Amazing Things Can Be Accomplished When People Believe Amazing Things Can Be Accomplished.

The greatest obstacle to humanity becoming a spacefaring civilization is not technological. Randall Carlson identifies it as psychological - the attitude of too many people who hear the vision and respond with why should we go to space when we have so many problems here on Earth. He has heard that objection over and over and describes it plainly - that thinking is mental, emotional, and psychological. It is the ceiling that a subset of humanity places over the ambitions of the rest, and it is the most significant negative force working against the enterprise he has been describing.

The counter Randall offers is not an argument - it is a principle he holds as a genuine belief. When people come together with the conviction that amazing things can be accomplished, amazing things get accomplished. The history of human achievement is the history of people who refused to accept the limitations that others insisted were real. Randall closes with the principle that has guided his own work - reach a little farther than your grasp. Not because success is guaranteed, but because the reach itself is what moves humanity forward. The problems on Earth and the ambition to go beyond it are not in competition. The attitude that treats them as such is the only thing that makes them so.