The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the earth,

and the ocean and the sky

the open road still softly calls.

Our little terricolous globe

is the madhouse of those hundred, thousands, millions of worlds.

We, who can not even put our own planetary home in order

driven with rivalries and hatreds,

Are we to venture out into space?

By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems,

we will have changed.

The simple passage of so many generations would have changed us.

Necessity will have changed us.

We’re inadaptable species.

It will not be we who reach of Alpha Centauri

and the other nearby stars.

It will be a species very like us

but with more of our strengths

and fewer of our weaknesses.

More confident, far-seeing,

Capable, and prudent.

For all our failings,

despite our limitations and foul abilities,

we humans are capable of greatness.

what new wonders undreamed of in our time

will we have wrought in another generation?

And another,

how far will our nomadic species have wondered by the end of the next century?

And the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely read on many worlds from the solar system

and beyond, would be unified.

By their common heritage.

By their regard for their home planet.

And by the knot that whatever life there may be,

the only humans in all the universe, come from earth.

They will gaze up and screen to find

the blue dot in their skies.

They will marvel the whole vulnerable, the repository of more potential, once was.

How perilous, our infancy,

How humble our beginnings.

How many rivers we had to cross

before we found our way?