The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.

We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.