"We of the early twentieth century, and particularly that growing majority of us who have been born since the Origin of Species was written, perceive that man, and all the world of men, is no more than the present phase of a development so great and splendid that beside this vision all the exploits of humanity shrivel in the proportion of castles in the sand. We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime. We turn again toward the future, surely any thought of finality, any millennial settlement, has vanished from our minds. The question what is to come after man is the most persistently fascinating and the most insoluble question in the whole world."

-- Herbert G. Wells, Scientific American, July 1904