Predicting how the world will end is unthinkable. More than a century ago, most people still thought that the end times is what was wri...
Predicting how the world will end is unthinkable. More than a century ago, most people still thought that the end times is what was written in the Bible. Although popular literature and science fiction during that time has envisioned end times scenario like alien invasion or any form of cataclysm.
Camille Flammarion's novel "Omega" is eerily similar to the 1998 blockbuster Hollywood disaster movie "Armageddon" with a great comet crashing down on Earth. Although, the comet in Omega misses the Earth by itself, it's only then that the narrative heart of the novel begins to pump in earnest. By the 100th century AD, humans have evolved with two new human senses, an electric and a psychic, "by which communication at a distance is possible." After million years or so have passed, the Sun cooled down and the Earth freezes.
Although they had accepted their fate, the last surviving humans Omega and Eva were saved by a spirit who brought them to Jupiter where the rest of humanity are living in cleansed and purified state. The whole solar system eventually dies, followed by the cosmos itself, making way for new universes: "And these universes passed away in their turn. But infinite space remained, peopled with worlds, and stars, and souls, and suns; and time went on forever. For there can be neither end nor beginning."
A year after Omega appeared in English, H.G. Wells published "The Time Machine" wherein he imagined the Earth's last inhabitant, thirty million years hence, to be a monstrous crab moving slowly along a desolate beach, as the universe freezes towards its final moment.
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