It’s odd to feel excited and inspired by something we can barely imagine. It’s humbling. It’s a reminder that, while it sometimes feels like we’re living in the future, this is someone’s distant past. Yes, the Internet, or your phone, or whatever newer technologies appear over the next few years are pretty impressive. But one day people will think back from whatever planet they’re living on, to people on Earth at the turn of this millennium and see us as primitive and laughable. We’re just a tiny step, part-way along an impossibly long timeline.
Which could be depressing. But it’s a reminder that we’re never at the end. Even our inter-planetary descendants will one day, in turn, be viewed by their descendants as backward and simplistic. We’re permanently on a journey with no certain destination. We should, I guess, simply be trying to make the journeys of those ahead of us as extraordinary and as just as possible.