Northern Exposure, Season 3

Chris:
I made you, paddle person, because I had a dream. A little wooden man smiled at me. He sat in a canoe on a snowbank on this hill. Now the dream has begun to come true. "The sun spirit will look down at the snow, and the snow will melt, and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes. Down again, on at last to the sea. You will go on with the water, and you will have adventures that I would like to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to stay with my father and help with the traps." That's Paddle to the Sea, folks. The story of a little Indian Boy who send a toy canoe on a journey that he himself is too young to take. We do the same thing you know? Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo. Our Standard-bearers in the eternal human crusade: exploration. And now we've hit the cosmic trail. Why? Because Earth's played out. You know, less than a hundred years ago Amundsen could've been the first human being to reach the South Pole, Falcon Scott could've died trying. And now…well, last year, China had to close down Mount Everest. Too much litter. The world's become a fragile place. It's not to be conquered, it's to be protected, coddled, nursed, like a little baby. What do we do now? We launch our surrogates into interstellar space, dreaming of that one fine day when we ourselves can go.