 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. 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. 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. Pre-setting a course may take centuries, if we can ever master it. He left a year ago to visit a son in the Centauri system.
 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.