I had forgotten the “dying sun” thing. I looked through my archives and stuff not yet posted and I don’t have anything on it (so far), but I’m sure there must have been some sort of revival of the idea, especially in the fin-de-siecle period.

As I thought about the idea of humans evolving into big-heads, though, I remembered that coelacanths have been around a few hundred million years with little change (not that Wells or anybody in the 19th C. would have known that) — perhaps humans are more like them and less like bacteria (some of which adapt/evolve at frightening speed).

Or perhaps not.

Besides the idea of big-brained, big-eyed, tiny-bodied evolved humans, the source article is an example of the “dying sun” idea, derived from Lord Kelvin’s calculations on the possible energy source of the sun: lacking a theory of atomic energy, calculations gave the sun an extremely short lifespan of a few tens of million years. Given the length of time required to evolve existing humans, the future was not bright in a literal or metaphorical sense. Wells’ evolved humans have retreated to the interior of the earth for shelter against the spreading cold–of course, the most famous example of the Sun going out is that classic of Edwardian weird fiction, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land