Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Burroughs frames “man” not as a finished natural creature but as a manufactured object—an “artifact”—whose proper destiny lies beyond Earth. The tadpole analogy implies that remaining in a fixed biological form is a kind of arrested development: just as a tadpole is meant to metamorphose, humans are meant to transform, potentially through technology, altered consciousness, or evolutionary change. The line also carries Burroughs’s characteristic suspicion of the given “biologic state” as a limiting program that can be rewritten. In this reading, space travel becomes both literal expansion and a metaphor for radical self-modification and escape from terrestrial constraints—social, bodily, and mental.