Pale Blue Dot ( PDFDrive.com ) (1)

[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Might a planetary civilization which has survived its adolescence wish to encourage others struggling with their emerging
technologies? Perhaps they would make special efforts to broadcast news of their existence, the triumphant announcement that it's possible to avoid selfannihilation.
Or would they at first be very cautious? Having avoided catastrophes of their own making, perhaps they would fear giving away knowledge of
their existence, lest some other, unknown, aggrandizing civilization out there in the dark is looking for Lebensraum or slavering to put down the potential
competition. That might be a reason for us to explore neighboring star systems, but discreetly.
Maybe they would be silent for another reason: because broadcasting the existence of an advanced civilization might encourage emerging civilizations to do
less than their best efforts to safeguard their future— hoping instead that someone will come out of the dark and save them from themselves.
[§§§§§§§§§§] Cf. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (New York: Random House, 1992).
[***********] Even if we are not in any particular hurry, we may be able by then to make small worlds move faster than we can make spacecraft
move today. If so, our descendants will eventually overtake the two Voyager spacecraft—launched in the remote twentieth century—before they leave the Oort Cloud,
before they make for interstellar space. Perhaps they will retrieve these derelict ships of long ago. Or perhaps they will permit them to sail on.
[†††††††††††] A value that nicely approximates modern estimates of the number of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Most of it may be in "nonbaryonic" matter, not made of our familiar protons and neutrons, and not anti-matter either.
Over 90 percent of the mass of the Universe seems to be in this dark, quintessential, deeply mysterious stuff wholly unknown on Earth. Perhaps we will one
day not only understand it, but also find a use for it.