 What is particularly strange about humans this world?
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. This was the first hope they’d found that the century-long trips between stars in the ponderous shuttles might be ended and he should have been filled with excitement at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report. Scientists there had puzzled over it, reset it and sent it back. GILES SNORTED and turned to the third frame, which showed a group picture of the family in some sort of vehicle, against the background of an alien but attractive world. 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. “Rats don’t have minds that could show any real damage such as the loss of power to rejuvenate. NO SANE man would risk a chance for near eternity against such a relatively short wait. Dubbins was at his side almost at once, with a hand under his arm to guide him toward his suite. After all, there was nothing to worry about; Earth’s doctors could cure anything. He left a year ago to visit a son in the Centauri system. Dubbins’ manners must have carried him back into the past; doctors didn’t go in for home visits now—they preferred to see their patients in the laboratories that housed their offices. Now he’d taken to walking, as so many others had, for even with modern safety measures so strict, there was always a small chance of some accident and nobody had any desire to spend the long future as a cripple.
 People are living for far, far longer than they ever have before.
 They have achieved immortality,  They use telecommunications across planets to stay in contact.  They no longer have the same family values most people do.  People are living for far, far longer than they ever have before.