As one journalist asked at the time: we may "paint optimistic pictures of the future on the hazy horizon of the million years ahead", but what of the potential for mishaps that may extinguish humanity, cancelling our "alluring hopes of progress" and the "world-picture of coming grandeur"? There may indeed be "almost infinite possibilities of betterment", he wrote, but this only deepens the tragedy of lost potential should humanity somehow go prematurely extinct "within the next thousand years, the approaching century, or even on a succeeding day".