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this is a story about us
the story I want to tell you is a remarkable story
about the inhabitants
of a small and rocky, ocean-covered, little world,
star
in an ordinary Galaxy and this story goes
that these beings with soaring
imagination and laughing at the idea boundaries and limitations,
over time, developed the languages of mathematics and science,
became skilled technologists,
developed mastery of the gravity, and eventually flung themselves and
their machines
into the interplanetary space surrounding them,
and they did that merely in response to an
innate desire to explore, and to learn about their cosmic neighborhood,
and, to secure the future of the progeny and
to seek the answers to questions that had vexed them,
and every generation of their ancestors before them:
how is it that their small planet and they living on it came to be?
and what is the great cosmic theater in which life on the planet had unfolded?
well, you probably figured it out already but this is a story about us
and we humans have been interplanetary travelers now
for over 50 years. we've been to
just about every corner of the solar system, we've been to all the planets
(all eight of them), we even right now have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto
and of course, we have set foot on our own moon,
forty years ago this year. and these
magnificent journeys, these long,
arduous journeys, have in fact
rewarded us with insights into the origin of the Earth and its fellow planets,
and they have shown us with startling clarity
our place in the cosmos
the most memorable of Cassini's returns is an image that
will probably be its greatest legacy: across a billion miles
of interplanetary space,
we can spot our own planet Earth nestled
in the arms of Saturn's Rings.
there is, a powerful recognition that stirs within us when we see
our own gorgeous little blue ocean planet
as it would be seen by others in the skies above other worlds
it's a recognition that never fails to move us
and it is here in this picture with Darwin meets Galileo
because it is a picture that made possible
by Galileo's first experiments with gravitation so long ago,
and it is a picture that to me shouts evolution. I look at this image
and I see out ancestors stepping down from the trees and walking
upright for the first time onto the African savannahs,
and pausing to look back at the forrest from which they came
and I look at this image and I see a species that is
positively unyielding in its pursuit of knowledge,
and brave and fervent in its longing to grasp the meaning
and the significance of its own existence. and finally I see in this image,
the very best that humanity has to offer. we are perhaps the small and troubled
inhabitants of one tiny little planet, but we are also
dreamers, and the thinkers, and the explorers who took this picture.
one-world, across a billion miles of space to another,
the extraordinary citizens
of planet Earth.