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 terr-aqueous 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...
Carl Sagan
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