I don’t follow the news religiously, but it finds me anyway. A clip on YouTube, a post in my feed, and there it is. Another war. Another atrocity. Another great power doing something cynical and calling it necessary. I usually come away feeling a little worse about us, because the names change but the story rarely does.
It would be easy to let that curdle into cynicism, and for a while it did. But lately I keep tripping over evidence that points the other way, and I’ve started collecting it the way you hold onto something you don’t want to lose. Or the way a hoarder holds onto anything, really. Let’s go with the nicer read.
The piece that surprised me most came from space, of all places, and from the military, of all institutions.
The place built for rivalry
Space is supposed to be the next arena for great-power competition. And yet, in 2025 the U.S. Space Force published its first International Partnership Strategy, built on a premise that sounds almost gentle for a military document: space superiority is no longer something any nation achieves alone. The whole strategy is about designing, integrating, and operating alongside allies rather than over them.
Then I found the numbers. Space Systems Command, the part of the Space Force that actually buys and builds the hardware, is running nearly 40 international agreements worth more than six billion dollars in partner investment across over fifteen allied nations, with hundreds of millions more expected by the end of this year. Read that again. In the one domain we’re told will define the next century of conflict, the working strategy is cooperation. Shared cost, shared design, shared command.
If rivalry can give way to partnership there, in the place built for it, I have a hard time believing it can’t happen anywhere else.
What a Navy SEAL said about love
Around the same time, I listened to Jonny Kim speak at Harvard’s Alumni Day. Kim has lived several lifetimes. He was a Navy SEAL who ran more than a hundred combat operations, then a doctor, and now a NASA astronaut who has seen this planet from orbit. If anyone has earned the right to talk about strength and rivalry, it’s him.
What he chose to talk about was love. Loving one another regardless of race, religion, or creed. Coming from a man who has seen the worst of what we do to each other, and then seen the whole Earth from above with no lines drawn on it, that didn’t sound naive. It sounded like the conclusion of someone who had actually looked. Here is how he put it:
Always lead with your heart. Take off your armor. Exercise empathy, especially towards people you disagree with. It is the only path by which we can coexist, leaving this fragile, beautiful spaceship we call Earth better than we found it.
The long game is the only game
Here’s the part I believe as arithmetic, not as a slogan. The universe is almost unimaginably vast, and we’re spending our short window on the one rock we have fighting over its corners while its resources quietly run down. Play that forward a few hundred or a few thousand years and ask yourself honestly what’s actually going to kill us. Not an asteroid. Not a dying sun. Us. The only version of that story that ends well is the one where we stop treating each other as the enemy long enough to figure out how to reach beyond this planet together.
Borders made sense as a way to organize a crowded, frightened species. But against the scale of what’s actually out there, they’re a small idea. We’re going to need a bigger one.
My north star
I’m not going to fix this. I know that. But I know what I’m pointed at. I want to leave the world a little better than I found it, for my family and for the generations who’ll never know my name. I want my kids, and theirs, to inherit a species that finally decided to grow up. So I keep paying attention to the proof that we can, I keep collecting it, and whenever I get the chance to build something, I try to build it in that direction.
That last part is the whole reason I write any of this down.