{"id":243185,"date":"2026-08-26T01:04:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/the-man-who-saw-humanity-from-two-billion-years-away"},"modified":"2026-08-26T01:04:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:04:15","slug":"the-man-who-saw-humanity-from-two-billion-years-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/the-man-who-saw-humanity-from-two-billion-years-away","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-man-who-saw-humanity-from-two-billion-years-away.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/thereader.mitpress.mit.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/mit_audio\/20741-male.mp3\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, \u201cLast and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,\u201d in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity\u2019s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLast and First Men\u201d eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as \u201can essay in myth creation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the \u201cAnglesey vision\u201d that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had \u201ca sudden fantasy of man\u2019s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, \u201cLast and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,\u201d in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity\u2019s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":715,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/715"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}