Chris Hadfield

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.

It makes me an eternal optimist because our species has been here forever.

for half a million years.

And we're still here despite our destructive nature and despite the rises and falls.

And I just see it as a necessity as the current crop of adults to not squander that and to try and do our best to recognize our history and make the most of our presence so we can hand our kids a decent future.

Yeah.

And in fact, perhaps it's more important than ever.