This Timeline of Great Science Fiction Forecasts the Future Until 802,701

Good news, everybody! The world will still be here long after the flora and fauna our bodies compost have repeated the cycle a few million more times. At least according to our best science fiction writers, who, let’s acknowledge, have yet to be proven wrong about anything.

Inspired by a Brainpickings chart of events as predicted by famous novels, Italian Information Designer Giorgia Lupi created her own graph of the future as based on science fiction works from authors like Charlie J. Anders, Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

Giorgia explains this graphs to Brainpickings:

The visualization is built on a main horizontal axis depicting a distorted time-line of events (in fact we put them regularly, in sequence), starting our future-timeline in 2012. The y-axis is dedicated to the year the novel / book foretelling the event was published.

Events were split into scientific, social, political, and technological categories as well as being sorted by their book’s genre. Sweet for whatever form of life is still reproducing in the year 802,701 — a year that, to be entirely frank, has existed only in the imagination of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, waaaaaay out in front of the next-closest predicted future, the year 3961. Orcs, Morlocks, CHUDs, whatever. I’m not sure what kind of world will exist, but something will be here. Thus it is written, thus it is foretold.