How the Restless Craving for Adventure Helps Humanity Survive
“We were wanderers from the beginning…A few of us cooperating accomplished what many of us, each hunting alone, could not. We depended on one another.
The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky.
In the last 10,000 years, an instant in our long history, we’ve abandoned the nomadic life. For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game, none of them lasts forever. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species might be owed to a restless few drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
These days, there seems to be nowhere left to explore, victims of their very success, the explorers now, pretty much, stay home.
Better places will always call to us…Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet, but those are the worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Silently, they orbit the sun waiting.
Even if the call of the open road is muted in our time, a central element the human future lies far beyond the Earth.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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