30s-40s sci-fi kort historia: tidsresa, i framtiden hundar utvecklas tillsammans med män, den senare har uppnått storhet

"Twilight" , en 1934-roman av John W. Campbell, Jr. , även svaret på den här gamla frågan ; först publicerad under pseudontern Don A. Stuart på Förtrollande historier , november 1934 , tillgängligt på Internetarkiv .

Wikipedia sammanfattning:

The narrator relates his conversation with an oddly dressed man whom he had picked up by the side of the road. The traveler claimed to have been from the year 3059, and to have developed time-travel technology with which he had first traveled 7 million years forward in time. He then overshot on his return trip, landing himself in 1932.

In the future, man has colonized the solar system but is dying out. Human existence is free of difficulty, as all illness and predators have been eliminated, and all work is done by perfect machines. However, almost all other living species have been made extinct by the advancement of man; the oceans are empty of any life-forms altogether, all other mammals, as well as birds, lizards, insects and microbes, have been eradicated and even traditional pets are gone for good. Only some plant-life still exists - and machines who blindly follow orders given by the previous generations of humans. Humans, though highly intelligent, have totally lost their curiosity, drive and much of their knowledge. As a result, they have accomplished nothing new in about two million years. They are, as things then stand, a dying race, which retreats from the outskirts of the solar system back to earth, has abandoned most of the mega-cities (such as "Yawk City" = a megalopolis, stretching from north of Boston to south of Washington DC) and even hardly reproduces anymore. All they are able to do is stare at their remote ancestors' achievements, while comprehending none of them.

But the machines just go on; each of the long-deserted cities keeps running perfectly, as if nothing has changed. Cities, where human foot has not stood for hundreds of thousands of years, are still cared for by the machines, who never stopped supplying the city all its human needs, because no one has ever told them to stop; no human of that time can remember how.

Highly intelligent machines capable of independent thought had previously existed, but were shut off for an unknown reason. No human alive knows of their prior existence any more, aside from the traveller. To try and ensure that there remains something that can strive and evolve on Earth, he orders several of the remaining machines to figure out how to recreate a curious, thinking machine, even if it takes millions of years.

I framtiden blev män starkt utvecklade, hade uppnått storhet och i stort sett toppat. Hundar utvecklades också med dem.

And on all Earth there was only man and the organisms he had protected—the plants he wanted for decoration, and certain ultra-hygienic pets, as long-lived as their masters. Dogs. They must have been remarkable animals. Man was reaching his maturity then, and his animal friend, the friend that had followed him through a thousand millenniums to your day and mine, and another four thousand millenniums to the day of man's early maturity, had grown in intelligence. In an ancient museum—a wonderful place, for they had, perfectly preserved, the body of a great leader of mankind who had died five and a half million years before I saw him—in that museum, deserted then, I saw one of those canines. His skull was nearly as large as mine. They had simple ground machines that dogs could be trained to drive, and they held races in which the dogs drove those machines.

Then man reached his full maturity. It extended over a period of a full million years. So tremendously did he stride ahead, the dog ceased to be a companion. Less and less were they wanted. When the million years had passed, and man's decline began, the dog was gone. It had died out.

Maskiner skapades för att tänka men slogs aldrig på för att utforska universum. Människans befolkning minskade såväl som nyfikenhet. Killen reste sig i tid för att varna människor för att slå på maskinerna.

Inte exakt, men:

I did just one thing before I left that may help. I may even try to go back there sometime. To see, you know.

I said they had machines that could really think? But that someone had stopped them a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them?

I found some records and deciphered them. I started one of the latest and best of them and started it on a great problem. The machine can work on it, not for a thousand years, but for a million, if it must.

I started all five of them actually, and connected them together as the records directed.

They are trying to make a machine with something that man had lost. It sounds rather comical. But stop to think before you laugh. And remember that Earth as I saw it from the ground level of Neva City just before Reo Lantal threw the switch.

[. . . .]

So I brought another machine to life, and set it to a task which, in time to come, it will perform.

I ordered it to make a machine which would have what man had lost. A curious machine.

Om nedgången i den mänskliga befolkningen:

I tried calling different city centers shown on the map. I had quickly learned the system when I examined the central apparatus.

I tried once—twice—thrice—a round dozen times. Yawk City, Lunon City, Paree, Shkago, Singpor, others. I was beginning to feel that there were no more men on all Earth.

[. . . .]

San Frisco and Jacksville wre the only two cities on North America still used. But the machines went on in all the others, because they couldn't stop. They hadn't been ordered to.

[. . . .]

But one child was born in the course of a month in that city of one hundred thousand people. The human race was growing sterile.

Jag tror inte att författaren är så känd.

John W. Campbell? Sic transit gloria mundi.