Sitting here on anchor at Wallops Island you can’t help but look out at the few structures on shore. I thought they looked kind of “military” and figured Norfolk Naval base is just a bit South down the coast. However, after pulling up Google Maps you find MARS! OK it’s the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport.

I now see we are anchored off a Virginia space center with a rocket launch pad. Vector Space Systems has teamed up with MARS and is comprised of many folks from both the aerospace (SpaceX cofounders) and tech industries (Shaun Coleman – VMWare VDI/View & Cofounder of CloudVolumes)

I think we may have missed an earlier rocket launch on Nov 11th. Too bad, We would have stuck around to watch that. Kelly & I talk quite a bit about the cosmos and we both believe that the human race’s primary purpose should be to explore the cosmos.

We are all conscious (some more than others). Last night standing in the cockpit and looking up at the stars you can’t help but feel small. My visual view of the world is centered from inside my own head. We are all aware that we walk (or boat) the surface of this planet with other conscious beings who are centered in their own heads. Many of them are kind souls who find a purpose in helping others in need. However like many others,  I am sometimes bothered by the human need to fight with one another instead of seek intelligent life as well as a second habitable planet for plan B. This planet has a few people that I hope don’t make the trip to Earth 2.0.  The Kepler space telescope has now found ..”219 planets, 10 are thought to host conditions similar to Earth”…

So WHEN DO WE LEAVE and Who wants to come?

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994