Neville anticipates a historic space launch the following morning — 'boys' who will blast off toward an object he says is 500,000 miles from earth — as an example of humanity's imagination achieving what once seemed impossible. He compares it to the European discovery and settlement of America roughly four hundred years earlier, and to the harnessing of water for irrigation to make barren land fertile, arguing that man's creative power has no real limit because man is God.