Trivia / Last and First Men

• Science Marches On:
  • For instance, the outer planets (and Neptune especially) are treated like they have a solid surface.
  • Almost every detail of planetology and physics, and many details of natural history, which Stapledon included in the story have been superseded by discoveries in the eight decades and more since he wrote it. The work is still awesome.
  • This also extends to how geology and evolution itself is treated.
  • This also applies to the nuclear chain reaction, one actual feared outcome of nuclear weapons.
  • Stapledon wrote about matter-antimatter annihilation as a power source (before the word "antimatter" had even been coined) but he relied on Dirac's original 1929 theory that the proton was actually the anti-electron. This was known to be incorrect by 1931, and the actual anti-electron, or positron, was discovered in 1932.