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| The Martian surface as viewed by The Mars Curiosity Rover, 2014 (Image credit: NASA/JPL) |
The people of our time are fascinated by the thought of life, especially intelligent life, existing elsewhere in the universe, and we have naturally devoted a considerable amount of effort into looking for traces of it in interstellar radio signals and Martian soils, but it wasn't all that long ago that we had a comparable mystery right here on Earth. Before we became a seafaring species, our ancestors could only look out from impassable shorelines and likewise wonder what mysteries lay beyond. Minds left to wonder about this imagined great sea monsters, cities of gold, and advanced civilizations on lost continents. How they would envy us for living at a time when we know in fantastic detail about what really lies on the other side of those oceans, and how surprised they would be to learn that we're not walking around in constant amazement about what we've discovered.
We may view the great period of naval exploration with some passing historical interest today, but we mostly take it for granted. Perhaps then, even a discovery as enormous as alien life would have the same fate, only raising a shrug from future students once it too became something people learned about from dusty old history books, or whatever future equivalents there might be of history books and dust.
