Build an extension In 1976, physicist Gerard Kitchen O'Neill published The High Frontier: Human colonies in space, which married NASA-vintage, can-do engineering with growing popular concern about ecological damage. Why are we polluting the Earth when we could move our heavy industry into space? Better still, why not extend the living world beyond its home, by establishing fully functional ecosystems in orbit?



Captured in paint by NASA artist Donald Davis, O'Neill's grandiose vision drew applause and scorn in roughly equal measures. But we've yet to see a better plan to make off-world life more endurable. O'Neill went on to found the Space Studies Institute, a group dedicated to space manufacturing and colonisation.



(Image: Donald Davis/NASA)

Clean up the mess It's all very well leaving for the stars – but what sort of state will we leave our home world? Douglas Trumbull's 1972 film Silent Running darkened O'Neill's vision, sending poorly tended scraps of the natural world into space in a last-ditch attempt at preservation.



More recently, in 2008, the Pixar animated romantic comedy Wall-E stood Silent Running on its head: it sent us all into space, leaving robots to put the planet back in order. (Needless to say, leaving the clear-up to machines causes them to improve, while we devolve into gigantic pampered babies.)



Wall-E's end titles are a cartoon that reruns the human story from start to finish – only this time we're accompanied by wise machines. Technology is the answer to our problems – but only when it's smart enough to understand us.



(Image: courtesy Everett Collection/Rex) Advertisement

Go back to the future Wall-E's remade Earth is a paradise. The British fantasy tradition boasts a long line of wish-fulfilment fantasies which restore "Wild England", after some cataclysm (usually a flood), over the ruins of contemporary suburbia. Sometimes they contain disconcerting surprises. Richard Jefferies's After London or Wild England (1885) is for the most part a medievalist fantasy set in a half-drowned far future, but it tips its hat to Darwin, turning once-domesticated animals into savage, feral forms. Its climax – a voyage by coracle over the potent, toxic ruins of London – sets a very high bar for J. G. Ballard's own post-apocalyptic escapades in The Drowned World (1962).



William Morris followed Jefferies's model in his News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest (1890), marrying socialist political theory and craft skills. His future at once both progressive and nostalgic – and not very different from scenarios discussed today at festivals like Green Man and Uncivilisation.



(Image: William Morris)

Secure the food supply The science fiction writer Harry Harrison was an able and very funny satirist. He was also more than capable of scaring the pants off people. In 1966, his novel Make Room! Make Room! used the then-current US government census figures to imagine what the world might look like after 33 years of unchecked population growth. In 1999, 35 million people live in New York City; life is cheap but food is impossibly expensive. Most people subsist on a diet of Soylent Green, an unappetising though nutritious mulch of soya beans and lentils. (Believe it or not, you can now buy the stuff.)



Upping the ante for the cinema, screenwriter Stanley Greenberg added human corpses to the broth: in Richard Fleischer's 1973 movie Soylent Green (pictured), we're sustaining ourselves by a sort of industrialised cannibalism. The film's no classic, but its opening credits are clever and powerful.



(Image: MGM/The Kobal Collection)

Live fast, die young In Soylent Green, suicide is not just tolerated, it is positively encouraged. Take the next step: what if voluntary euthanasia were enforced? In 1967 William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson cooked up a dystopia in which resources are secured and maintained by altering the human lifespan. This devilish solution to population and resource pressure was Logan's Run though by the time it was filmed, in 1976, nightmare visions of the future had lost some of their angst and were becoming their own, playful kind of entertainment. Michael York (pictured with co-star Jenny Agutter) plays an antiheroic "sandman" charged with enforcing the scheduled deaths of citizens in his chromed and domed, op-art-heavy city. It's as camp as they come, but director Michael Anderson was no dummy, and the meat of the story survives.



(Image: MGM/The Kobal Collection)

Lay down and die Pollute the world enough, and controlling the size or longevity of the human population might no longer be a problem: the difficulty may be how to survive at all. In 1992 the writer P. D. James, best known for her crime fiction, forayed into science fiction with The Children of Men, set in the UK of 2021. An inexplicable pandemic of male sterility has rendered a generation childless – and there is no sign of a cure. The book is complex and political; Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 film Children of Men is simpler, but loses none of the idea's horror and sadness.



For most of us, James's future hardly seems sustainable. But this depends on what you want to sustain. If you lost the humans, would you save the planet? The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded in the early 1990s by Oregon teacher Les Knight, sees no tragedy in our demise.



(Image: Rex/Moviestore Collection)

Dive, dive, dive While the third collaboration between director Kevin Reynolds and film actor Kevin Costner (after Dances With Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of thieves) is the weakest by a mile, Waterworld (1995) has incidental invention in plenty – enough to compensate a little for its Mad Max-inspired script. In a world completely inundated by rising seas, among pirate hordes, floating townships and far too many jet skis, an unnamed "navigator" (Costner) sails a young girl and her guardian across the vast world-ocean to Dryland (actually, the peak of Everest).



The navigator has no use for this promised land. The sea is his home. He is used to it. Adapted to it. Look: he has gills. It's a nice touch: while we root for the landlubbers, we come to realise that the real future of humankind lies in our adapting, like the ancestors of whales and dolphins, to the deep.



(Image: Moviestore Collection/Rex)

Adapt and survive When the narrator in H. G. Wells's 1895 novella The Time Machine arrives in the year 802,701 AD, he's glad, at first, to make the acquaintance of the Eloi – peaceable, childlike human descendants who live in a sort of Edwardian Garden of Eden.



But the Eloi are no conversationalists – indeed, they're simple to the point of idiocy. Underground, however, demonic and mischievous Morlocks – descended, we assume, from more practically minded humans – are waiting for nightfall, and dinner. In the 1960 film of the book, pictured here, the time traveller takes the pastel-clad Eloi to visit their cousins' forbidding lair.



While the class satire is easy to spot, Wells's main interest was Charles Darwin's theory of how species originate and adapt over time. (At the book's end, the narrator confronts humankind's last successor: a kind of crab.) Adaptation will sustain us, the novel suggests, but it will also, eventually, rob us of the very things that made us special.



(Image: The Kobal Collection/MGM)

Get smart, get small Before we all turn into giant red crabs, it may be that we'll adapt into creatures the Earth can more easily sustain. If we're running out of room and running out of stuff, why don't we simply shrink ourselves? This idea is the provocation for The Incredible Shrinking Man, a web project by artist Arne Hendricks, who is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.



The original shrinking man, in Richard Matheson's novel and screenplay, had a hard time of it, evading the pet cat, battling spiders with sewing needles and so on (pictured).



Hendricks's vision of a diminutive human future is much gentler in spirit. Were such accelerated evolutionary change to prove possible, life for shrunken humans would probably mix comfort and peril in about equal measure. Mary Norton's 1952 children's classic The Borrowers might give us a clue how to organise things.



(Image: Rex/Moviestore Collection)