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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
taking place in a neighboring star was observed.
It began to change from white to Violet and increase in brightness.
When the ship returned, the crew flung open the ports
and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd.
These poor human wrecks have shown a phobia of the stars
and of all that is not human.
They dare not go out at night.
They cannot find companionship.
They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life,
a mere defense against reality.
Listen patiently.
The navigators have made a startling discovery.
It is something unprecedented:
A normal star suffering from a fantastic acceleration of its vital process.
We hoped that our sun might prove too distant to be seriously influenced,
but this hope had to be abandoned.
Within thirty thousand years,
life will be impossible anywhere within a vast radius of the sun...
So vast a radius
that it is quite impossible to propel our planet away fast enough to escape.
The discovery of this doom kindled in us unfamiliar emotions.
Outwardly, everyone behaved with perfect Serenity,
but inwardly, every mind was in turmoil
as we faced the sudden destruction of our world.
There was nothing left for us to do
but to crowd as much as possible into our remaining life
and meet our end in the noblest manner.
And there again came upon us
the rare experience of a unified mind among the species.
For a whole year, every individual entered a trance
in which we resolved many ancient mysteries.
And in consequence of this,
we found ourselves faced with two tasks that had not yet been contemplated.
First, we have set about the forlorn task
of disseminating the seeds of a new humanity among the stars.
We have devised minute electromagnetic wave-systems
individually capable of sailing forward toward the most promising regions of the galaxy.
These units are so cunningly interrelated that they combine to form spores of life.
We shall project these particles in immense quantities.
But the chance that any of them will survive to find a suitable environment is small.
It is clear to us that the work will not be completed
until the disintegration of our community has begun.
The second task that occupies us relates to the past.
We need your help.
We have long been able to enter and participate in the experiences of past minds
as passive spectators.
But recently, we have discovered the power of influencing the past.
This may seem to be an impossibility. A past event is what it is.
But, in certain cases, some feature of a past event
may depend on an event in the far future.
In certain rare cases,
mental events far separated in time determine one another directly.
The past can help us learn once again
that supreme achievement of the human spirit:
The loyalty to the forces of life embattled against death.
But what is it that we seek to contribute to the past?
We want to help the past make the best of itself.
We seek to direct the attention of past individuals to truths,
which would otherwise be overlooked.
Those of us who still care for the life of the mind
are tempted to regret that humankind did not choose decent suicide
before the degeneration began.
But this could not be.
The mission we undertook had to be completed.
This is the last office of humanity.
I am speaking to you now
from a period about two thousand million terrestrial years in your future.
It has become very difficult to reach you,
And still more difficult to speak to you.
Some centuries have now passed
since the sun began to show the first symptoms of disintegration:
Namely a slight change of color toward the blue,
followed by a definite increase of brightness and heat.
The deluge of solar radiation has had a disastrous effect on the human organism.
We are the wreckage of our former selves.
The normal power of telepathic communication is now so unreliable
that we have been compelled to fall back upon the archaic practice of vocal symbolism.
Away from the sun's destructive heat,
we are forcing our planet outward from its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral.
But we have not been able to prevent the climate from becoming more and more deadly,
even at the poles where we have migrated.
The intervening regions have all been deserted.
Evaporation of the oceans has thrown the whole atmosphere into tumult.
Now and again, we meet together, the few that prevail,
to hearten ourselves with one another's presence.
We can only sit in silence,
groping for consolation and for strength.
Sometimes, the spoken word flickers between us,
shedding a brief light but little warmth.
But listen patiently.
This is not our last word.
We, the last men, still have something in us left from the time that is past.
The stars have their beginnings and their ends.
For a few moments, somewhere in between,
a few, very few, may support thought.
The universal end comes in due course.
After the end, events unknowable will continue
in a time much longer than that which will have passed since the beginning.
The whole duration of humanity, its evolution and many successive species,
is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.
Looking at the heavens and at the Violet splendor that seeks to destroy us,
we are filled with awe and pity:
Awe for the inconceivable potential of this bright host
And pity for its self-thwarting effort to supplant the universal spirit.
We find ourselves filled, in spite of everything,
with a triumphant love of our fate.
Great are the stars,
And humankind is of no account to them.
But humankind is a fair spirit,
Whom a star conceived
and a star kills.