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344 What is the place of humans in this vastly expanded space? Many con- clude that we are so small and weak as to be inconsequential, and possibly ephemeral. Some scientists seem to be frustrated that their data do not convince everyone of human insignificance.° Others have reacted against the peripheralization of Humankind. We may deserve better. Searching for other civilizations helps us to visualize ourselves in the fourth dimension—time. Contact could bring a Copernican revolution not just in the spatial sense but in the historical sense as well. The moment of contact is unpredictable; it could range from tomorrow to the end of intelligent life on Earth. Our nearest neighbors may be many light-years away—a measure of time as well as distance. In a radio dialogue across interstellar space, the gap between question and answer could be centuries. Thinking about our place in time must include a long future. By focusing attention only on the past and the present, argued Tipler, science has ignored almost all of reality.’ We ourselves will change over time. If the search goes on long enough, Baird foresaw, the definition of humanness may slowly shift to the extent that the organism that initiated the search in the twentieth century may bear little resemblance to the organism that finally tastes success.* A View from the Millennium Harrison proposed a perspective from 1000 years in our own future. Initial contact will be part of history; future human attention will be directed somewhere else. Any difficulties or dislocations that occurred during first contact will be long past. Interacting with other civilizations will be no more unusual than interacting with human colonies that will be sprinkled throughout the solar system and beyond. People will be quite different from today, but human interaction with extraterrestrials will account for only some of those differences.’ The Copernican revolution and its successors have destroyed the chau- vinism of place. The successive demotions of Earth showed us that our planet has no special position in the universe. If we still consider ourselves important, it is not because of our location. The Copernican Time Principle extends that demotion from space to time. The cosmological epoch in which we humans emerged may have no Paradigm Shifts Our Place in Time