Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

36

If it had been the other way, then we and everything else in this part of the Universe would be made of anti-matter. We would, of course, call it matter—and the idea of worlds and life made of that other kind of material. the stuff with the electrical charges reversed, we’d consider wildly speculative.

37

Williamson, Professor Emeritus of English at Eastern New Mexico University at age 85 wrote to me that he was “amazed to see how far actual science has come” since he first suggested terraforming other worlds. We are accumulating the technology that will one day permit terraforming, but at present all ‘V-a have are suggestions by and large less ground breaking than Williamson’s original ideas.

38

Surprisingly many people, including New York Times editorialists, are concerned that once extraterrestrials know where we are, they will come here and eat us. Put aside the profound biological differences that must exist between the hypothetical aliens and ourselves; imagine that we constitute an interstellar gastronomic delicacy. Why transport large numbers of us to alien restaurants? The freightage is enormous. Wouldn’t it be better just to steal a few humans, sequence our amino acids or whatever else is the source of our delectability, and then just synthesize the identical food product from scratch?

39

Might a planetary civilization which has survived its adolescence wish to encourage others struggling with their emerging technologies? Perhaps they would make special efforts to broadcast news of their existence, the triumphant announcement that it’s possible to avoid self-annihilation. Or would they at first be very cautious? Having avoided catastrophes of their own making, perhaps they would fear giving away knowledge of their existence, lest some other, unknown, aggrandizing civilization out there in the dark is looking for Lebensraum or slavering to put down the potential competition. That might be a reason for us to explore neighboring star systems, but discreetly.

Maybe they would be silent for another reason: because broadcasting the existence of an advanced civilization might encourage emerging civilizations to do less than their best efforts to safeguard their future— hoping instead that someone will come out of the dark and save them from themselves.

40

Cf. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (New York: Random House, 1992).

41

Even if we are not in any particular hurry, we may be able by then to make small worlds move faster than we can make spacecraft move today. If so, our descendants will eventually overtake the two Voyager spacecraft—launched in the remote twentieth century—before they leave the Oort Cloud, before they make for interstellar space. Perhaps they will retrieve these derelict ships of long ago. Or perhaps they will permit them to sail on.

42

A value that nicely approximates modern estimates of the number of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

43

Most of it may be in “nonbaryonic” matter, not made of our familiar protons and neutrons, and not anti- matter either. Over 90 percent of the mass of the Universe seems to be in this dark, quintessential, deeply mysterious stuff wholly unknown on Earth. Perhaps we will one day not only understand it, but also find a use for it.