This is what Arthur C. Clarke had in mind when he wrote, in the best tradition of aspirational science fiction, about the expansive potential of humanity and of the generations of the far future: They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure the eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions. . . . But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.
