A kneeling woman pours water from two urns. One feeds a pool, the other the ground. A tree grows in the background. In other decks, the woman is simply looking at the night sky, where bright stars shine in the far distance. So far, indeed, that the light from the Sun's nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, took more than four years to get to us. And the light from the most distant celestial object humans can observe left there at a time when other human species besides Homo sapiens still walked the Earth. These are expanses of space and time that are truly unimaginable for beings in whose experience light travels instantaneously. Imagine!

 

I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,
The unending sky, with all its million suns
Which turn their planets everlastingly
In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.

 

If I could sail that nothing, I should cross
Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing,
Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss
Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,

 

And rage into a sun with wandering planets
And drop behind, and then, as I proceed,
See his last light upon his last moon’s granites
Die to dark that would be night indeed.

 

Night where my soul might sail a million years
In nothing, not even death, not even tears.

 

- John Masefield, 'Lollingdon Downs', stanza 12

 

It becomes clear that this card takes the long view. The Star tells us to look to the future, to think about the long run. The future of our own lives, as James Dean suggests: "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." But also a much more distant future, on a timescale measured not in years but in centuries. This video captures the words of astronomer Carl Sagan as he envisions the future of humanity:

 

We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

 

By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We are… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.

 

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered, by the end of the next century, and the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system, and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross, before we found our way.

 

As biologists Peter B. and Jean S. Medawar have noted, to imagine what will come to pass millenia from now is to celebrate our humanity:

 

Only human beings guide their behavior by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only human beings find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on.

 

And so eventually that cold and distant Star turns out to have a deeply personal impact as well. We humans like to look at ourselves from afar because it inspires us with a gentle hope and optimism. It comforts us by putting things into perspective, reminding us that "our troubles are but mayflies, rising and falling between the turn of dawn and dusk." Contemplating that interstellar vastness may fill us with a strange sense of calmth and serenity. Essentially, the Star it reminds us to value the future on a timescale longer than our own.