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In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.

We are the first generation of human beings to have substantial insights into the origin of our cosmos and of human life in it.

Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.

Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is.

What evolution tells us is that we are part of a grand, dynamic, and ever-changing fabric of life that covers our planet. Even to a person of faith, in fact especially to a person of faith, an understanding of the evolutionary process should only deepen their appreciation of the scope and wisdom of the creator's work.

So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.