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 terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds. We who cannot even put our own planetary world into order, riven with rivalries and hatreds... are we to venture out into space? By the time we're 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're 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.

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?