Out of This World

Memos leaked. Wars raging. Rosie fighting in court. CEOs being dragged into court.

As we obsess over it all the spacecraft Voyager 1 (search) is on the edge of the solar system, more than 8 billion miles from Earth -- the tiny blue planet from which it blasted off more than 26 years ago. Twenty six years ago!

Think of what was going on then and what has happened since then.

How this 1,600-pound piece of tin and wire has plodded through the cosmos at more than 38,000 miles per hour as we have plodded through history.

When it launched Jimmy Carter was president and he was popular.

Bill Clinton was an Arkansas attorney general and he was unknown.

We were a long way from 1,000 on the Dow then. We would climb more than 10-fold since then.

Two years away from another energy crisis then.

Jimmy Stewart was still alive. And so were Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson and Richard Nixon. And so were my parents.

We were talking up some new fangled contraption called the Space Shuttle at NASA and talking down something called Muslim unrest in Iran.

It was before Khomeini and before Saddam.

Communism was still thriving and the World Trade Center was still standing.

No one knew who Bill Gates was then. Michael Dell was in high school. The shooters at Columbine and those who they would shoot weren't even born then.

No one had computers. We had typewriters.

Wal-Mart wasn't big and returns on stocks weren't big either.

There was no Internet yet. No Internet boom yet. And no overnight rich yuppies yet.

So many fortunes to be made and lost. There'd be famines and wars, lots of U.N. debates and AIDS.

And as momentous events moved on, Voyager 1 carried on, leaving all of us behind, further and further, quieter and quieter, until the din of our noise became but a flutter in the sky -- an insignificant dot amid so many other insignificant dots.

Man's greatest triumph was realized without any man around.

A pity that as it leaves this great solar system we call home, Voyager 1 can't even see us to say goodbye.

Watch Neil Cavuto's Common Sense weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on Your World with Cavuto.