"man's hope lies in his intelligence. with it, he has riddled out the secrets of stars and atoms. he has traced the thin thread of causality back form a tremor in an adult's hand to a long-forgotten trauma in childhood. he has mastered the complexities of transfinite algebra and deciphered the histories of unknown men from speechless stones. he has freed himself from the grip of Earth and swims at the shores of the universe. these achievements of the human intellect farther the hope that man will solve whatever message may come from the stars. Perhaps some day earth will be enriched by the profound knowledge of glittering civilizations, and man, in turn, will endow them with the magnificent creations of his Shakespeares and the noble philosophies of his Christs. "
"The discovery that other beings inhabit the same corner of eternity as man, that "they" are out there and 'we" are down here, that life is not only an earthly state of being, that man must now surrender his last claim to uniqueness in the universe, would profoundly affect human thought. At the same time, it would open unimaginable vistas of technological growth that might help men solve the problems of war, disease, hunger. this would require an exchange of information, something beyond the mere hearing of a signal from outer space. "
"To the beings of such a society, our Sun must appear as a likely site for the evolution of a new society. it is highly probable that for a long time they will have been expecting the development of science near the sun. we shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from the sun which would make known to them that a new society has entered the community of intelligence. What sort of channel would it be?"
Then I flipped the front cover, saw that the book was written in 1964, and went "ohhhhhhhh."
No comments:
Post a Comment