and makes you feel the weight of what they say — not to guilt anyone, but because you cannot fix what you cannot see. If a strategist’s first instinct is to look clearly at the facts before deciding what to do, then this is me pointing that instinct at the most important balance sheet we have: the health of our only home.