Tag Archives: h.g. wells

‘Beyond: Our Future in Space,’ by Chris Impey

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This is a new book about the potential for space colonization.

Its concluding section presents a scattered but sweeping vision for our future in space, and offers more plausible ideas than can be found in whole shelves of futuristic science fiction. Want to construct a lunar base, or mine asteroids for precious resources? Are you looking for alien life in our solar system, or habitable planets around other stars? Impey covers all this and much, much more in a brilliantly brisk series of chapters intended to show how we might someday become not only an interplanetary species but also an interstellar one.

Such a leap would be far more epochal than that of the Apollo moon landings, Impey notes. If Earth were the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the marble-size moon would be only a yard away — and the nearest neighboring star system would be 30,000 miles distant. Though that distance may now seem insurmountable, Impey implores us to consider the possibility of crossing it, even if only to grasp how far we have come since our ancestors spread out of Africa, and how far we still must go in securing a legacy for our distant descendants.

Someday, the sun and Earth will perish, but humanity may have the choice to be “more than a footnote in the history of the Milky Way.” Contemplating this future “and the possibility that we might not exist at all, is as haunting as deep space,” Impey writes.

The book review makes some references to H.G. Wells’ 1902 essay series Anticipations, which I might get around to reading some day.

The Time Machine

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Here’s the epilogue from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1898):

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.