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357 Our cooperative efforts may be limited to those who are not millions or billions of years more advanced than we are. We may never know if the most advanced intelligences are engaged in great endeavors; we may never be participants in their work. They may be driven by millennial purpose, employing their knowledge, skills, and power in tasks so vast as to make planet-crawlers seem like short-lived germs; or they might be so weary of immortality, so inward-directed, so resigned to entropy, that they no longer care. We may have the opportunity to join in the triumph of intelligent life, or its tragedy. Soft ideas dismissed by hard science—motivation and morale—may determine the outcome. There is reason for long-term optimism. We may be embedded in a favor- able trend: the growing emergence and spread of intelligent life. We may have entered the period of galactic history when mind asserts itself over mindlessness, when intention is imposed on chance. The Triumph of Mind