We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds, despoiling our environment, murdering one another through … - Carl Sagan

You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real. Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. It

We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the stars—unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first.

The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. Should I do something with this?