Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.

There are countless space activities that would be no less exciting than the moon missions were, I have no doubt. The search for life on Mars, for example.

You say you're worried about kids? I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups... Children are not the problem here... We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

It could be that these other civilizations, if they are far more advanced intellectually than we are, would not even measure our existence as a blip on the intelligence radar. They could be so advanced that we are to them what worms are to us.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

Since life on Earth is, so far, the only known example of life in the universe, our dilemma may simply be that we have no other examples to compare us with. If we did, then the life/non-life transition might look downright simple to us.