If we regard the ages which stretch ahead of us as an unmapped and unexplored country, what I am attempting to do is to survey its frontiers and to get some idea of its extent. The detailed geography of the interior must remain unknown—until we get to it
Four and a half centuries ago, European civilization started expanding into the unknown, in a slow but irresistible explosion fueled by the energies of the Renaissance. After a thousand years of huddling round the Mediterranean, Western man had discovered a new frontier beyond the sea. We know the very day when he found it — and the day when he lost it. The American frontier opened on October 12, 1492; it closed on May 10, 1869, when the last spike was driven in the transcontinental railroad.
In all the long history of man, ours is the first age with no new frontiers on land or sea, and many of our troubles stem from this fact. It is true that, even now, there are vast areas of the Earth still unexploited and even unexplored, but dealing with them will only be a mopping-up operation. Though the oceans will keep us busy for centuries to come, the countdown started even for them, when the bathyscaphe Trieste descended into the ultimate deep of the Marianas Trench.
There are no more undiscovered continents; set out toward any horizon, and on its other side you will find someone already waiting to check your visa and your vaccination certificate.
This loss of the unknown has been a bitter blow to all romantics and adventurers. In the words of Walter Prescott Webb, the historian of the Southwest:
"The end of an age is always touched with sadness... . The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express. For centuries they heard its call, listened to its promise, and bet their lives and fortunes on its outcome. It calls no more... ."
Professor Webb’s lament, I am glad to say, is a few million years premature. Even while he was writing it in the small state of Texas, not a thousand miles to his west the vapor trails above White Sands were pointing to a frontier unimaginably vaster than any that our world has me ever known — the frontier of space.
The road to the stars has been discovered none too soon. Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually. The physical need is obvious—new lands, new resources, new materials. The spiritual need is less apparent, but in the long run it is more important. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance. As the psychologists have shown by their sensory deprivation experiments, a man goes swiftly mad if he is isolated in a silent, darkened room, cut off completely from the external world. What is true of individuals is also true of societies; they too can become insane without sufficient stimulus.
[...]
The space frontier is infinite, beyond all possibility of exhaustion; but the opportunity and the challenge it presents are both totally different from any that we have met in our own world in the past. All the moons and planets of this solar system are strange, hostile places that may never harbor more than a few thousand human inhabitants, who will be at least as carefully handpicked as the population of Los Alamos. The age of mass colonization has gone forever. Space has room for many things, but not for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .” Any statue of liberty on Martian soil will have inscribed upon its base “Give me your nuclear physicists, your chemical engineers, your biologists and mathematicians.” The immigrants of the twenty-first century will have much more in common with those of the seventeenth century than the nineteenth. For the Mayflower, it is worth remembering, was loaded to the scuppers with eggheads.
Psychologically as well as physically, there are no longer any remote places on Earth. When a friend leaves for what was once a far country, even if he has no intention of returning, we cannot feel that same sense of irrevocable separation that saddened our forefathers. We know that he is only hours away by jet liner, and that we merely have to reach for the telephone to hear his voice. And in a very few years, when the satellite communication network is established, we will be able to see friends on the far side of the Earth as easily as we talk to them on the other side of the town. Then the world will shrink no more, for it will have become a
dimensionless point.
But the new stage that is opening up for the human drama will never shrink as the old one has done. We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face to face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints. From a world that has become too small, we are moving out into one that will be forever too large, whose frontiers will recede from us always more swiftly than we can reach out toward them.
Only a few people can be pioneers or discoverers, but everyone who is even half alive occasionally feels the need for adventure and excitement. If you require proof of this, look at the countless horse operas now galloping across the ether [western tv shows and films]. The myth of a West that never was has been created to fill the vacuum in our modern lives, and it fills it well. Sooner or later, — however, one tires of myths (many of us have long since tired of this one) and then it is time to seek new territory. There is a poignant symbolism in the fact that the giant rockets now stand poised on the edge of the Pacific, where the covered wagons halted only two lifetimes ago.
Only creatures of metal and plastic can ever really conquer it, as indeed they have already started to do. The tiny brains of our Prospectors and Rangers barely hint at the mechanical intelligence that will one day be launched at the stars.
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