If we can accomplish the integration of the search without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing.

We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

Or perhaps they are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica , some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction.

So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.

Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library