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History has had its periods of magnificent excess, when vast amounts of human effort were devoted to cultural projects that transcended the necessities of survival and commerce. Obvious examples begin with the construction of the great pyramids. Much later, Europe's cathedrals were the ultimate commitment of society's surplus energy to expressions of the spirit. The explorations of the remote regions of the Earth followed in time as luxuries of civilization that were also adventurous investments. During the last century, technologies of all kinds were obsessively undertaken, with results that have transformed life. Most recently, and for a brief moment fitting onto this logarithmically shrinking temporal series, were the years of the intense involvement of our segment of society in the exploration of space. This endeavor is generally thought of as having things in common with each of those earlier enterprises; it might even be considered as an evolutionary culmination of their entire trend.