Space was not prepared to receive us and does not receive us now. To the robots, it is immaterial: we needed to leave the planet, the oceans were swallowing us whole, and so we went. We were given no choice. We are lucky they felt some responsibility for their makers, as clumsy and backward as we are to them. But for us, who built Elysian Fields for our dead, who tore down our forests and burnt the sky to please the living, who made the robots to make us whole—we might have made another choice. We might have burned along with the world, drowned along with the dead.
