Space colonization will be a turning point in a way that few other events in history can match. A few million years from now no one will know what social reforms we came up with any more than we know about the dinosaurs. But they will be looking at our footprints on the moon.

Leaving our planet is equivalent to when life grew legs and crawled out of the oceans, or the invention of fire, perhaps the implications are even greater if we learn that the Fermi Paradox is real and we are one of the few to get around it.