A Fucking Brilliant Time to be Human

It is easy to get caught up in the bad, sometimes outright evil perpetrated by us humans. In just the last 150 years, we have wreaked more destruction than this planet has seen since the dinosaurs went extinct. We still see human rights violations across the globe, sometimes perpetrated by our own "enlightened" governments. In so many ways, us humans kind of suck ass. And in such an ass sucking existence, it is easy to forget the truly wondrous, awe inspiring achievements we have made. It is also easy to forget that many of us are struggling against this ass sucking, to make our home more tolerable, more livable and above all, more humane.

But we are also the people who have managed to cure diseases that were almost certain death and/or maiming, just a scant eighty years ago. We are a people who have managed to find ways to extend the mortality of the general public, even as we have thrown more abuses to our bodies than our ancestors ever dreamed possible. And whatever problems there are for those of us without health insurance, even the poor are able to get unprecedented access to lifesaving medical care - imperfect as that access is.

And we are a people who decided to point a telescope at absolutely nothing, to see what might be there - how fucking brilliant is that? And what we discovered - images that have been traveling towards our position in space, since billions of years before this planet was born of fire, gravity and debris - the very star-stuff that makes up not only this planet, but everything we are and everything we see - every material we work with. Images that help us to comprehend, just a little, of what our universe consists of - billions, upon billions, upon billions of other galaxies. Not solar systems and stars - but fucking galaxies. Numbers that are so staggering, as to be incomprehensible, yet are comprehended just a little, when we look at nothing and notice thousands of galaxies, in just that tiny speck of nothing out there.

We are also the people who managed to send people outside our precious blanket of atmosphere, to walk on an extra-planetary body. That it is our own moon, our own planet's satellite does not detract from the awesome wonder of having sent a human to step foot on another chunk of rock, hurling through space. And we have people up there right now, outside our atmosphere - living and working on a space station of human construction.

And we managed to send vehicles to another planet altogether, to see what is there, learn about one of our close neighbors and see what it looks like up close and personal. We have seen image after image, sent by these probes and seen a landscape that was invisible before, that is not only visible, but has been altered ever so slightly, by our proxy presence there.

We are, to our cores, explorers. We absolutely have to go out and check things out. We simply can't stand not knowing what is around that next bend, what is under that rock - what is at the bottom of that miles deep ocean trench, what is such staggeringly huge distances away from us. We are insatiably curious creatures, with an almost inherent desire to know what there is to know and when we have managed to learn that, we want to know some more. And today, this day, this fraction of a blink of an eye, we are seeing more, learning more - knowing more than ever before and that knowing is coming at us at an accelerated rate.

To think, just moments ago, we were tiny, four legged creatures, trying desperately to evade the smaller scavenger dinosaurs - those old guard rulers of this planet earth, who would shortly be dead and gone. A moment later we were struggling against all odds to survive, to adapt to a constantly changing earth - spending less time in trees and enough time walking in the ground, that our hind hands turned into feet and lost their opposable digits. Moments after that, our brains growing with our increasingly protein rich diet, we started to communicate verbally. In a mere blink of an eye, we went from these tiny, innocuous creatures, to what we are today - so insignificant and small - our entire existence an infinitesimal footnote in the history of our infinitesimal planet, in the backwater of our tiny little galaxy.

And yet we are here!!! Much like the Whos, on that speck of dust, in Seuss's Horton Hears a Who. We shout out to our galaxy and to our universe that we are here, with an unspoken, "we will soon be there. We are no longer bound to this single piece of rock, this starship Earth. We are going places and somehow, someday, if we survive, we will go further and further - because we are fucking human and that is what humans do. We want to know, we need to know, we absolutely must know - more.

If we manage to survive, imagine what we will be in another blink of the eye - where we will go, what we will become. Dream, in this universe of virtually infinite wonder and beauty, of what tomorrow may look like - that you may truly want for a tomorrow, another blink of the eye. Dream of what our ancestors may be - as alien as we would be to our own early hominid ancestors? Dream of tomorrows without limit, so that when you focus on today, you have a purpose.

Dream, because you are human and humans must explore - even the places and times that can only be explored in our dreams