Hi Marcia

Primitive peoples - and even some later "civilized" ones - had a Cosmological Horizon that stopped about as far away as their normal territorial range plus a bit more. After that was "Beyond" thus the old stories about white explorers being seen as "ghosts" and the dead returned - because they had literally come from Beyond. Until relatively late Classic times people still imagined a flat world floating on a great ocean wrapped up in a Sky-Dome... beyond that was utterly unknown. Gradually the range of the Cosmic Horizon expanded and receded at an incredible pace - in 400 BC educated people could still imagine the Sky being supported by high mountains, but by 200 BC no one could entertain such ideas and by Ptolemaic times people had measured the Solar System and could see it was at least 10,000 times bigger than the Earth...

Of course by Galileo and Kepler's day the Horizon raced away even quicker. In fact Thomas Digges placed an infinite number of stars in an infinite space by 1576 - before Galileo and Kepler. The Horizon had gone asymptotic. These days we don't expect the dead to return from space - though that was a common idea for a long time too amongst the esotericly minded - and fewer people expect the gods to appear from there too.

Maybe space has become a substitute for transcendence that used to be sought behind a solid Sky, as Raoul says, but I think we just have itchy feet because now more of us know that the Horizon has backed away immensely... we want to get out and look around.