We Are Like Butterflies

We Are Like Butterflies…

Who flutter for a few hours and think it is forever

In ancient world, you could travel from Spain to Azores in a few days, the same time it takes us now to cross the channel from the Earth to the Moon. It took then a few months to traverse the Atlantic Ocean and reach what was called then the New World, the Americas.

Today however it takes a few months to cross the cosmic ocean of the inner solar system and make planet-fall on Mars or Venus, which are truly and literally new worlds awaiting us. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from England to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

The annual costs were, relatively, more then than now, but in both cases less than one percent of the appropriate Gross National Product. Our present spaceships, with their robot crews, are the harbingers, the vanguards of future human expeditions to the planets. We have traveled this way before!

The earthlings are like butterflies who flutter for a few hours and think it is forever (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)