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220 Hopes content, would let us know that it is possible to stabilize a society and have it live for a long time.* Contact with a more advanced society also would suggest that the present state of human development need not be final. We would know that there can be evolution to a higher level; that could motivate us to transcend our condition. Puccetti offered a more modest prospect. It could comfort us to know, or have some scientific foundation for believing, that there are other natural persons in the universe somewhat like us physically, organized into moral communities, and sharing some of our own values.* It will be a moment of joy and pride. The eternal isolation of the spheres is vanquished. mo... m.-- 10705 Contact might bring us into communication with other beings who feel the joy and pain of awareness, who worry about their survival, and who seek answers to many of the questions we ask about the purpose and destiny of intelligent life. Horowitz saw this as the end of our isolation, the first bridge across 4 billion years of independent evolution. This is remarkably similar to Clarke’s comment about spaceflight: “The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation.”® A Mirror Image. Science writer Ian Ridpath suggested a reversal of roles. If no one before has reached “cosmic maturity,” our radio call signs in the future may be the lifeline that pulls other developing civilizations out of the despair of their own isolation.’ The Cyclops report drew an analogy with our own history—implicitly a model of the future, and a hope. The discovery of the New World, the cir- cumnavigation of the Earth, and the development of trade routes to the East brought cultures into contact that had long been isolated. There fol- lowed a period of trade and cultural enrichment in which change and growth were more rapid than in the centuries before.* The authors left out less attractive facts, such as the beginnings of imperialism and colonial exploitation. Tsiolkovskii, who advocated an end to nationalistic thinking, urged people to think of themselves as citizens of the cosmos. He saw this change as necessary preparation from humanity’s joining a cosmic community of intelligent beings. Others put this idea into a more organizational form; Stapledon wrote of an interstellar League (perhaps inspired by the then- existing League of Nations) and of a galactic Society of Worlds.’ A Sense of Community —Charles Cros, 1869°