the future. Unfortunately, their calculations are wrong as they didn't take into account the size of the asteroid which could cause a Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The asteroid strikes Earth, critically damaging the planetary ecosystem. The Titan team members are presumably the last humans left alive. As the surviving astronauts slowly die of disease and in-fighting, they decide to try to ensure life will continue to survive: they take a flask of bacteria and drop it into a crater filled with liquid water, in the hope that some form of life will develop. The novel's final sequence depicts the final two crew members returned to life through some unspecified alien process on Titan where they died, several billion years in the future. The sun has entered its red giant phase, warming the Saturnian system and aiding the evolution of life, in the form of strange, intelligent beetle-like creatures, on Titan. The astronauts watch as the creatures build a fleet of slow interstellar probes to seed new solar systems before the expanding sun boils off the surface of the moon. Literary significance and criticism The novel's final chapter has been heavily criticised for excessive implausibility, but it can be read as deliberate wishful thinking: it epitomises Baxter's moral that if the human race is to survive indefinitely, it must become more proactive in its approach to space travel, and not resort to shallow militarism or nationalist isolationism. The Titanian beetles represent Baxter's dream of what the human race should be. Conceivably, the final chapter can be read as the dying dream of the astronauts, rather than a realistic evocation of Titan's future. This novel is also considered eerily prescient, with some incidents including the space shuttle Columbia's crash, the election of a far-right president, the rise of anti-intellectualism, and NASA's funding trickling away paralelling real events. Baxter wrote a short story, "Sun God", that features the final sequence of Titan from the point of view of the Titanian beetles. The story was included in the collection Phase Space. Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science The depiction of Titan's surface is speculation based on respectable scientific data that was available in 1997 – in fact the book "Lifting Titan's Veil" notes that Baxter's story paraphrases closely sections of papers by Lorenz on raindrops on Titan and the geomorphology of crater lakes. The Cassini probe's study of Titan, which began in 2005,