"Some 3.6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints-the footprints, she believes, of an early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk on another world. We have come far in 3.6 million years, and in 4.6 billion and in 15 billion.

For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pndering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at last, conciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. WE speak for the Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

-Carl Sagan, Cosmos.


We've only just taken the first step of a much larger journey, I hope it won't be the last.