All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe. - Arthur C. Clarke

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life — a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Then, one day, an unusually tasty dish appeared, which brought back vivid memories of the deer - hunts and barbecues of his youth. However, there was something unfamiliar about both flavour and texture, so Poole asked the obvious question. Anderson merely smiled, but for a few seconds Indra looked as if she was about to be sick. Then she recovered and said: 'You tell him - after we've finished eating.'... 'Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,' Anderson explained. 'Raising animals to - ugh -eat them became economically impossible. I don't know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants... And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques. 'But what finished the whole horrible business was not economics - but disease. It started first with cattle, then spread to other food animals - a kind of virus, I believe, that affected the brain, and caused a particularly nasty death.... Synthetic foods were now far cheaper, and you could get them in any flavour you liked. p.32 -33

Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull.