In H.G. Wells’ dystopian 1895 novel The Time Machine an unnamed Victorian scientist travels to the year 802,701. Instead of finding a flourishing, enlightened human civilisation reaping the cumulative benefits of millennia of economic and intellectual growth, he finds a horror scene. Here, gentle humans called Eloi are now the farmed food for the troglodyte-like Morlocks.
Science writer Henry Gee paints a less horrific but equally worrying picture of humanity’s future in his book The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. Unlike Wells, Gee doesn’t see the human species capable of surviving longer than the next 8000-12,000 years.
