science fiction story.76 (Lewis considered it “brilliant, though to my mind depraved.”77) Haldane begins by looking at how the Earth and our sun might come to their natural ends. He soon turns to consider a theme that we will see become increasingly common, how we might destroy the Earth ourselves, imagining an account of the last millennia of human life on Earth as it might be told by a distant descendant living on Venus.78 The premise of this story is that as a consequence of having “ridiculously squandered” tidal power over a period of some five million years, humans have changed the moon’s orbit until it comes so close to Earth that it is pulled apart, in the process making Earth uninhabitable.79
While this result was long predictable, humans “never looked more than a million years ahead” so few were ever concerned with this consequence of using tidal power.80 Instead, in the course of their three-thousand-year-long lives, most people concentrated on “the development of personal relationships” and on “art and music, that is to say, the production of objects, sounds, and patterns of events gratifying to the individual.”81 Natural selection having ceased, the only substantial change to humanity was “the almost complete abolition of the pain sense.”82 Real advances in science came to a halt; rather than try to develop the human race, attention was paid to breeding beautiful flowers.
Having foreseen what was to come, however, a few did what they could to assure the existence of life elsewhere after the anticipated disaster. That is no small task as Haldane paints it; even simple steps like managing to land explorers successfully on the moon, Mars, and Venus takes a couple of million years. The technical difficulties of landing and return are compounded by the disinclination of individualistic humans to give up their long lives on what amount to suicide missions. Those who finally land alive on Mars are destroyed by sentient alien life already established there, as Flammarion might have expected. Those who land on Venus find extremely hostile environmental conditions under which humans cannot possibly survive. Efforts at further exploration are dropped for the time being.
About eight million years later, the approaching moon having disrupted earth’s geology and ecosystems, a minority undertake renewed efforts to colonize Venus. “A few hundred thousand of the human race . . . determined that though men died, man should live forever.”83 By a ten-thousand-year-long effort at selective breeding, humans create a new race that can survive on Venus.84 These colonists are sent out in 1,734 ships; eleven manage to land.85 Such life as Venus already had, inimical to the colonists, is utterly destroyed by bacteria prepared for that purpose. From that point on, the settlement of Venus proceeds apace.
Our Venusian descendants were designed by the small minority of species-minded Earthlings to share a hive mind; they do not suffer from the selfish propensity for seeking individual happiness that led to Earth’s destruction. Two new senses contribute to the hive mind: at every moment they sense “the voice of the community,” and they also have a sort of built-in radio that can be turned on or off at will. They are also genetically predisposed to look to the future more than the past, unlike Earthlings whose strange backward-looking propensities are illustrated not only by their failure to act in the face of their destructive tendencies, but by their religious beliefs. The Venusians’ forward-looking characteristic also makes them more willing to sacrifice themselves.
The net result is that the Venusians see their potential extending far beyond anything humans ever could have accomplished; “we have settled down as members of a super-organism with no limits on its possible progress.”86 They plan to breed a version of themselves that will be able to settle Jupiter. Foreseeing in 250 million years an improved opportunity for interstellar travel, they think they can take it “if by that time the entire matter of the planets of the solar system is under conscious control.”87 Only a few of the millions of projectiles they send out might succeed. The Venusians are undaunted:
But in such a case waste of life is as inevitable as in the seeding of a plant or the discharge of spermatozoa or pollen. Moreover, it is possible that under the conditions of life in the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds. Our galaxy has a probable life of at least eighty million million years. Before that time has elapsed it is our ideal that all the matter in it available for life should be within the power of the heirs of the species whose original home has just been destroyed. If that ideal is even approximately fulfilled, the end of the world which we have just witnessed was an episode of entirely negligible importance. And there are other galaxies.88
In his commentary on his story at the end of “The Last Judgment,” Haldane acknowledges that he is not really trying to predict the future—he is just engaging in an imaginative thought experiment, a “valuable spiritual exercise.”89 The future will certainly not conform to our present ideals, but thinking about it can illuminate “our emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” that presumably is one source of those ideals.90 Traditionally, that attitude has been the province of religion. But modern science has taught us that the universe is far vaster in size and possibilities than religions ever knew, and so it is necessary to start using our imaginations in connection with these new realities. In effect, then, science fiction stands in for religion. The new scale of things we can begin to imagine should call forth a greater ambition among the most creative humans to develop (and for the rest of us to cooperate in) a plan that goes beyond traditional ideas of salvation, such as the assumption that the purpose of creation is to prepare some few for “so much perfection and happiness as is possible for them.”91
We can “only dimly conjecture” what this plan might be, but Haldane wonders whether it might be the “emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter.”92 As we can already envision the end of our own world, some such transformation will be necessary. Only if the human race proves that “its destiny is eternity and infinity, and that the value of the individual is negligible in comparison with that destiny,” will “man and all his works” not “perish eternally.”93
The tension within this edifying conclusion is not hard to spot. In Haldane’s scheme, an eternal and infinite destiny can only be achieved by making man himself into one of the works of man, such that in fact human beings do perish eternally. Furthermore, the imagination of this superior progeny is really an exercise in elucidating all the reasons for which, by and large, we should not be missed. So Haldane’s substitute for religion embodies an “emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” which is predicated on the assumption that whatever human beings do, “man’s little world will end.”94 The real choice is between ending it ourselves and having it ended for us, or perhaps between ending it accidentally and ending it deliberately.
MANKIND REMANUFACTURED
Haldane may have claimed he was not trying to predict the future, but our final author certainly was—and in the process, he lays out a rather specific path toward what he calls “the progress of dehumanization,” integrating many of the themes that our other authors developed.
The Irish-born J. D. Bernal (1901–1971) was, like Haldane and Flammarion, a scientist by training. He is probably best known for the development of the mathematics of X-ray crystallography, which quickly became a key technique of chemical analysis.95 (It was this technique that allowed the double-helix structure of DNA to be discovered, for example.) He did research that helped facilitate the D-Day landings, and made serious contributions to the sociology of science.96 A public intellectual of some note, Bernal was a dedicated communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; in 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, a prominent Soviet prize for the country’s international supporters, and from 1959 to 1965 he was president of the World Peace Council, a Soviet-funded international activist group.97
Bernal’s first popular publication was a thin volume called The World, the Flesh
