I would like to suggest that the history of science is the history of an enlarging understanding of the universe, its evolution, its history, and its structure. We have engaged the universe at the very limits of our capacity. We have explored the world of the microcosm and the world of the macrocosm. We have found at both extremes incredible complexity. The universe, beginning from an unimaginably hot and dense singularity, evolved through a series of stages, each producing the condition necessary for the succeeding stage. Our sun, our solar system, our planet, our own beings are all late stages of this evolving universe. The insights of cosmology and theoretical astronomy have served to tie us ever more tightly into the emerging story of the universe itself. The history of the universe is our history. We emerged from the same vast processes that created galaxies and suns and stars and planets. We are all of us recycled stardust.
|
Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children -Alex Haley
|
And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
|
This is why man creates his own universes when he Knows them, and these universes can never be prior to man because they are mere images of the vanity of vanities that will make whole man�s thirst of solidarity with the Infinite, the Absolute and the Plenitude dusted by so much stardust of its own illusory image of life. To claim that Man�s God is independent of him is a fiction, because this God is a God of the man�s Illusion of Life because it cannot be any other way, because this the only way in which man can determine and recognize it, because only this way can this God exist.
|
We sang our spacecraft to sleep today with a melody of digital ones and zeros. Stardust has performed flawlessly these last seven years and 2.88 billion miles, and deserves a rest for a while, like the rest of the team.
|