Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.

Perhaps no other year before or since 1984 has been awaited with such eager anticipation.

The future is not to be forecast, but created.