Perhaps the most sobering thought is that, after a lifetime of dreaming, I’m still going to die on this planet. That after thinking about galaxies, looking up at the stars, writing about extra-planetary travel, reading books and listening to programs about life out there, and trying to raise myself above whatever provincial concerns that surround me in my own life (wherever I happen to be), that at the end of it all, it is on Terra Prime, a small blue planet orbiting Sol on the mid-western arm of the Milky Way, is where I will spend my last breath.
Somewhere in this black thought is a faint blue line of hope in the spectrograph, but I can barely see it.