At the first, in 1876, the United States was still recovering from a disastrous Civil War. Yet it was also laying the foundations of the technological revolution that would soon transform the Earth. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the very year of the first Centennial, this country brought forth the invention which really began the conquest of space.
For in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first practical telephone.
We take electronic communications so utterly for granted that we cannot imagine a society without them; we would be deaf and dumb if these extensions of our senses were suddenly removed. So let us remember that just four hundred years ago, the telephone began the abolition of space -at least upon this planet.
A century later, in 1976, that process had almost finished-and the conquest of interplanetary space was about to begin. By that time, the first man had already reached the Moon, using techniques which today seem unbelievably primitive. Although all historians now agree that the Apollo Project marked the United States’s supreme achievement, and its greatest moment of triumph, it was inspired by political motives that seem ludicrous-indeed, incomprehensible -to our modern minds. And it is no reflection on those first engineers and astronauts that their brilliant pioneering effort was a technological dead end, and that serious space travel did not begin for several decades, with much more advanced vehicles and propulsion systems.
A century later, in 2076, all the tools needed to open up the planets were ready to hand. Longduration life-support systems had been perfected; after the initial disasters, the fusion drive had been tamed. But humanity was exhausted by the effort of global rebuilding following the Time of
Troubles, and in the aftermath of the Population Crash there was little enthusiasm for the colonization of new worlds.
Despite these problems, mankind had set its feet irrevocably on the road to the stars. During the twenty-first century, the Lunar Base became self supporting the Mars Colony was established, and we had secured a bridgehead on Mercury. Venus and the Gas Giants defied us-as indeed they still do but we had visited all the larger moons and asteroids of the Solar
System.
By 2176, just a hundred years ago, a substantial fraction of the human race was no longer Earthborn. For the first time we had the assurance
that whatever happened to the mother world, our cultural heritage 286 would not be lost. It was secure until the death of the Sun-and perhaps beyond…. The century that lies behind us has been one of consolidation, rather than of fresh discovery. I am proud that my world has played a major role in this process, for without the easily accessible hydrogen of the Titanian atmosphere, travel between the planets would still be exorbitantly expensive.
Now the old question arises: Where do we go from here? The stars are as remote as ever; our first probes, after two centuries of travel, have yet to reach Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s closest neighbor. Though our telescopes can now see to the limits of space, no man has yet traveled beyond Pluto. And we have still to set foot on far Persephone, which we could have reached at any time during the last hundred years…. Is it, true, as many have suggested, that the frontier has again closed?
Men have believed that before, and always they have been wrong. We can laugh now at those early4wentieth-century pessimists who lamented that there were no more worlds to discover-at the very moment when Goddard and
Korolev and von Braun were playing with their first primitive rockets. And earlier still, just before Columbus opened the way to this continent, it must have seemed to the peoples of Europe that the future could hold nothing to match the splendors of the past.
I do not believe that we have come to the end of History, and that what lies ahead is only an elaboration and extension of our present powers, on planets already discovered. Yet it cannot be denied that this feeling is now widespread and makes itself apparent in many ways. There is an unhealthy preoccupation with the past, and an attempt to reconstruct or relive it. Not, I hasten to add, that this is always bad -what we are doing now proves that it is not.
We should respect the past, but not worship it. While we look back upon the four Centennials that lie behind us, we should think also of those that will be celebrated in the years to come. What of 2376, 2476… 2776, a full thousand years after the birth of the Republic? How
will the people of those days 287 remember us? We remember the United States chiefly by Apollo; can we bequeath any comparable achievement to the ages ahead?
There are many problems still to be solved, on all the planets.
Unhappiness, disease-even poverty -still exist. We are still far from
