[Neil deGrasse Tyson:]
‘We have one collective hope: The Earth.
And yet uncounted people remain hopeless.
Famine and calamity abound.
Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war.
People kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God.
Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?
Each fabricated conflict, self murdering bomb, vanished airplane,
Every fictionalized dictator, biased partisan and wayward son
Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts,
And you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.
When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets,
Each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity,
I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever expanding
With its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time.
However big our world is — in our hearts, our minds, in our out-sized atlases?
The universe is even bigger.
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches.
More stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed.
More stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived.
The day we cease exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuance of our species.
In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations
Would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices,
And would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment —
Until the rise of a visionary new culture once again embraces the cosmic perspective;
A perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above, nor below, but within.’
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