Arthur C. Clarke

Presently he invented philosophy, and religion. And he peopled the sky, not altogether inaccurately, with gods.

So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborne; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope.

When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers…The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.

Perhaps the Chinese were only trying to shore up their sagging economy, by turning obsolete weapons systems into hard cash, as some observers had suggested. Or perhaps they had discovered methods of warfare so advanced that they no longer had need of such toys; there had been talk of radio hypnosis from satellite transmitters, compulsion viruses, and blackmail by synthetic diseases for which they alone possessed the antidote.

These charming ideas were almost certainly propaganda or pure fantasy, but it was not safe to discount any of them.

They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

Soft light flooded into the chamber; Bowman saw moving shapes silhouetted against the widening entrance. And in that moment, all his memories came back to him, and be knew exactly where he was.

Though he had come back safely from the furthest borders of sleep, and the nearest borders of death, he had been gone only a week. When he left the Hibernaculum, he would not see the cold Saturnian sky; that was more than a year in the future and a billion miles away.

He was still in the trainer at the Houston Space Flight Center under the hot Texas sun.

For a few seconds Moon-Watcher stood uncertainly above his new victim…he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next.

But he would think of something.

Deep Space Monitor 19 had noted something strange — a faint yet unmistakable disturbance rippling across the Solar System…As would Orbiter M 15, circling Mars; and High Inclination Probe 21, climbing slowly above the plane of the ecliptic; and even Artificial Comet 5, heading out into the cold wastes beyond Pluto. As soon as he glanced at his morning report, the Radiation Forecaster at Goddard knew that something strange had passed through during the last twenty-four hours. Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars.

The man-apes had been given their first chance. There would be no second one; the future was, very literally, in their own hands.

Moons waxed and waned; babies were born and sometimes lived; feeble, toothless thirty-year-olds died; the leopard took its toll in the night; the Others threatened daily across the river - and the tribe prospered. In the course of a single year, Moon-Watcher and his companions had changed almost beyond recognition.

A century ago we came to your world and saved you from self-destruction. I do not believe that anyone would deny that fact—but what that self-destruction was, you never guessed.

"All political problems," Karellen had once told Stormgren, "can be solved by the correct application of power"

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely. [...] During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.