Bestselling author of The Revenge of Gaia James Lovelock―the great scientific visionary of our age―presents a radical vision of humanity’s future Now in his 95th year, James Lovelock has been hailed as “the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin” (Independent) and “the most profound scientific thinker of our time” (Literary Review). A Rough Ride to the Future introduces two new Lovelock­ian ideas. The first is that three hundred years ago, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine, he was un­knowingly beginning what Lovelock calls “accelerated evolu­tion,” a process that is bringing about change on our planet roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution.