Worlds, like people or snowflakes - all unique. Yet all form within certain spectra and parameters, just like a snowflake. Understanding and the accumulation of knowledge is an eternal process. If humanity makes it to a billion years (earth time) and explores large chunks of this galaxy, or even hundreds of galaxies and maps millions of worlds, discovers life and sentient life in all sorts of shapes and composed of elements never imagined feasible - it still will only have the tiniest fraction of understanding about the universe in its totality.

This rather obvious observation should make the duality of our universe stand out. That knowledge, like a glass of water, is always half-full and half empty. The vast accumulated scientific knowledge we have in our books and which we live by and use to shape our world, is a fleeting shadow. It is bound to be replaced, in totality, by greater truths, more accurate science. And this process will keep going on long after man has voyaged between galaxies.

Another realization is that perhaps man, like the rest of the animal kingdom, has a finite place in the evolutionary scheme. Just like tigers will not build spacecraft and explore Jupiter, perhaps man was not meant to travel outside our world, solar system or galaxy until man evolves into something else. And before you think that's a horrible mindset to hold, let's examine the premise further.

Look at mankind in totality.

How many care a whit about space exploration? How many really desire to live on other worlds? How many bother to even learn anything about space or the planets in our system?

The percentages are dismal.

Man, generally, is a sentient beast whose eyes are cast down to the ground. He is easily placated with carnal desires and these desires are constantly exploited. Man exploits mankind. Man is a carnivore - but he will exploit and destroy his own kind to further his own survival.

So space exploration succumbs to mankind's base nature. It offers no immediate gratification. The needs of the mind, for humanity, have never held a candle to the needs of the body. Humanity's children are trained to worship at the altar of celebrity, pleasure and financial accumulation. An education, as is consistently taught to these children, has value in procuring them financial rewards in their future.

So man is a slave. A slave of his lusts. A slave to other men and their shallow societies. How strang is it that in these circumstances, science and space wither and are only exploited to create new pleasures and reap financial gains. To expect this slave to have the "right stuff" to make it outside the solar system, much less outside the galaxy, is on the face of it an absurdity. At least until man evolves into something else. Something more intellectual and less animal.

Those who pursue science and space exploration are the tip of humanity's evolutionary curve. They are outnumbered 1,000,000:1 by the rest of humanity who look only to placate their animal instincts - reproduction, comfort and survival.

Mankind and humanity, as they evolve, will replace and augment the lower lusts with higher ones. The pleasures and survival of mankind's next evolutionary generation will not be possible without constantly quenching their hunger for knowledge and mental growth, the way they currently hunger for food, sex, money or love.