Dodge everything else and you're still faced with the fact that time catches us all in the end.  So it goes with the Earth.  Sure, you might avoid all the other potential disasters and catastrophes, but the world still has a sell by date and its get older and colder, the Sun burns more and more hydrogen, and entropy in general wears down mountains as well as men.  Sooner or later is all just dies like a ninety year-old man with a bad heart and a lifetime unlimited free bordello pass.

H. G. Wells was aware of this when he wrote his first science fiction novel, The Time Machine in 1895.  When his anonymous hero travelled 800,000 years into the future he found that civilisation had been and gone and that mankind had split into two species.  The middle class had become a race of diminutive lotus eaters called Eloi with all the personal incentive of a cabbage and the working class had degenerated into Morlocks, subterranean cannibals who bred and fed upon the Eloi.

Escaping from the Morlocks, our hero then travelled millions of years into the future until he found the Earth a dead planet.  It had long ceased to rotate and showed the same face to the Sun, which had grown swollen and cold as it burned itself out.  Even the oceans were evaporating and the only life were lethargic squid-like things that floated upon the waters.  The Eons had taken their toll.  The long history of the Earth had come to a sullen end.

And my dry cleaning was still not ready.

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