Reflection

What will we say, when they ask us, "What is the purpose of your civilization?

"What is the purpose of the war, the pollution, the destruction - all the ills which your existence has inflicted? Where in that was the good?"

We will point upwards, I think. We will speak to them of the landing of a Man on the Moon; of landers on Mars; of probes sent beyond even the furthest reaches of our solar system. For they are the things which are not the struggles of a self-centered society, aiming no higher than survival -

they are the works of a people who would become better than they were.