2008 must be a year of profound change in America. The world is threatened as the planet's population exponentially explodes. Billions demanding more and more of less and less beckon for science not fundamentalism to lead. Seven years of evangelical ruin has left America internationally paralyzed and domestically polarized. Science holds the answer while our own elections, coupled with term limits, hold our hope.
Another violent act -- the death of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto -- has left her country feeling vacant, angry, desperate, and hopeless. Like the suffering people of Iraq, Darfur, and even Bush's America, Pakistan's people are searching for a better tomorrow. Benazir's impassioned speeches flood the Internet. Humanity has failed her proactive populist's vision. Violence erupts. The war in Iraq has crippled America's international influence to help carry on Bhutto's objective of a better day; that was 2007. Humanity needs its own a New Year's resolution.
Even with the world weeping, New Years Day arrives. Millions of people will be realigning their personal priorities with hope of making 2008 better. Resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking, or any number of noble causes, can quickly fall away as addictions demand to be fed. Humanity's habit of violence is counterintuitive to progress. Now more than ever we need a choice to leave the religion behind in favor of science and fact. Perhaps then humankind can see its way clear of the bloodshed that has plagued man since written history.
Violence such as Bhutto's death and the Iraq war, jar change on a political scale, but science can stir truthful, meaningful change. The space program's most arresting image proves just how far science, not superstition, can take mankind.
On February 14th 1990 NASA turned Voyager one's cameras around to capture humanity's most poetic image. The portrait is called "Pale Blue Dot" -- less than half a pixel of light that is our planet Earth. Photographed from just beyond Saturn, the Earth was cosmically as near to Voyager as your two fingers pressed together, but our Earth already looks as far away as the faintest, smallest star.
Alone floating in space, reflecting a faint glow of light, we appear inconsequential; no God looking down, just us alone waiting for evolution to tell its next tale. Carl Sagan's narration is worth six minutes of your year.
Change your perspective and alter our world.
Happy 2008.