“To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
For many of us, those immortal words from the opening of Star Trek are more than TV nostalgia — they are a mantra. The phrase comes to mind often when I board a plane to an unfamiliar destination, especially one that lies well beyond my comfort zone.
The recent Artemis II mission took four astronauts farther than any human has traveled in the history of mankind. Its photographs — Earth hanging in the void, luminous and impossibly fragile — evoke the iconic Apollo 11 mission images from nearly half a century ago, and carry the same quiet message: our planet is precious, beautiful, and perhaps singular in the universe. When the Artemis II capsule swept around the Moon and beamed back images of the its far side, something stirred in me. I was transported back to the electrifying moment when I watched Neil Armstrong take the first lunar footsteps — the experience that crystallized, once and for all, my interest in the unknown. The Moon, Mars, distant solar systems, and far-off galaxies aren’t on the Travelers’ Century Club list just yet, but Artemis II reminds us that one day is getting closer.
Space or Earth, the deeper truth is the same: travel brings perspective.
As I expressed in my first President’s Letter, my children and I traveled extensively during their formative years. Our dinner table became a clearinghouse for observations and memories of the people and places we had encountered along the way. Through a close friend who leads the Mars expedition at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I was fortunate enough to get a behind-the-scenes tour — and I felt like a kid in a candy shop. During that visit, one photograph especially stood out to me: our Sun setting behind a Martian mountain range, the sky bruised with color. As it turned out, these images are freely available on NASA’s website, so I downloaded it, had it framed, and set it at the center of our dining room table.
One evening, I challenged my children to identify the location. They studied it carefully guessing the Mojave, the Gobi,the Shenandoah. When they finally gave up, I revealed the location.
The look on their faces said everything. It was a familiar sun. A familiar-looking mountain range. An entirely different world. In that moment, our quiet dinner table opened onto the cosmos. It was a profound reminder of how easily we confine ourselves to narrow definitions of “the world” — and how much is waiting just beyond that edge. Challenging our perspective doesn’t simply expand the mind; it redefines the boundaries of what is possible.
The impulse behind Artemis II and a trek through a remote village on Earth is, at its core, identical—the same restless thread of adventure, exploration, and curiosity that has always driven us forward. We travel not only to see new things, but to see familiar things — a sunset, a mountain, a horizon—through an entirely different lens.
But the most powerful lens of all isn’t a spacecraft window or a mountaintop vista. It’s another person.
Every culture carries its own way of seeing the world—shaped by centuries of history, hardship, celebration, and belief. When you sit down to a meal in a home that isn’t yours, when you listen to an elder recount what a particular stretch of land has meant to their family across generations, when you watch a community mark a moment of joy or grief in ways that are entirely unfamiliar — something shifts. You begin to understand that your own view of the world, however well-traveled, is still just one vantage point among billions.
I have stood at sites that were uninspiring to me as a landmark but everything to the person standing beside me. A field. A river crossing. A crumbling wall. Seen through their eyes—through the weight of their history — the ordinary becomes sacred, and the familiar becomes strange in the best possible way. That is the gift that other people’s stories give us.
This is why I have always believed that the most transformative souvenir you can bring home from any journey isn’t something you pack in a suitcase. It’s a question you can’t stop asking: Why do I see the world the way I do — and what am I missing?
The Martian sunset on our dining room table reminded me and my children that “the world” is far larger than they imagined. Travel — real travel, the kind where you slow down long enough to listen and observe — reminds us that it is also far richer. Every culture is, in a sense, its own planet: a distinct world of meaning, memory, and possibility, waiting to be explored with the same wonder we bring to the stars.
The greatest journeys are not measured in miles or planets — they are measured in perspectives and motivated by curiosity. Where will yours take you next?
