"Whence came the soul, whither will it go, how long will it be our mate and comrade? Can we tell its essential nature? When did we get it? Before birth? But then there was no "ourselves". What of it after death?" "Come in my dreams once more and calm my grief, Come in my dreams like mermaids in peace" "I asked them where they came from, what were they doing here, whether they were stellar explorers, whom they were. One of them stared at me, and said: we are... hunters" "Assuming incoming probes are essentially light-sails, it will take them some 75 to 95 years to cover the distance between the a-Centauri system and Sol-3 so that we should expect them to arrive somewhere between 2095 and 2110. If they are light-sails there is no other way for them to reach Sol-3 than to perform a final swing-by maneuver using the a-Centauri System, which is the closest star to Sol."