The world of 2013 is different: We don’t even attempt manned space programs anymore. They are too expensive, and what’s the point? Thank goodness for the plucky little Voyager I probe, which has just left the solar system, 36 years after it was launched, carrying sounds of Earth, including a baby crying, a whale’s song and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

But our sodden political dysfunction is tuning out the cosmos. Among the casualties of this month’s government shutdown were many of the world’s largest radio telescopes, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Turned off because of a lack of funds, they stopped listening for electromagnetic signals from other galaxies and planets. “We’re really at a dead halt,” the observatory’s director, Anthony Beasley, told Science magazine.

The only aggressive space program these days, not surprisingly, is China’s. The Chinese plan to launch this year a lunar rover, called Chang’e 3, that would be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon’s surface in 37 years. The Chinese are planning a manned mission to the moon sometime after 2020 and, subsequently, to Mars. The United States has abandoned that dream.