 Why is Earth so stunted in comparison to other colonies?
But with the Procyon shuttle arriving yesterday, there was no telling what might turn up. They found it drifting half a light-year out and captured it. 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. Scientists there had puzzled over it, reset it and sent it back. Harry had been born just before Earth passed the drastic birth limitation act and his mother had spoiled him. 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. And even if Exodus ever got the super-light drive working, there was no reason he should give up his work. 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.
 No one is dying, so their priorities don’t lend themselves to progress.
 They don’t have the right kind of technology.  They’re overpopulated and sending off their youngest people.  They don’t receive the same attention.  No one is dying, so their priorities don’t lend themselves to progress.