The Far Future

The concept of the Earth being swallowed by the sun has been in the back of my mind ever since I found out about its inevitability in primary school. Doing a bit of research; this will occur in around 3.5 billion years. Another strange coincidence occurs at this time; the clash between the Andromeda galaxy and ours. I’ve made a decision to not include exact dates in the final book; but I think it will be useful to have it as a point of reference.

A difficult thought experiment will be imagining what life will be like by then. I think a strong argument can be made for ‘history repeating’. Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ describes how human colonisation follows a familiar path. It starts with curious (sometimes peaceful, sometimes not) explorers followed by an armed takeover (often involving missionaries to convince the populace to abandon the culture of their ancestors and adopt the colonists’). The fact that the initial explorers had the technology to reach the place that was soon to be colonised, meant that they had a superior war machine. This was the same whether it was through the lens of the Spanish colonisation of South America or the Maori colonisations of the islands near New Zealand. 

The appeal of applying the physical laws of science into the mythos of Dead Earth Gods is something I want to infuse into the process. Grappling with this will be hard enough without injecting extra terrestrial life (ie; non-Earth based life) into the mix. Stephen Hawking has said, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” 

Dead Earth Gods revolves around Earth-based life surviving until the sun swallows the Earth, so, like Dune, the mythos will focus on the advancement of human civilisation.

A colleague made a comment to me once which stuck: Technology changes; but human psychology doesn’t. And human psychology doesn’t always work in our favour, especially at an international scale let alone an interplanetary scale. So we’d need to adapt to a form more conducive to surviving the far future.

Which makes sense; if there wasn’t anything resembling a human 65 million years ago at the end of the age of dinosaurs; then the chances of there being any 3.5 billion years into the future would be very unlikely. So what could they be like? In Dead Earth Gods they have become the Aton and the Earthlings.