We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at least it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries, throbs and thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities, sings in our music and flowers in our art. And when, from that retrospect, we turn again towards the future, surely any thought of finality, any millennial settlement of cultured persons, has vanished from our minds. The fact that man is not final is the great unmanageable disturbing fact that rises upon us in the scientific discovery of the future, and to my mind at any rate the question what is to come after man is the most persistently fascinating and the most insoluble question in the whole world. Of course we have no answer. Such imaginations as we have refuse to rise to the task.
—H. G. Wells, “The Discovery of the Future”, lecture delivered at the Royal Institution in London, 1902, as quoted by Freeman Dyson in Infinite in All Directions
我们经过无数年的回顾，看到了生活在潮间泥泞中挣扎的伟大意志，挣扎着从形状到形状，从权力到权力，爬行，然后自信地行走在陆地上，一代又一代地挣扎着掌握空气，爬行道。在深渊的黑暗中，我们看到它在愤怒和饥饿中重新打开自己，重新塑造自己，我们看到它越来越接近我们，扩展，自我阐述，追求它无情的不可思议的目的，至少它到达我们，它是通过我们的大脑跳动。我们战列中的动脉、悸动和雷鸣，轰鸣着我们的城市，在我们的音乐中歌唱，在我们的艺术中歌唱。从那时起，我们再次转向未来，当然，任何关于终结的想法，任何千禧年的文明人的定居，都已经从我们的脑海中消失了。人不是最终的事实是在未来科学发现中浮现在我们身上的一个巨大的不可控制的令人烦恼的事实，在我看来，不管怎样，人类之后的问题是全世界最持久的迷人和最难解决的问题。当然，我们没有答案。像我们这样拒绝想象的任务。
- H. G. Wells，《未来的发现》，在1902伦敦皇家学会发表的演讲，由戴森无限地引用在四面八方。（谷歌翻译仅供参考）