It was a beautiful, harmonious, peaceful-looking planet, blue with white clouds, and one that gave you a deep sense of home, of being, of identity. It is what I prefer to call instant global consciousness.

The ancient traditions, even Christianity, say God is Love. There is symmetry here. The fundamental step where you get into this transcendent state is this feeling of ebullience, love and caring and unity.

The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system.

My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

The answer to the nature of our existence is somewhere in the middle, and that, of course, is what we're looking for: how to see ourselves in a new picture of ourselves and understand the questions that humans have asked forever, "Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what's the nature of this reality that we're in?"

Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.

Another way to think of this is there are now 6.8 billion people on this planet, and half of them weren't even born when we went to the moon, and so they don't have the perspective.