Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 20

“We can hope to survive in a world bristling with hydrogen bombs for a few centuries, if we are lucky,” Freeman Dyson has written. “But I believe we have small chance of surviving ten thousand years if we stay stuck to this planet. We are too many eggs in too small a basket.

“The emigration into distant parts of the solar system of a substantial number of people would make our species as a whole invulnerable. A nuclear holocaust on Earth would still be an unspeakable tragedy, and might still wipe out ninety-nine percent of our numbers. But the one percent who had dispersed themselves could not be wiped out simultaneously by any man-made catastrophe, and they would remain to carry on the promise of our destiny.

“This vision of comet-hopping emigrants, streaming onward like the covered wagons on the Santa Fe Trail, is perhaps absurdly romantic or fanciful. Maybe it will never happen the way I imagine it. But I am convinced that something more or less along these lines will ultimately happen. Space is huge enough, so that somewhere in its vastness there will always be a place for rebels and outlaws. Near to the sun, space will belong to big governments and computerized industries. Outside, the open frontier will beckon as it has beckoned before, to persecuted minorities escaping from oppression, to religious fanatics escaping from their neighbors, to recalcitrant teen-agers escaping from their parents, to lovers of solitude escaping from crowds. Perhaps most important of all for man’s future, there will be groups of people setting out to find a place where they can be free from prying eyes, free to experiment with the creation of radically new types of human beings, surpassing us in mental capacities as we surpass the apes.”