think it's good that we die. I just wish that more of us could have more fulfillment, and know the beauty of life more fully. When I hear about Silic… - Ann Druyan

One starry night, as we lay together on the deck of a ship in the Pacific, we spotted a dolphin couple riding the wave off the hull. We watched them for about 10 minutes, when suddenly in a single graceful motion they peeled off the wave at a right angle and disappeared into the deep. They moved in unison as if they had been communicating in some mysterious way. Carl looked at me and smiled: "That's us, Annie," he said. We had 20 years until his death made me a permanent exile from that world we discovered together. I was suicidal. But our children were still young and as their mother I had no choice but to live. So I carried what I learned with Carl inside me and have done my best to keep his flame burning. I rededicated my life to continuing the work we had done together.

When Carl wrote Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, he imagined an Encyclopedia Galactica-a reference work that includes all the worlds of all the stars. He was bravely writing at a time before a single exoplanet had been discovered and long before the internet. In the decades since, we have located thousands of planets orbiting other stars. His dream of the Encyclopedia Galactica is a little closer to reality now.

If we could only just see our lives as links in the chain of life, and see as our first responsibility to get that next link in the chain safely to the future