 How is it this society can manage such slow communications?
But with the Procyon shuttle arriving yesterday, there was no telling what might turn up. For eighty years now, they’d been sending out the little ships that vanished at greater than the speed of light, equipped with every conceivable device to make them return automatically after taking pictures of wherever they arrived. The little ship apparently had been picked up by accident when it almost collided with a Sirius-local ship. Scientists there had puzzled over it, reset it and sent it back. He had no desire to spend ninety years cooped up with a bunch of callow young emigrants, even in one of the improved Exodus shuttles. The discovery that men could live practically forever had put an end to most family ties; sentiment wore thin in half a century—which wasn’t much time now, though it had once seemed long enough. Earth was becoming a backwater world; no real progress had been made in two centuries; the young men were sent out as soon as their first fifty years of education were finished, and the older men were too conservative for really new thinking. It took two accidents to get the thing back to us—and with a half-light-year miss that delayed it about twenty years before the Procyon shuttle heard its signal. Pre-setting a course may take centuries, if we can ever master it. Even with Sirius expecting the missiles and ready to cooperate.
 People live long enough now where they’ve adapted to the delay.
 People live long enough now where they’ve adapted to the delay.  Everything eventually gets to where it’s going, so they make do.  They work around it. They have the time to wait.  Science is progressing slowly as well, so they can’t rush it anyway.