“Get back on board. Damn it.” — Coast Guard De Falco ordering Captain Schettino of the ill-fated Costa Concordia

JUST recently, the Costa Concordia cruise ship, a modern-day, 6 year-old vessel that brought tourists to several ports of call in different countries around the Mediterranean waters hit some jagged rocks and ran aground alongside the coast of the island of Giglio, not far from the Italian mainland. The ship had just sailed from Civitavecchia, a port near Rome and was just 3 hours into a seven-day cruise with its first stop in Savona, another port North of Rome.

“It says something about the rarity and  preciousness of life on this planet.  The flip side of not finding life on another planet is appreciating life on earth.” — Carl Sagan 

THE Big Bang Theory claims that out of gas and dust, the universe was born  some 13.2 billion years ago in a spectacular explosion. The solar system where our tiny, fragile, magnificent earth orbits was born only in the last 4.5  billion years. Life, in the form  of single celled organisms began on earth 3.4  billion years ago and man began to walk the earth just a few million years ago. How does one fathom the unfathomable? One brilliant writer drew a parallel about the existence of life as we know it in this way. If the time frame of 13.2 billion years were to be thought of as a 24-hour day, life only began the last two seconds before midnight.