The speaker looks out at the huge scale of the universe and feels both daunted and tender. The poem keeps returning to the line "the scope is daunting," and each time it moves from awe toward a kind of plan. The speaker worries that our lives are too fast, and that the "wavelengths of meaning" we send may stretch and fade until no one in the far future can hear them. Even sound and letters, the poem imagines, could be lost as the universe changes.
Still, the mood turns warm. The speaker says the future people are not meaningless to them, and asks how those people could fail to love us back, since we loved them before they existed. Even the idea that they will be isolated, "like us all," becomes a shared bond. The final lines restate the point plainly, as a direct address to the future: we love you now, before you live. The poem ends as a message in a bottle, hopeful and a little lonely.