But I could be wrong.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.

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.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.