We have known about the dangers we pose to ourselves for decades and yet we continue sleepwalking toward a grim future, somehow numb to what it will … - Ann Druyan

The words Einstein chose to open the 1939 World's Fair echo in my brain: "If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people."

Science has nothing in common with fundamentalism or with superstition, but it has a lot in common with that desire to understand where we came from and who we are.

We all feel the chill our present casts on our future. Some part of us knows that we must awaken to action or doom our children to dangers and hardships we ourselves have never had to face. How do we rouse ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate or a nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed before it has destroyed our civilization and countless other species? How do we learn to value those things we cannot live without-air, water, the sustaining fabric of life on Earth, the future-more than we prize money and short-term convenience? Nothing less than a global spiritual awakening can transform us into who we must become.