I think about this video all the time:
What an incredible moment. Humans defying the crushing immensity of the gravity well of our 4 billion year old world. Filmed onto an incredibly powerful turing machine that fits inside your pocket and allows you to communicate with almost anybody on the planet at any time and can perform millions of mathematical operations every second. Shot from the air in an invention that allows us to collectively travel great distances, and holy shit, while there - 8 kilometers up in the sky - you can still be connected to a pan-planetary network that lets you share the video before you even land.
Wow.
"The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." --William Gibson
None of those things would be possible without the anonymous people who have dedicated their lives to doing the druging hard work of science every single day. Those people are my heroes and I am lucky enough to call some of them my friends.
Segue: my friend Dave came up with a great analogy for parenthood soon after the birth of his first daughter. Parents are the genetic equivalent of the boosters on a space rocket. The booster rockets get all used up, out of fuel, and then fall away into the ocean before the rocket breaches the atmosphere and enters space.
As a parent you know this to be true. You can feel yourself burning up all of your resources to launch these little people into the world. You burn harder than you've ever burned before, age faster than you've aged before, and sleep less than you ever have before, because you're now a privileged link in the chain of humans going down through the generations. You feel with absolute certainty that you are expendable now because you've created something greater than yourself.
I don't think I've ever been happier than in my role as a booster rocket. I feel so lucky.