 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. 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. 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.
 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.