On May 1, 2023, a small plane went down in the Colombian Amazon. The mother and two pilots died, but four children, ages 13, 9, 4, and 1, survived the crash and wandered into the jungle looking for help. For weeks soldiers and Indigenous volunteers searched, finding a tiny drinking bottle, scissors, a hair tie, a makeshift shelter, and little footprints. On the 40th day the radio crackled with the code words: “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle.” All four were alive. Their family said 13-year-old Lesly had grown up knowing which fruits were safe and how to care for a baby, and she kept her younger siblings going until help came.
In April 2020, during Britain’s first COVID lockdown, a World War II veteran named Tom Moore set out to walk 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire before his 100th birthday. Each loop was about 82 feet. His goal was to raise 1,000 pounds for NHS charities. People were so moved that donations poured in from everywhere, and in the end he had raised almost 33 million pounds. He became Captain Sir Tom, and his simple saying, “Tomorrow will be a good day,” spread across the country. He died in February 2021 at 100, remembered as a beacon of hope.
Paul Alexander caught polio in 1952 when he was just six years old, and within days the disease left him unable to breathe on his own. He spent the next 70-plus years in an iron lung, a seven-foot metal cylinder that pushed air into his lungs. Most people would have quit dreaming right there. Paul didn’t. Holding a rod in his mouth, he learned to turn pages and paint. He went to high school, college, and law school and worked for years as an attorney. Later he used that same mouth rod to type out his own autobiography. When he died in March 2024, a friend said Paul would want everybody to know they are capable of great things.
On Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of one of the most painful years in American history, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit another world. Borman later said they were told they would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice, and NASA’s only instruction was to do something appropriate. So while the camera showed pictures of the moon and the Earth, the three men took turns reading the first verses of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” They closed by wishing a merry Christmas to everyone on the good Earth.
In November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft’s code with it. They couldn’t fly out and replace a chip, so they rewrote the code in pieces and tucked it into other spots in the computer’s memory. Every command took about 22 and a half hours to reach the spacecraft and another 22 and a half for an answer to come back. On April 20, 2024, the team finally heard usable data again and celebrated in a conference room, and by June all four of its science instruments were working again.
