Last and First Men

Listen patiently.

We, who are the last men, earnestly desire to communicate with you.

I am speaking to you now

from a period about two thousand million terrestrial years in your future.

Astronomers have made a startling discovery,

which assigns a speedy end to humankind.

We can help you -

and we need your help.

When your writers romance about the future,

they imagine a progress toward some kind of utopia

where beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss.

No such paradise existed

through the eons that lie between your age and mine.

Instead, we have watched huge fluctuations of joy and woe,

the results of changes not only in humanity's environment,

but also in its fluid nature.

Human existence has been less like a mountain torrent

than a great sluggish river, seldom broken by rapids.

Ages of dormancy, often of stagnation,

filled with monotonous problems and toils of countless almost identical lives,

were punctuated by rare bursts.

Existence has always been precarious.

At any stage of its career, humanity might have been exterminated

by some slight alteration to its chemical environment,

by a more than usually malignant microbe,

by a radical change of climate,

by the manifold effects of its own folly,

Or by some celestial event.

And so it was that humanity detected a volume of non-luminous gas.

Calculation showed that this object and the sun

were approaching one another at a tangent and would collide.

As a result of this, the sun would flare up and expand prodigiously.

Life would be quite impossible on any of the planets

save, perhaps, Neptune.

Some of our predecessors,

realizing that they themselves could never live on the inhospitably remote planet,

advocated an orgiastic celebration of pleasure until the end.

But at length, our earlier species excelled itself

in an almost unanimous resolve to devote its remaining centuries

to the production of a new human species into a new world.

Ten more species succeeded one another on the plains of Neptune.

We, the 18th, are the last men.

If you could enter this world of the last men,

you would find some things familiar

and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse.

You would encounter creatures recognizably human,

yet in your view grotesque.

Some of these fantastic beings you would find covered with fur or mole velvet,

revealing the underlying muscles.

Others display brown, yellow, or ruddy skin,

and yet others a translucent ash-green.

You might call us faun-like, ape-like,

bear-like, or even elephantine.

Yet some characteristics are common to all of us.

The upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown of the skull would shock you.

This organ, when fully extended about a handbreadth from its bony case,

reveals the heavens in as much detail as your astronomical telescopes.

Scattered about the green plains of our colonized planet,

you would notice many buildings.

These buildings would seem like geometrical mountains to you.

In many cases, the whole fabric is translucent or transparent.

So that at night, with internal illumination, it appears as an edifice of light.

Springing from a base twenty or more miles across,

the star-seeking towers attain a height where even the atmosphere is breached.

Some of them are almost as old as our species.

Some are not yet completed.

Every successive culture has expressed itself

in one or more of these supreme monuments.

In their summits work the hosts of our astronomers:

The essential eyes through which our community peers across the boundless ocean of space.

Each of us goes there, at one time or another.

Together, we perform the symbolic acts

which replaced the debased rites of your religions long ago.

Our children are very different beings from the first human children.

Their number in our world is small in relation to our immense population.

Yet, seeing that every one of us is potentially immortal,

you may wonder how we permit ourselves to have any children at all.

Our policy is to produce new individuals of a higher order than ourselves.

As a result, we need a continuous supply of children.

The fetus is carried for twenty years.

Infancy lasts for about a century

when the foundations of body and mind are slowly laid.

When our children attain physical adolescence, nearly a thousand years after birth,

they leave the safe paths of childhood to spend another thousand years

in one of the polar continents known as the land of the young.

There, our young people live the half-primitive, half-sophisticated life

that suits their nature.

They love

and hate.

We live through all the mistakes of thought and action

that humankind has ever made.

And, at last, we emerge ready for a world of maturity.

The designers of our species set out to produce a new order of mentality

in a system of distinct brains held in telepathic unity.

The immense difference between ourselves and all other human species

lies in the group-mind.

When these individuals join in simultaneous mental unity,

the entire past of the species appears as a personal memory.

They are able to enter into past minds.

Away from those contented to remain on the planet's surface are the navigators

who embody humanity's proud mastery of interstellar space.

The navigators mentally form a unique class among us

because they spend so much of their time

in the empty regions beyond the range of telepathic communication.

They are a Hardy, simple, and modest folk.

Recently, an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts through space.

Half the crew had died.

The survivors were emaciated

and mentally unbalanced.

Throughout the voyage, an unexpected alteration