Before Man Goes To The Stars He

This Is Written In The Elder Days As The Earth Rides Close To The Rim Of Eternity, Edging Nearer To The Dying Sun, Into Which Her Two Inner Companions Of The Solar System Have Already Plunged To A Fiery Death. The Twilight Of The Gods Is History; And Our Planet Drifts On And On Into That Oblivion From Which Nothing Escapes, To Which Time Itself May Be Dedicated In The Final Cosmic Reckoning.

If The Means Were Available, We Could Trace Our Ancestry - Yours And Mine - Back To The First Blob Of Life-like Material That Came Into Being On The Planet.

My Reluctance To Use Alien Invasion Is Due To The Feeling That We Are Not Likely To Be Invaded And Taken Over. It Would Seem To Me That By The Time A Race Has Achieved Deep Space Capability It Would Have Matured To A Point Where It Would Have No Thought Of Dominating Another Intelligent Species. Further Than This, There Should Be No Economic Necessity Of Its Doing So. By The Time It Was Able To Go Into Deep Space, It Must Have Arrived At An Energy Source Which Would Not Be Based On Planetary Natural Resources.

I Have Tried At Times To Place Humans In Perspective Against The Vastness Of Universal Time And Space. I Have Been Concerned With Where We, As A Race, May Be Going And What May Be Our Purpose In The Universal Scheme — If We Have A Purpose. In General, I Believe We Do, And Perhaps An Important One.

And Time Itself? Time Was A Never-ending Medium That Stretched Into The Future And The Past - Except There Was No Future And No Past, But An Infinite Number Of Brackets, Extending Either Way, Each Bracket Enclosing Its Single Phase Of The Universe.