[ WP ] `` In the end , we left the Earth knowing nothing . ''

Doran stood gazing out the window at immense plains sweeping outwards from his position, running unbroken towards a horizon fifty thousand miles away in a lush, emerald green of tall grasses waving in the wind. Even after being born and raised here on Neptune, this view still had the power to take his breath away. 
 An 18th-generation descendant of original Neptune settlers, Doran's upbringing instilled in him a strong allegiance to both family and to the standards which upheld the society which they lived in. 
 
 Except that lately, say in the last hundred years, a small but growing segment of the population was already rebelling against the very principles which had assured their settler forebears first sustainability, then stability, which strengthened into abundance, confidence and security. And as that surplus deepened and enabled the taming and colonization of vast areas of land, the people built cities, albeit far cleaner than their ancient Earth-bound versions. 
 
 That was all well and good... but it seems that when we finally left Earth, bedraggled and battle-weary, the seeds of Rome came with us, a malignant instinct in our very blood, that no amount of scrutiny or passion could ever displace. Doran had excelled in school, and then later in college, he had shown a keen interest in Terran Studies, fascinated by the motley assortment of peoples and nations on Earth, of competing interests and the blood-soaked battles to gain prominence. 
 
 He remembered one particular *holo-set* which held an interview of one of the original settlers to Neptune so long ago. The man's name was Dave Green, a used car salesman from Omaha, Nebraska. He told of how close we had come to missing our chance to escape... of the population being whittled down viciously to less than one billion worldwide... of the massive furnaces which had been built to incinerate the dead, their ashes unceremoniously dumped into the deepest abandoned mine shafts available. 
 
 Doran recalled how hollow-eyed the man had been, recounting the horrors of latter-day Earth in a deadpan voice that had been burned clean of all emotion or zeal. He once figured, as did his friends, that the majority of settlers had been joyous, vibrant pioneers staking a claim on a new world as a matter of both providence and right... 
 And those individuals *did* make up a full third of the people who journeyed here... but the others, while they had the relief of escaping Earth and its torments, were irrevocably damaged from the harshness of their existence. Still, it was those people who contributed more to the establishment of the laws and traditions which built a foundation for their descendants to thrive upon, than did the raucously exuberant folks. 
 
 And now? Doran mused. Now there were gigantic industrial zones, the largest of which sprawled over an area of a thousand square miles, fed by an open-pit coal mine the size of North America. Forward teams have already been sent to both Saturn and Uranus to launch new *power centers* such as we have here, with plans to develop the staggering energy of Jupiter's wind storms already in the testing stage. 
 And the money being made by such assets is nearly beyond calculation. 
 As Doran turned from the windows and walked back to his office, the words of that long-deceased man from Omaha rang in his mind, haunting him still: 
 
 *'' We were taught in school that the Statue of Liberty was once a beacon to the entire world, a visual symbol of the hope that a place of true freedom existed... a place where one could thrive apart from tyranny and condemnation... where a person could achieve their dreams. Only, in the end, we ironically became slaves to our self-serving dreams, and lost the very freedoms we had laid down our lives to purchase...'' * 

