“No one can deny the excitement of visiting another world.”

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

Present annual world energy consumption is about equal to the annihilation energy of 4 tons of matter.

Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

We don’t necessarily stand by our faults every time, but we will always stand by our methodologies and ethos.