The responsibility is frighteningly big, but we DO contain the entire history of the universe in our fingertips, and we cannot escape the fact that we are the end result of everything that has ever happened. Our future can either be a long and painfully fumbling continuation of the present, or we can expand our expectations and grasp it bravely with both hands to create - as a first step only - a planet which is free of ignorance, poverty, mindless cruelty and pointlessness.

What Einstein once said still applies, "Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust; we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." (28)