history

This comic is a mash-up of ideas gathered from two recent books I've been thinking about. The first is Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, which chronicles the demise of a number of species which humans have driven to extinction and argues that we find ourselves in the midst of what will someday go down in history as the sixth mass extinction to occur on Earth. The second is Naomi Oreskes' The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, which describes the future history of a Chinese historian in the year 2393 looking back at the history of humankind's response to the warning signs we now have regarding climate change. I've cast my eyes a little further ahead in time and gone a little further afield to visit a planetary museum and check out one of our possible futures.