different.
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
On immense timescales, in hundreds of millions to billions of years, the centers of galaxies explode. We see, scattered across deep space, galaxies with “active nuclei,” quasars, galaxies distorted by collisions, their spiral arms disrupted, star systems blasted with radiation or gobbled up by black holes—and we gather that on such timescales even interstellar space, even galaxies may not be safe.
There is a halo of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way, extending perhaps halfway to the distance of the next spiral galaxy (M31 in the constellation Andromeda, which also contains hundreds of billions of stars). We do not know what this dark matter is, or how it is arranged—but some[43] of it may be in worlds untethered to individual stars. If so, our descendants of the remote future will have an opportunity, over unimaginable intervals of time, to become established in intergalactic space, and to tiptoe to other galaxies.
But on the timescale for populating our galaxy, if not long before, we must ask: How immutable is this longing for safety that drives us outward? Will we one day feel content with the time our species has had and our successes, and willingly exit the cosmic stage? Millions of years from now—probably much sooner—we will have made ourselves into something else. Even if we do nothing intentionally, the natural process of mutation and selection will have worked our extinction or evolved us into some other species on just such a timescale (if we may judge by other mammals). Over the typical lifetime of a mammalian species, even if we were able to travel close to the speed of light and were dedicated to nothing else, we could not, I think, explore even a representative fraction of the Milky Way Galaxy. There’s just too much of it. And beyond are a hundred billion galaxies more. Will our present motivations remain unchanged over geological, much less cosmological, timescales—when we ourselves have been transfigured? In such remote epochs, we may discover outlets for our ambitions far grander and more worthy than merely populating an unlimited number of worlds.
Perhaps, some scientists have imagined, we will one day create new forms of life, link minds, colonize stars, reconfigure galaxies, or prevent, in a nearby volume of space, the expansion of the Universe. In a 1993 article in the journal
For many pages now, we have left the realm of plausible conjecture for the heady intoxication of nearly unconstrained speculation. It is time to return to our own age.
My grandfather, born before radio waves were even a laboratory curiosity, almost lived to see the first artificial satellite beeping down at us from space. There are people who were born before there was such a thing as an airplane, and who in old age saw four ships launched to the stars. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. This is true of our science and some areas of our technology, of our art, music, literature, altruism, and compassion, and even, on rare occasion, of our statecraft. 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?
Two billion years ago our ancestors were microbes; a halfbillion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.
When we first venture to a near-Earth asteroid, we will have entered a habitat that may engage our species forever. The first voyage of men and women to Mars is the key step in transforming us into a multiplanet species. These events are as momentous as the colonization of the land by our amphibian ancestors and the descent from the trees by our primate ancestors.
Fish with rudimentary lungs and fins slightly adapted for walking must have died in great numbers before establishing a permanent foothold on the land. As the forests slowly receded, our upright apelike forebears often scurried back into the trees, fleeing the predators that stalked the savannahs. The transitions were painful, took millions of years, and were imperceptible to those involved. In our case the transition occupies only a few generations, and with only a handful of lives lost. The pace is so swift that we are still barely able to grasp what is happening.
Once the first children are born off Earth; once we have bases and homesteads on asteroids, comets, moons, and planets; once we’re living off the land and bringing up new generations on other worlds, something will have changed forever in human history. But inhabiting other worlds does not imply abandoning this one, any more than the evolution of amphibians meant the end of fish. For a very long time only a small fraction of us will be out there.
“In modern Western society,” writes the scholar Charles Lindholm,
the erosion of tradition and the collapse of accepted religious belief leaves us without a
I believe it is healthy—indeed, essential—to keep our frailty and fallibility firmly in mind. I worry about people who aspire to be “god-like.” But as for a long-term goal and a sacred project, there is one before us. On it the very survival of our species depends. If we have been locked and bolted into a prison of the self, here is an escape hatch—something worthy, something vastly larger than ourselves, a crucial act on behalf of humanity. Peopling other worlds unifies nations and ethnic groups, binds the generations, and requires us to be both smart and wise. It liberates our nature and, in part, returns us to our beginnings. Even now, this new
The pioneering psychologist William James called religion a “feeling of being at home in the Universe.” Our tendency has been, as I described in the early chapters of this book, to pretend that the Universe is how we wish our home would be, rather than to revise our notion of what’s homey so it embraces the Universe. If, in considering James’ definition, we mean the real Universe, then we have no true religion yet. That is for another time, when the sting of the Great Demotions is well behind us, when we are acclimatized to other worlds and they to us, when we are spreading outward to the stars.
The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. 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 love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. 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.
About the Author
CARL SAGAN was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the American space program since
