Al Gore has a piece in the New York Times today describing his five-part plan for shoring up the US economy while simultaneously laying the groundwork for making major reductions in our consumption of dirty energy sources. (It’s just the usual stuff; the prescriptions aren’t the part that’s been stuck in my mind all day.)

In closing, Mr. Gore shares the following amazing, humbling thought:

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.