[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things child… - Carl Sagan

Wahana-wahana ini telah mengajarkan kita tentang keajaiban dunia lain, tentang keunikan dan kerapuhan dunia kita sendiri, tentang awal dan akhir. Keduanya memberikan kita akses ke sebagian besar Tata Surya — baik dari segi jangkauan maupun massa. Keduanya adalah wahana pertama yang menjelajahi tempat yang mungkin akan menjadi kampung halaman keturunan kita di masa depan yang jauh.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.

Above the table on which the chattering telefax set was a mirror. In it she saw a woman neither young nor old, neither mother nor daughter. They had been right to keep the truth from her. She was not sufficiently advanced to receive that signal, much less decrypt it. She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.