Saudades do meu amigo Artur...

«There will always be plenty of people who will stay at home and do the jobs their fathers did; without them, civilization would not survive. Yet there must also be those who are never content with things as they are, who will not rest while any new horizons remain uncrossed. It is not safe to keep them at home; in their frustration, they will cause mischief. But let them go, and they will become the great explorers and discoverers, opening up new worlds of mind and matter for those who come after them.
They are the ones who, in the ages now opening before us, will lead the human race out of the nursery in which it has played for long enough. For no healthy society can stand still; a civilization that has no problems, no challenge to try its strength, must eventually stagnate. It may be pleasant for the individual to dream of stability and the end of striving, but when a race seeks such things, its doom its already upon it.
Beyond the atmosphere that challenge awaits. In the closing years of this century, men will go out to meet it and in so doing will change the history of more planets than their own. »

Extract from “The Exploration of the Moon”, first pub. by Frederick Muller, London, 1954.