"The most astounding fact..is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body.
Are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core, under extreme temperatures and pressure.
These Stars, when unstable in their later years, collapsed and exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy.
Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.
These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense and collapse, forming the next generation of solar systems - stars with orbiting planets.
And these planets now have the ingredients for life. So when I look up at the night sky
..I know that yes, we are part of this universe We are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts...Is that the universe is in us."
"We were hunters and foragers, the frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky.
The open road still softly calls our little tarraquest globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds.
We who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?
By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed.
The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us.
Necessity will have changed us.
We're an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars, it will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.
More confident, far seeing, capable, and prudent.
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, We Humans are Capable of Greatness.
What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in another generation and another?
How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century and the next millenium?
Our remote descendants safely erade on many worlds through 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 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." - Carl Sagan
