Shankar Vedantam

And so this is part of like the space race.

And that was during the Cold War.

But what Kennedy tried to do was get people around a common visionary purpose.

Can we put somebody on the moon?

And that generated an enormous amount of excitement.

And so this is something that is often missing from the way that our politics normally unfolds, which is really about partisan gain.

We really need to think about what is going to animate and excite and motivate people to feel a common sense of purpose, to make sacrifices and help one another and move away from trolling one another online or in other forms of media.

To address a problem like climate change, we need a level of international cooperation we've never seen before.

And the experience of these astronauts suggests it's possible.

Many interviews with astronauts who've ever seen the Earth from above have this experience of awe and connectedness with all of humanity.

And many say they're changed by it permanently.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

It's not feasible for us to get everybody up to the moon, but what it suggests is that if we can get people to see themselves as connected to all of humanity, we might be able to change the way they think about themselves.

They suddenly see themselves as part of something bigger, part of something bigger than their nation.

And it might be the trigger that we need to motivate people to work towards common purpose, to fight off the threats that are going to affect all of us.

And the biggest one on the horizon...

climate change.

It's going to be a tsunami.

We're already seeing the effects of it.

And so it really does require a sense of common purpose among everyone, among every country, because if we lose this earth, we don't have anywhere to go.