04/21/2026
We are all in this together...
💞 A Republican, 💞 one of the actual Human Ones, and astronauts speak...
"TRUE ABUNDANCE AND HAPPINESS"...
A Statement of Decency:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." — Dwight D. Eisenhower
The OPPORTUNITY Cost of War
In his 1953 "Chance for Peace" address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower laid out a profound moral ledger, illustrating that the true cost of modern weaponry is not just money, but the stolen potential of humanity.
The COST of a Bomber (in 1950's $'s)
To illustrate the "theft" from those who are hungry and cold, Eisenhower calculated the trade-off for a single modern heavy bomber:
EDUCATION: It equals the cost of more than 30 modern brick schools.
Infrastructure5: It could fund two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 people.
HEALTHCARE: It is worth two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
TRANSPORTATION: It equals fifty miles of concrete pavement. (The interstate highway system was Eisenhower's idea!)
THE POSSIBILITIES OF PEACE:
Eisenhower argued that peace is not merely the absence of war, but a conscious choice to redirect the world’s resources toward human growth. He proposed a world where:
FEAR IS REPLACED BY TRUST: Nations agree to the limitation of armaments and the international control of atomic energy.
WEALTH IS USED FOR WELFARE: The savings from disarmament are funneled into a "World Aid Fund" to develop the "underdeveloped areas of the world."
GLOBAL UNITY: Cooperation is based on the "common hunger for peace" rather than a race for dominance.
💞 The "Overview Effect" has inspired many astronauts to speak on Earth's beauty and fragility. Here are the most notable reflections:
YURI GAGARIN (Vostok 1, 1961)
"Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!"
BILL ANDERS (Apollo 8, 1968)
"We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."
NEIL ARMSTRONG (Apollo 11, 1969)
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
EDGAR MITCHELL (Apollo 14, 1971)
"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’"
RUSTY SCHWEICKART (Apollo 9, 1969)
"You look down and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, 'Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at what’s important.'"
RON GARAN(ISS, 2011) "When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also looks extremely fragile... We are all in this together."
CARL SAGAN (Reflecting on the "Pale Blue Dot" photo from Voyager 1, 1990)
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
"If you think you are separate or separated from the rest of Humanity you are living in an optical delusion! A human being is part of the whole we call the universe, existing within limits of time and space. Yet we experience ourselves — our thoughts and feelings — as though we are separate from everything else. This sense of separation is a kind of illusion produced by our own consciousness.
That illusion becomes a prison. It confines us to personal desires and to attachment to only a few people close to us.
The work before us is to free ourselves from that confinement by expanding our awareness and compassion to include all living beings and the whole of nature in its beauty."
ALBERT EINSTEIN
WILLIAM SHATNER'S: 2021 experience aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard left him with a profound sense of "overwhelming sadness" rather than the awe he expected. This phenomenon is often linked to the "Overview Effect," but Shatner described it as something more visceral and mournful.
Upon returning to Earth, he shared several powerful reflections, most notably in his book Boldly Go:
"I saw a cold, dark, black empty void. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the edge of the planet, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, and I realized that everything we’ve ever known is right there—this tiny, fragile ball of life.
I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving Hovering over the Earth made me realize how delicate and how precious life is. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread."
And finally, just last week:
VICTOR GLOVER, Artemis II Pilot (April 2026)
"You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you're on a spaceship called Earth, created to give us a place to live in the universe... this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we've got to get through this together. In all of this emptiness, this thing we call the universe, you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are all the same thing and that we've got to get through this together."
https://youtu.be/Or9I-qElmCY?si=2rbK0sAv6JdRjxOM
