Two futures are open to the human race. An engineer sets out the evidence for both, and argues that only one of them is survivable.
Humanity's own future is the oldest open question there is, and the one most often answered badly. George Klenowski takes it as an engineering problem.
The book sets out rational laws for modern physics, describes the universe as current observation finds it, and traces life on Earth through the extinction events that have repeatedly reset it. From there it turns to the near term: population growth the planet cannot carry, warming and glaciation that arrive on a cycle, and the technological and social changes that would let the species outlast both.
Its conclusion is not a prediction. Prophecy here means the set of futures the evidence still permits — and the argument that only one of them ends with human beings still in it. Some of what follows is provocative, and the author says so. It is offered to any reader willing to think at the scale the problem actually has.
One case, built across eight steps, each depending on the one before it.
A set of rational laws, stated plainly, for how matter, space and time behave.
What the universe is now, as observation describes it rather than as convention repeats it.
How life arrived, diversified, and was cut back to almost nothing, more than once.
Neither is a one-off event. Both recur, and the record shows roughly when.
The arithmetic of human numbers against finite resources, and what follows if it is left alone.
The social and technological changes the species would have to make, and the order they have to come in.
Why travel beyond the solar system is treated here as a requirement rather than an ambition.
Two endings. The book closes on the case that the choice between them is still open.
The earlier statement of the case. Matter, space, time and the solar system, the mass extinctions that keep interrupting life on Earth, and the population control, genetic engineering, energy and space travel that Klenowski holds are required if human beings are to continue.
For review copies, rights enquiries, interviews and speaking, write to George directly. He answers his own email.