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We were wanderers from the beginning.
We knew every stand of tree for a hundred miles.
When the fruits or nuts were ripe, we were there.
We followed the herds in their annual migrations.
We rejoiced in fresh meat.
through stealth, feint, ambush, and main-force assault,
few of us cooperating
accomplished what many of us, each hunting alone, could not.
We depended on one another.
Making it on our own was as ludicrous to imagine
as was settling down.
For 99.9 percent of the time
since our species came to be,
we were hunters and foragers,
wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth
and the ocean and the sky.
In the last ten thousand years
— an instant in our long history —
we've abandoned the nomadic life.
For all its material advantages,
the sedentary life has left us edgy,
unfulfilled.
The open road still softly calls,
like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
We invest far-off places with a certain romance.
This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted
by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.
Long summers,
mild winters,
rich harvests,
plentiful game
none of them lasts forever.
It is beyond our powers to predict the future.
Catastrophic events have a way of
sneaking up on us,
of catching us unaware.
Your own life, or your band's,
or even your species' might be owed to a restless few
drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand,
to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
To the ancient Greeks and Romans,
the known world comprised Europe and
an attenuated Asia and Africa, all surrounded by an impassable
World Ocean.
Travelers might encounter inferior beings called barbarians
or superior beings called gods.
But there were not very many gods, at least at first,
perhaps only a few dozen.
They lived on mountains, under the Earth,
in the sea, or up there in the sky.
They sent messages to people, intervened in human affairs, and
interbred with us.
As time passed,
as the human exploratory capacity hit its stride,
there were surprises:
Barbarians could be fully as clever as Greeks and Romans.
Africa and Asia were larger than anyone had guessed.
The World Ocean was not impassable.
Three new continents existed,
had been settled by Asians in ages past,
and the news had never reached Europe.
Also the gods were disappointingly hard to find.
Since we first emerged, a few million years ago in East Africa,
we have meandered our way around the planet.
There are now people on every continent and the remotest islands,
from pole to pole, from Mount Everest to the Dead Sea,
on the ocean bottoms and even,
occasionally,
in residence 200 miles up
humans, like the gods of old, living in the sky.
These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore,
Victims of their very success
the explorers now pretty much stay home.
Vast migrations of people
— some voluntary, most not —
have shaped the human condition.
More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today
than at any other time in human history.
As the Earth's climate changes in the coming decade.
There are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees.
Better places will always call to us.
Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet.
But the lands we run to now have already been settled.
Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight,
are there before us.
Maybe it's a little early.
Maybe the time is not quite yet.
But those other worlds — promising untold opportunities — beckon.
In the last few decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union
have accomplished something stunning and historic
the close-up examination of all those points of light,
from Mercury to Saturn,
that moved our ancestors to wonder and to science.
Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in 1962,
our machines have flown by, orbited, or landed on more than seventy new worlds.
We have wandered among the wanderers.
We have found vast volcanic eminences that dwarf the highest mountain on Earth;
ancient river valleys on two planets
enigmatically one too cold
and the other too hot for running water;
a giant planet with an interior of liquid metallic hydrogen
into which a thousand Earths would fit;
whole moons that have melted;
a cloud-covered place with an atmosphere of corrosive raids,
where even the high plateaus are above the melting point of lead
ancient surfaces
on which a faithful record of the violent formation of the Solar System is engraved;
refugee ice worlds from the transplutonian depths;
exquisitely patterned ring systems,
marking the subtle harmonies of gravity;
and a world surrounded by clouds
of complex organic molecules
like those that m the earliest history of our planet
led to the origin of life.
Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
We have uncovered wonders undreamt by our ancestors
who first speculated on the nature
of those wandering lights in the night sky.
We have probed the origins of our planet and ourselves.
By discovering what else is possible,
by coming face to face with alternative
fates of worlds more or less like our own,
we have begun to better understand the Earth.
Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive.
but, so far as we know, they are also,
every one of them, desolate and barren.
Out there, there are no "better places."
So far, at least.
During the Viking robotic mission,
beginning in July 1976,
in a certain sense I spent a year on Mars.
I examined the boulders and sand dunes,
the sky red even at high noon,
the ancient river valleys,
the soaring volcanic mountains,
the fierce wind erosion,
the laminated polar terrain,
the two dark potato-shaped moons.
But there was no life
—not a cricket or a blade of grass, or even,
so far as we can tell for sure, a microbe.
Life is a comparative rarity.
You can survey dozens of worlds
and find that on only one of them
does life arise and evolve and persist.
Neptune lies a million times farther from Earth
than New York City is from the banks of the Bug.
But there are no distant relatives,
no humans,
and apparently no life waiting for us on those other worlds.
No letters conveyed by recent émigrés help us to
understand the new land
only digital data transmitted at the speed of light
by unfeeling, precise robot emissaries.
They tell us
that these new worlds are not much like home.
But we continue to search for inhabitants.
We can't help it. Life looks for life.
No one on Earth, not the richest among us,
can afford the passage;
so we can't pick up and leave for Mars or Titan on a whim, or
because we're bored, or out of work, or drafted into the army, or
oppressed,
or because, justly or unjustly, we've been accused of a crime.
There does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit
to motivate private industry.
If we humans ever go to these worlds,
then, it will be because a nation
or a consortium of them
believes it to be to its advantage
or to the advantage of the human species.
Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us
that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds.
Should we solve those problems first?
Or are they a reason for going?
Even if the call of the open road is muted in our time,
a central element of the human future
lies far beyond the Earth.