If you're anything at all like me and tend to focus mainly on all the negative aspects of life because, for some nihilistic reason, it's so much easier to wallow in pity rather than try to seek out the positives, the world can start to seem pretty hopeless. It's so easy to get caught in all of the muddy crap that clogs up our days, melting each one into the next until you're left with one endless strand of mundane existence. With all of this war, this wild hatred and prejudice, manic crime and violence consuming our news stations and tabloids, most of us end up asking a similar question: what is there to be positive about? Is it even worth it to be hopeful anymore?

Yes. Yes, it is worth it. Why? Well, let me tell you a little something about my own personal source of hope—Voyager. The two spacecrafts NASA launched into outer space in the late 1970s with the intention, or rather the hope, of discovering proof of real alien life to some degree. Riding safely onboard Voyager is a three-paragraph-long letter signed by former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. In his famous letter, Carter writes out to any other possible lifeforms that may be inhabiting our galaxy explaining the existence of our home planet and how we, essentially, "come in peace."

Jimmy Carter is famous for claiming to have seen a UFO during the summer of 1969, and ever since this "sighting" occurred he has become an icon for alien fanatics across the board. Though Carter didn't think that his experience was the, what he calls, "space people" paying Earth a friendly visit, it filled him with a swelling hope for what really is floating around out there that we don't know about. Along with his letter, a vinyl record serving as a time capsule of humankind was placed carefully on board because yes, of course these mysterious space creatures have access to a record player. It just kind of makes sense...

Basically, the human race constructed a cosmic mixtape for, and about, itself. The aforementioned "Golden Record" included Earthly sounds such as waves crashing, howling wind and rumbling thunder. In case these "space people" don't have animals on their alienated planet, the record also contains the tweeting of birds, humpback whale calls and the screeching of chimpanzees. There's even music, 90 minutes' worth of culturally diverse music, even including the first two bars of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat. The best part, though? The composers recorded spoken greetings and messages from earthlings in over 100 different languages ranging from Sumerian to Welsh. One of the people chosen to be recorded on the record had this message for whomever it may concern: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."

This. This right here is what I believe to be the most hopeful thing that any human being has ever created. With this massive compilation, all of our thoughts, our languages, our music, our existence is now traveling at 11 miles per second through interstellar space. Everything we are as a human race, everything that needs explaining or introducing was noted, recorded, belted to a piece of metal that we catapulted out into the dark abyss above us. As much as it kills me to say it, the odds of either Voyager 1 or Voyager 2 being intercepted within our lifetimes are infinitesimal, but that's completely beside the point. The point is, one day, a day so unfathomably futuristic, a time so far into the future we can’t even comprehend the number, some really bored lifeform might stumble across some dead, battered piece of space junk and find the remnants of an entire planet’s desperate speck of hope locked tightly away inside. And if, against every odd, this lifeform can actually understand what it is that Jimmy Carter and the rest of the entire world is trying to say, they might just train their sights in the direction of our little corner in the sky and find the place we once occupied and think, "Damn. We missed out on something there."

Guys, we're all just so damn lonely. It is in our nature to gaze up into the night sky and pick out stars to marvel at. We look to them and beg to be shown that we are not alone out here, that we aren't the only floating ball of life suspended in this immense darkness. We tell all kinds of stories and make these massive movies about what the little, green, bigheaded creatures from other galaxies could do to us. But these alien disaster films are just our own way of pretending that we are fine just like this. Fine on our sad little pebble rotating on the back burner of an already-back burner solar system. We tell ourselves that we don't want these aliens to discover us because we all tend to fear what we do not know. We'll talk endlessly about the possibility of life on other planets and then turn right around and paint these unknown beings as monsters of mass destruction. We hunger for the answer to whether or not these "aliens" are legitimate, but deep down, we don't actually want them.

But, God, I want them. I want them and all of their mysterious glory. I want them careless and clever, small and quivering and just as confused as we are. Look: all my life I have pondered over the same question in hopes of extracting some sort of comfort from the answer. I need to know that there is more than this. More than what humanity has built itself into. More forms of intelligence and different ways of showing it. I need to know that we are not all the universe has to offer.

They call our generation "The Middle Children," that we were born too late to explore Earth, born too early to explore space. But you know what, fellow 'Middle Children?' Maybe what that really means is that this is the best time to be alive. We live in an era of ideas, of imagining and creating all sorts of scenarios without being suppressed by facts and scientific proof. We don't know yet what's really looming out there in the great unknown and we are free to be skeptical and we are totally able to "stretch it," even. We are free to be as hopeful as any person can possibly be.

So here we are, going about our everyday lives as usual, when all the while Voyagers are out there, orbiting and hurtling onward blindly just hoping to stumble across something we don't even know about yet. We are in search of what we do not know and that, my friends, is the definition of pure hope. Every day we wake up, these spacecrafts are just that much closer to uncovering something absolutely amazing that has been waiting to be discovered for longer than we can even imagine, something revolutionary, even. These thoughts are what fill my head with wonder and my chest with hope every single time I think about it. Voyager, and the journey never-ending.