We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.
“Now if you’re a human being, you probably realize that it’s possible for you to degenerate into a beast; people who don’t acknowledge this have actually degenerated in a different way, have lost a certain amount of self insight. And you can regress into being an ape, if that’s what you really want to do.”
Gene Wolfe