We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.

Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting.

With our scurrying minds and our lidless will and our lank, floppy bodies and our galloping yens and our deep, cosmic loneliness and our starboard hearts where love careens, we are listening, the small bipeds with the giant dreams.

Foster’s character peers out her spaceship window as she approaches an extraordinary alien world and gasps: “They should’ve sent a poet!”

Carl Sagan depicted us as “a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.”

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth

our place in the cosmic order not as something separate from and superior to nature, but as a tiny pixel-part of it, imbued with equal parts humility and responsibility.

Sagan delivered at Cornell University in 1994—a speech that swelled into a best-selling book the following year, reverencing Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

tell stories about what is real and what is possible, and what it means to be.