If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

Science makes God unnecessary.

Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.

We won't know for a few years.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn’t have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.