More than a hundred years ago, French science fiction author Camille Flammarion has envisioned how the world would end in such an aston...
More than a hundred years ago, French science fiction author Camille Flammarion has envisioned how the world would end in such an astonishing detail that it feels like its taken from the script of a blockbuster Hollywood film.
Flammarion's 1894 apocalyptic novel "Omega" eerily resembles that of the 1998 hit end-of-the-world movie "Armageddon" where a big comet is heading towards Earth. Although Bruce Willis saved the world in the movie, the comet in Omega missed the Earth by narrow margin. What makes the novel ahead of its time is how its narrative envisioned our world would be like.
By the year 10,000, human evolution have refined our senses so that we have two new senses, an electric sense and a psychic sense, that will allow us to communicate at a greater distance. Countless million years will pass and the Sun will being to cool off and the Earth will freeze much like the great Ice Age. When we reach that point, the last surviving humans Omegar and Eva have all but accepted their fate. But before they become extinct, they managed to go to Jupiter with the help of a spirit. There they found the rest of humanity living in a utopian state where they are all cleansed and purified.
Flammarion envisioned that the whole solar system will die and eventually the cosmos itself thereby 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."
After the English translation of the Omega was released, the renowned H.G. Wells published his classic "The Time Machine," which coincidentally imagine the last inhabitant on Earth much like what Flammarion wrote in his book. Well's version imagined a future 30 million years ahead of time where the universe is about to end. Not just a writer, Flammarion has a good academic background as an astronomer, a product of the Paris Observatoire.
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