By dint of laborious calculation it has been
shown that the sun's heat is by slow degrees becoming less and less,
and that some day, long years hence, the sun will no longer give out
the warmth necessary for human existence. Mounting his "time machine,"
Mr. (H. G.) Wells plunges off into the future, and, when he has
journeyed millions of years hence, he finds a slowly freezing world in
which man and beast fail to find the means of subduing the pangs of
hunger or of protecting themselves from the cold. The sun hangs in a
grey sky a pale, weird, ash−coloured ball, incapable of
supplying light and warmth.
Pearson's Magazine (1900) If you live in most parts of the world, the words
"ice age" are the haunting promise of a planet shrouded in a funeral
pall of ice, cities crushed by relentlessly grinding mountains of ice,
and all of human achievement smothered under a blanket of never ending
snow as the populace stare out in numbed horror from their tiny
hovels, like pin-point oases of warmth, at a world in the hand of icy
death. If you live in the American Midwest, it means
it's September. |
