Out of Their Minds by Clifford D. Simak

have made a valid prediction that they were about to happen. It would not have made good sense for an observer, a half billion years ago, to have predicted that in a few more million years life forms would leave the water and live upon the land. It would have seemed, as a matter of fact, a most unlikely thing, well-nigh impossible. For life forms as they were then constructed, needed the water; they could live nowhere else but in the water. And the land of that day, sterile and barren, must have seemed as incredibly hostile to life as space seems to us today.
    Life forms, half a billion years ago, were small. Smallness then must have seemed as much a part of life as water. No observer in that day could possibly have imagined the monster dinosaurs of later ages, or the modern whale. Such size the observer would have thought to be impossible. Flying he would not have thought of at all; it would have been a concept which would not have crossed his mind. And even if, by some remote chance, it had, he would have seen no way for it to happen, or no reason for it.
    So while we can look back, after the fact, and sense the validity and the rightness of all evolutionary progress, there seems no way in which it can be predicted.
    The question of what may come after man is a thought which has arisen at times, although largely as a matter of idle speculation. There is a reluctance, I would imagine, for anyone to think too seriously of it. Most people would believe, if they thought of it at all, that it is a question which lies so far in the future that it is senseless for one to give it consideration. The primates have been around only eighty million years or so, perhaps somewhat less than that; man for only two or three million, even at the most optimistic calculation. So, measured against the trilobites and dinosaurs, the primates have many millions of years still left before they become extinct or before they lose their position of dominance upon the earth.
    Also there may be a reluctance to admit, even by the thinking of it, that man ever will become extinct. Some men (by no means all of them) can reconcile themselves to the realization that they, personally, some day will die. A man can imagine the world with himself no longer in it; it is far more difficult to imagine an earth with no humans left. We shy away, with some strange inner fear, from the death of the species. We know, intellectually, if not emotionally, that some day we, as members of the human race, will cease to exist; it is difficult to think, however, that the human race itself is not immortal and eternal. We can say that man is the only species which has developed the means by which he can bring about his own extinction. But while we may say this, we do not, in our hearts, believe it.
    What little serious speculation there has been about this subject has not really been about it at all. There seems to be a mental block which prevents consideration of it. We almost never speculate upon what might supersede man; what we do is to conjure up a future superman—inhuman in many ways, perhaps, but still a man. Alienated from us in a mental and intellectual sense, but still, biologically, a man. Even here, in this kind of speculation, we perpetuate the stubborn belief that man will go on forever and forever.
    This, of course, is wrong. Unless the evolutionary process, in bringing forth the human race, has reached a dead end, there will be something more than man. History would seem to say that the evolutionary process has not reached a dead end. Through the ages there has been evidence that the principle of evolution is never at a loss to produce new life forms or to introduce new survival values. There is no reason to believe, on present evidence, that in man the evolutionary process has used up all its bag of tricks.
    So there will be something after man, something other than man. Not just an extension or modification of man, but something entirely different. We ask, in