Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.
Sir Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University and Astronomer Royal. As quoted by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic in an article on the science fiction of J.G.Ballard.