See It Sometime

While I was on the space station, I used Twitter to ask hundreds of thousands of people what they would like me to take a picture of.  Resoundingly, the answer was “home.”  Everyone, from all around the world, wanted to see their hometowns.  I found that thought-provoking.  After millennia of wandering and settling, we are still most curious about how we fit in and how our community looks in the context of the rest of the world.  A curiosity of self-­awareness, now answerable by technology.
This is where the answers to our problems will start.  ­People across the planet need to see and internalize an accurate global vision of place and individual account­ability — to recognize the problems that face us all and the technologies that exist to combat them.  Our young ­people need to be able to look up, to look beyond the horizons of their forebears, and see the wisdom and opportunity that comes from a more universal sense of responsibility.
The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery.  Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity’s attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.
It is not a perfect world, but it is ours.  Sometimes you have to leave home to truly see it.
—    Chris Hadfield
From an article:  “We Should Treat Earth as Kindly as We Treat Spacecraft“
The on-line version of the article is at:  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/chris-hadfield-wired/
In the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine:  http://www.wired.com/
[I have subscribed to “Wired” for over a decade.  It is well worth the money for anyone who fancies himself (or herself) a futurist!    —    kmab]
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On This Day In:
2022	42
2021	Blessings Larger Than Life
	Tomorrow She Sails
2020	The Sun Came Out
	Not A Wink On Guard
2019	The Importance Of A Deadline
	Chaos Is Not Really A New Remedy
2018	History Will Judge Harshly
	Father Time, Perhaps?
2017	Odds Are
2016	Prayer, Too
2015	History, n.
2014	See It Sometime
2013	Precious Friend
2012	It Couldn’t Be Done
	Feeling Surrounded?
2011	Surprise!

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