Chris Hadfield

And so you're just sticking your head in the sand if you don't think that our current civilization is going to come apart at the seams and crumble for a while before something else emerges.

So so there's urgency to what's happening.

We're at a moment right now where we're capable of doing magnificent things.

You know, it's kind of staggering to think of the huge number of things that are happening simultaneously on Earth right now, right at the cutting edge, stuff that was impossible just five years ago.

um and so a lot of what i do is to be part of the effort to help hold it all together to keep us from falling to our our bad chimpanzee natures and to actually um make the most of of the civilization that we've been handed but i also one of the things whitney that you really internalize orbiting the world

is a sense of time.

In a frenetic place, in a city, everything's just going, going, going, and fast.

And it's hard to even imagine the rest of the world.

It sure is hard to imagine 100 years.

And it's virtually impossible to imagine 1,000 years or 10,000 years.

But on the quiet

grace-filled almost sanctity of a spaceship you can see where the continents fit together just by looking out the window and and while i was on board the spaceship we went from one side of the sun to the other over six months and i got to watch the entire world

changed from summer to winter as the hemisphere swapped.

I got to watch the whole world take a breath in what I realized was one of four and a half billion breaths of how our world refreshes itself.

And that sense of time really soaked into me.

And also the commonality of the human experience, because you see the same patterns reflected no matter where we have chosen to live.

They all are similar, but...

whether you're over Connecticut or whether you're over Africa or whether you're over Australia, you can see, hey, it's just people doing the same thing down there.

And they all want a little joy and laughter and a good world for their children and their grandchildren.

And so to me, that tempers the kind of panicked urgency of a lot of news reporting and frantic feeling of desperation that seeps into common everyday society.