For the first time we had the assurance that whatever happened to the mother world, our cultural heritage 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 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 early-twentieth-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... 27 76, a full thousand years after the birth of the Republic? How will the people of those days 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 Utopia, and we may never achieve it. But we know that all these
problems can be solved, with the tools that we already possess. No pioneering, no great discoveries, are necessary here. Now that the worst evils of the past have been eliminated, we can look elsewhere, with a clear conscience, for new tasks to challenge the mind and inspire the spirit.
Civilization needs long-range goals. Once, the Solar System provided them, but now we must look
beyond. I am not speaking of manned travel to the stars, which may still lie centuries ahead. What I refer to is the quest for intelligence in the universe, which was begun with such high hopes more than three centuries ago — and has not yet succeeded.
You are all familiar with CYCLOPS, the largest radio telescope on Earth. That was built primarily to
search for evidence of advanced civilizations. It transformed astronomy; but despite many false alarms, it never detected a single intelligent message from the stars. This failure has done much to turn men's minds inward from the greater universe, to concentrate their energies upon the tiny oasis of the Solar System...
Could it be that we are looking in the wrong place? The wrong place, that is, in the enormously wide
spectrum of radiations that travel between the stars.
All our radio telescopes have searched the short waves — centimeters, or at most, meters — in length.
But what of the long and ultralong waves — not only kilometers but even megameters from crest to crest?
Radio waves of frequencies so low that they would sound like musical notes if our ears could detect them.
We know that such waves exist, but we have never been able to study them, here on Earth. They are
blocked, far out in the fringes of the Solar System, by the gale of electrons that blows forever from the Sun. To know what the universe is saying with these vast, slow undulations, we must build radio
telescopes of enormous size, beyond the limits of the Sun's own billion-kilometer-deep ionosphere — that is, at least as far out as the orbit of Saturn. For the first time, this is now possible. For the first time, there are real incentives for doing so...
We tend to judge the universe by our own physical size and our own time scale; it seems natural for
us to work with waves that we could span with our arms, or even with our fingertips. But the cosmos is not built to these dimensions; nor, perhaps, are all the entities that dwell among the stars.
These giant radio waves are more commensurate with the scale of the Milky Way, and their slow