Traditionally, science fiction with spaceships has been about exploration and escaping Earth. But that escape is a pipe dream. “We experience our actual earthbound future as an incomprehensible betrayal. For humanity to flicker and die on Earth alone — and to leave no trace of itself save its garbage and the geological echo of incomprehensibly vast mass extinction — seems to us like a crime against the specialness of our species (not to mention all the other species we’ve made extinct just to get this far).”