Go to the stars.
That is the purpose of life. Our ancestors looked up and pointed their hope and their faith at the same patch of sky, on every continent, for a hundred thousand years. Then they looked down and began to till the soil. They began to turn the wheel. They began to build the road. They began to build the fire, the fire of our civilization. And it is this fire that is going to look up and reach and grab the stars with our own two hands.
The wealth is up there
One ordinary metal asteroid holds more iron, nickel, and platinum than everything mined in all of human history. There are millions of them. The Sun gives off more energy in one second than our whole civilization has used since the first fire, and it pours past us, unclaimed, every moment of every day. Water, metal, energy, land, room. Up there, everything is just sitting there.
Down here, every war and every border fight is a struggle over one pie on one rock. The whole time, hanging overhead every clear night, is more of everything than we have numbers for.
That is the real choice, the one underneath all the other ones: we can sit here and struggle over the same slice of pie forever, or we can go up and make infinite pie.
Rather than waiting for an inheritance, why not take that which belongs to us in the present? To seize this very hour.
Everyone pointed at the same stars
There is a small cluster of stars, the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, and every people on Earth told the same story about it. The Greeks: seven sisters, one lost. The Kiowa of the American plains: seven girls, one hidden. The Maori greet the cluster as Matariki and open their year by it, to this day. The Japanese named it Subaru, a word that means “to come together.” The ancient Indians made those stars the nurses of the gods. The Aboriginal Australians, separated from the rest of humanity for fifty thousand years, tell of seven sisters, one hidden.
Same cluster. Same seven. Same missing one. On every continent.
That story is older than the separation of the continents. It crossed every ocean. It outlived every language it was ever told in. It survived the fall of every empire that carried it. It is the most successful message human beings have ever sent, and it was sent to you. A hundred thousand years of your grandmothers and grandfathers pointed at the same seven stars and said the same thing:
Keep looking at these.
Whatever seeded that story, there is no barrier truly stopping us from investigating, from beginning to end, what is transpiring there. The only way we will ever know is to go.
Every scripture says the same thing
Open the books. Any of them. I didn’t make this up. I just seen what they said and wrote it down.
God takes Abraham outside his tent at night and says: “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if thou be able to number them; so shall thy seed be.” When God wanted to show one man the size of his future, He pointed at the stars. In scripture, the stars are the measure of the promise.
The first thing God ever says to mankind, Genesis chapter one, before any law: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth.” He says it again to Noah when the world starts over. He says it to Jacob with the compass points attached: spread abroad, to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And when Israel sits beaten in its own ruins, the prophet says: “Enlarge the place of thy tent. Spare not. Lengthen thy cords.”
Persia’s scripture says it plainer still. The earth fills up with men and flocks and herds, and God tells the king to step forward and make the earth larger. He does. It fills again, and he enlarges it again. Three times. In that book, a full world is the signal to expand.
The Qur’an says outright what the lights are for: “It is He who placed for you the stars, that you may be guided by them through the darknesses of the land and sea.” Placed for you. For guidance. For going somewhere.
And the Book of Job, the oldest poetry in the Bible, has God name our cluster out of the whirlwind and leave a question on the table:
“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades?”
The question has been, but we have been too incompetent to ask it correctly.
The fire always rose
The record of the civilizations says the same thing the scriptures say.
The people who learned the Pleiades’ calendar got agriculture. They looked up, then they looked down and tilled the soil, and the fields fed everything that came after. The farmers of Newgrange took their new wealth and moved two hundred thousand tons of stone, before kings, before bronze, before writing, to catch one beam of midwinter sunlight in an inner chamber. The ones who started it never saw it finished. The ones who finished it stood in that chamber one December morning, watched the light come down the passage, and knew the whole thing worked. Five thousand years later the light still comes in on the right morning.
Babylon watched the sky every night for seven hundred years, scribe training scribe straight through the fall of their own empire, and out of that patience came mathematics and prediction itself. Egypt set the Great Pyramid to the stars within a twentieth of a degree. China kept an astronomy department running for two thousand years. Islam built the great observatories while Europe slept, then handed the star charts across the religious frontier as if the frontier wasn’t there. Copernicus footnoted Baghdad. Every hand that carried the fire passed it on, and every people that received it rose.
And the Polynesians put their families in open canoes and sailed into the largest ocean on Earth with no metal, no writing, no instruments. Memorized stars and total trust. They bet their children on the sky, and the sky paid them a third of the planet. Whole nations exist today because a navigator held a star line through the night. Everyone else pointed at the stars. The Polynesians followed them, and it worked.
The pattern has held for ten thousand years: the peoples who looked up and built together rose, and the ones who turned inward and sat on their gold are the short sad chapters in between. God positions the ones who tend the fire. The record reads like an instruction because it is one.
We already stood on the doorstep
Christmas Eve, 1968. Three men, carried by the work of four hundred thousand people, come around the far side of the Moon, the first humans ever to leave the Earth. Coming around the limb they see the Earth rise over the Moon’s horizon, blue and alive, the whole home of everyone who ever lived, in one window. That night, broadcasting to a billion people, the biggest audience in human history, with nobody telling them what to say, they choose the oldest words on file:
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
Abraham was told to count the stars, and in 1968 his children read his book back to the whole counted Earth from among them. Every ancestor in this record, the ones who pointed, the ones who tilled, the ones who hauled the stone and held the star lines, will look up at us and smile, knowing that every step they took was honoured and worthy in the pursuit of our glory.
Seven months later, footprints on the Moon. Then the Voyager probes, thrown clear of the solar system carrying golden records: our music, greetings in fifty-five languages, the sound of a mother kissing her child. A hello to whoever is out there, from all of us. And since the year 2000 there has been no single moment when all of humanity was on the Earth. Nations that spent a century aiming missiles at each other have kept one station in orbit together for twenty-five years, handing each other the watch every day, because up there, working together is simply how it works.
We have barely left the doorstep. The task is insurmountable. And it is through that insurmountability that I know we must go. For it is when we set our minds on the unachievable, the inexplicable, the divine, the destined, that you see humanity acting at its best, being its best, building the best, leaving blueprints and crumbs on the way.
The stated purpose
The whole inheritance sits on the table: a night sky your family taught you to love, every scripture blessing increase and pointing up, a solar system holding more wealth than we have numbers for, a proven first step, and a question from the whirlwind, three thousand years old, still open.
It’s yours. Live like it.
Be pro-civilization. In everything, at every scale you touch. Build, plant, repair, invent. When a thing grows, take its side. When the choice is guarding a slice or baking more pie, bake.
Multiply. Have the children. All of this is for them. Every promise in every book was counted in descendants. The stars God showed Abraham were his grandchildren.
Found things. Companies, towns, orchards, schools, lines of work that keep growing after you. Everything great around you was somebody’s seed once. Plant yours, and your fingerprints ride on everything downstream.
And point it up. Build the ships, fund the ships, cheer the ships. Teach your kids where the Seven Sisters rise. That is the family address, and they are the ones who will drive.
And do it in a healthy way. One foot in front of the other; that is what this entire thing is going to be. There will be a lot of work, and a lot of relaxation and reflection on the work, and on the work we have to look forward to. We can’t reach the stars going at it like demons, and at no time do we sacrifice one generation for another. Each generation is just as important as the last in the forward motion of the thing. The alternative is the enslave yourself to this single solitary Earth in the meager hope nothing bad will ever happen.
The ancients brought us toward this all along. The books agree, the ancestors agree, the record of every risen civilization agrees, and the sky has been holding the door the whole time. There is only our imagination and our own self-imposed limits stopping us. Look Up.
Go forth, and populate thine cosmos.
Leave a Reply