<i>The Victorians' discovery of deep geological time was unsettling.</i><p>To them. Eastern religions already had, and used, words to describe billion- and trillion-year time spans. For example, time spent in even the worst of Buddhism's narakas (hells) is not eternal, but is posited to stretch beyond 10^19 years. Somehow, 10^19 years of agony sounds more frightening than "eternal hell".<p><i>Only one author, Dougal Dixon, thinks it probable that humans will be extinct within a million years.</i><p>Unless humanity evolves dramatically, as a collective, the odds do not favor a million-year lifespan for the species. I don't envision a war or environmental disaster rendering the whole species extinct, but I could see one leading to a genetic bottleneck that opens the species up to disease. Also, fully modern humans are rather like the (now extinct) passenger pigeon in terms of being requiring a huge flock to survive.<p>Personally, I think there will be dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence, and I expect technological progress to continue throughout my entire lifetime, but I tend to doubt that we'll ever reach the Singularity. I think the greatest discovery-- disappointing from a Singularitarian's point of view-- of the 22nd century will be a strong evidential argument, as close as humanly possible to proof, that consciousness is, in part, nonphysical, ruling out the possibility of a full-on Singularity.