Page Content (OCR)
Some of the elder generation of awakened worlds were already facing the immensely difficult problems of travel on the interstellar and not merely the interplanetary scale. This new power changed the whole character of galactic history. Hitherto... the life of the galaxy had been in the main the life of a number of isolated worlds which took no effect upon one another. With the advent of interstellar travel the many distinct themes of the world- biographies gradually merged in an all-embracing drama. —Olaf Stapledon, 1937! Starflight Early fictional depictions of direct contact with extraterrestrials, like those by Lasswitz and Wells, assumed that spacecraft could carry living beings across interplanetary distances. Now we know that such journeys are pos- sible for a civilization at our level of technological development. We already have landed men on Earth’s moon and are planning to transport humans to Mars. We also know that the home planets of alien civilizations, if they exist, are much farther away. Could extraterrestrials traverse interstellar space to our solar system? Much of the public assumes that they could. Mass media science fiction populates visiting starships with intelligent beings, whether they are altru- istic humanoids or slimy reptilians. Most astronomers have been deeply skeptical about direct contact between civilizations across interstellar distances. Von Hoerner, writing in 1962, declared that space travel—even in the most distant future—will be confined completely to our own planetary system. He claimed that a similar conclusion will hold for any other civilization, no matter how advanced it may be.” Astronomer Edward Purcell was even more outspoken, dismissing the idea of interstellar flight as preposterous. “All this stuff about traveling 122 Direct Contact