Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
not." Earth set itself grimly to meet them with corrosive fire, determined to blast them back to the stars. But they erred in thinking hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully into its field. "Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud the Old Ones were too big to be clever. the ship had decelerated. "He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the Quest He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?" "Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question. Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are." cylinder had been engines and fuel but as the immense stores were spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was little more than a hollow shell. he met them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've sighted Earth." A feverish buzz arose He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years." we left, the world we knew and fitted in...." The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't returned successful, or if they returned at all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been forgotten altogether." Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either. He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the in interstellar flight while years and decades had raced by on the home world. the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony. "Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time. "It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the Quest ships will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream, humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...." that system, too, is devoid of planets. "We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we may complete our search without finding even one new Earth. "It makes no difference, of course we cannot betray the plan.... one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids, or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the twentieth century. "Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was in sight—so we launched the Quests . Perhaps our effort will prove as futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport very many people to other stars but Earth could at least go into its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward, expanding limitlessly into the Universe.... "Hopeless, unless we find planets!" Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away.... "Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the could achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory. "That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other Quests , to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from overpopulation. "Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be forgotten back there? ... for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able to alter that. He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have been done. The but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity. To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge, his father. "If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite would have felt nothing at all of the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities, The Quest III bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left if there had been come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn apart. Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy they had explored, but one of the other Quests might have encountered and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to conquer. space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight hours." "We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully. "If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first." "We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you continue toward Earth." Quest III's ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow human? " The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are

<question>:
What would have happened if the Centaurus Expedition hadn’t failed?

<options>:
A People from Earth would have colonized the Procyon system.
B Captain Llud would have become a hero.
C The other two Quest ships would have been launched.
D Humanity would have died out.

<answer>:

A