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In the winter of 1930, physicists Arthur Eddington the public, many of Britain's book is an amazing dump is the original work of fiction. This is a short novel, the first male-specific name, their commercial success is unexpected is that it is one of the reasons why, because of the absence of a central character, and in fact have no individuality. Most are. Fiction is the scale, has not been understood. Last year, and the first man can be imagined billion year chronicle and the future of human posthuman - History. It is also perhaps the first known example of the author's scientific imagination, the specific contents of the same thing ... "appropriate advanced civilization."           The Will to Live     In the winter of 1930, physicist Arthur Eddington, along with much of Britain's reading public, was captivated by a startlingly original work of fiction. It was a short novel with the peculiar title Last and First Men, and its commercial success was unexpected, among other reasons because it had no central character, and in fact very few individual characters at all. Given the novel's scale, such omissions were understandable. Last and First Men was the imagined chronicle of the next two billion years of human—and posthuman—history. It was also, quite probably, the first instance of an author using known science to imagine in detail something like... a "suitably advanced civilization."   The creator of this curious work was an equally curious man, a forty-four-year-old scholar named W. Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon held no academic post, and his formal training was in philosophy. Yet he was a regular reader of the journal Nature, and his attentiveness to developments in astronomy and evolutionary biology allowed him to imagine in detail a span of time in which not mere civilizations, but whole species calling themselves human, arise—in the process adapting to enormous changes in their environment—and fall.   By the book's final chapter the Sun has grown so hot that the inner Solar System is uninhabitable, and the eighteenth human species (which Stapledon terms the "Eighteenth Men") have colonized the planet Neptune. But before long this haven too comes under threat. Astronomers have learned that the swollen Sun will soon erupt with a violent storm that will sweep through the entire Solar System. From such calamity they have no means of escape; their "ether ships" are incapable of interstellar voyages. So it is proposed that biologists engineer a miniaturized human seed, to be cast into space from strategic points in Neptune's orbit and allowed to be carried outward by the solar wind. Some of this seed, they hope, may one day find hospitable ground on a distant planet, and so accord their species a modest sort of survival.   This plan, however, also meets with difficulties. The prospect of their own demise has instilled a specieswide despair, and the Eighteenth Men cannot summon the will to complete the work. So they undertake a second project—one that will call upon a feature in their rather highly evolved neurophysiology. The Eighteenth Men can intuit spacetime directly. Moreover, by what Stapledon terms "a partial awakening, as it were, into eternity," they have taught themselves to influence past minds in such a way that they can, to some degree, direct their own history. Now, however, they hope only to inhabit those minds long enough to regain their ancestors' passion for life and thereby be invigorated to complete work on the seeding project. It is on this poignant and uncertain note that the novel ends.   Stapledon's vision of a long-lived humanity, appearing at a time when fascism was spreading across Europe, served as a kind of spiritual tonic. Several of Stapledon's contemporaries, inspired by utopian impulses, also attempted to envision a far future. In 1923 the geneticist J.B.S Haldane produced a paper called Daedalus: or, Science and the Future; and in 1929, John Desmond Bernal published a monograph called The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Also about this time, Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was developing his own account of the long unfolding of the material cosmos, an unscientific (albeit quite poetic) description of the long ascendancy of life.   The first half of the twentieth century had seen predictions of the future of humanity; the second half had seen—in a 1977 piece by physicist Jamal Islam—a prediction of the future of the physical universe. It was for a physicist with a philosophical bent to pull these strands together. In 1979, Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study, published "Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe." It proposed a means by which intelligent life might survive not for a mere two billion years, but for a literal eternity.   … "No matter how far we go into the future," [Dyson] wrote, "there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory."             — David Toomey, The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics, Chapter 12 – Time Machines at the Ends of Time                               Indexes/22