The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. (查看原文)
But if our objective is deep knowledge rather than shallow reassurance, the gains from this new perspective far outweigh the losses. Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs-in time, in space, and in potential-the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. (查看原文)
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfiling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures, if we are to avoid them, we must understand that they are possible. But where are the alternatives? Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire? We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose? Where are the visions of hopeful futures, of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads? (查看原文)
There were Antipodes.* Three new continents existed, had been settled by Asians in ages past, and the news had never reached Europe. Also the gods were disappointingly hard to find.
* "As to the fable that there are Antipodes," wrote St. Augustine in the fifth century, "that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on I'll ground credible." Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, "there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.'' (查看原文)
OUR DISTANT ANCESTORS, watching the stars, noted five that did more than rise and set in stolid procession, as the so-called "fixed" stars did. These five had a curious and complex motion. Over the months they seemed to wander slowly among the stars. Sometimes they did loops. Today we call them planets, the Greek word for wanderers. It was, I imagine, a peculiarity our ancestors could relate to.
We know now that the planets are not stars, but other worlds, gravitationally lashed to the Sun. Just as the exploration of the Earth was being completed, we began to recognize it as one world among an uncounted multitude of others, circling the Sun or orbiting the other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy. Our planet and our solar system are surrounded by a new world ocean the depths of space... (查看原文)
