“When something becomes obvious to you,” he said, “you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.”

In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which weare special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least-the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. The two times, brought about by the same technology, coincide—a few centuries in the history of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. If you were somehow dropped down on the Earth randomly at any moment in the past (or future), the chance of arriving at this critical moment would be less than 1 in10 million. Our leverage on the future is high just now.