This Sunday on NPR radio's This I Believe Weekend Edition Sunday segment, astronaut Dan Tani shared his thoughts on our beleagured planet. A transcript of his remarks are available online, as is a podcast of his actual broadcast. I found it quite inspiring.

He describes himself as an optimist--

Like many people, I have a job that requires me to take a business trip every now and then. I'm on one right now. As I write this, I'm flying over New Zealand; it looks so beautiful out the window. Unlike most people, however, I'm traveling over 200 miles above the Earth, and I'm going 17,500 miles an hour.

Here are a few more excerpts from this remarks but I recommend listening to his full talk. It is quite brief.

First, I accept the statistical probability that I am not likely to be killed by a terrorist or contract some horrible disease. It's not that I think that everything will work out OK; it's that I think that everything will probably work out OK.

And second, trust. I learned trust from my mother, and in a way, this essay is for her. Two months ago, while I was up here, she died in an accident and of course I have been unable to return to honor her. I have been thinking about her life, which was not an easy one. She was born into poverty, forcibly relocated during World War II, survived the premature deaths of her husband and a son — and yet, her outlook was so life-affirming. She felt that people were good and well-meaning. Sometimes I felt that she trusted too easily, and I was afraid that that stranger she talked to on the street or the airplane might not be as nice as she thought. But I was almost always proven wrong, and I'm so grateful for her example.

His mother was one of the Japanese-Americans who spent WWII in an American concentration camp, so she her trust and optimism were clearly hard fought and impressive.