Each of us, in the immortal words of the American poet Walt Whitman, “…are the journeywork of the stars, no less than the leaves of grass.” As Carl Sagan would put it later in the twentieth century – “Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars… We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work… and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, have begun to wonder about our origins… star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth… Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet.
