It was one of the immense ideas of science and the phrase of Carl Sagan’s that rang down the TV and will ring down the centuries, that we are made of star dust. The stars are a vast resource of knowledge and wonder to our wonder-seduced brains. I was never one to have learned all the constellations or even to know all the names of all the galaxies, I was an adult before I even bought a pair of binoculars to look at the moon. Because of that perhaps I have more than admiration for Galileo and those men and women who watched, looked, counted and charted.
But I do think about the stars, not so much in Star Trek terms, but certainly as destinations. I don’t know what engines we will create to visit or what we will take with us, but out there is the future of the human race as we know this earth will crash into the sun one day. Who knows they may have a digital copy of my weblog with them.
And I don’t worry about what we may or may not meet out there, and what it will say to us because exploration isn’t like that. You climb a mountain because it is there and we will go into the stars because we must.
We are one and the same after all.