human events entail too many variables, too many uncertainties to make scientific statements about our future. but we can still dream. the next golden age of human achievement begins here and now. <

new year’s day of the next cosmic year: in the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the pale blue dot to heart and learn how to share this tiny world with each other. the last internal combustion engine is placed in a museum as the effects of climate change reverse and diminish.

a fifth of a second into this future, people will stop dying from the effects of poverty; the planet is now a completely self-sustaining, intercommunicating organism.

a half second from now, the polar ice caps are restored to the way they were in the nineteenth century. and the forecast is mild and pleasant for the next cosmic minute and a half — forty thousand years.

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 are an adaptable species.

it will not be we who reach alpha centauri and the other nearby star systems on our interstellar arks — it will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses. more confident, farseeing, capable, and wise. for all our failings, despite our flaws and limitations, we humans are capable of greatness.

what new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have accomplished in another generation? and another? how far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? and the next millennium?

from cosmos: a spacetime odyssey.

so hopeful!!