Arthur Dent, from the radio/TV/book and film (sort of) versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was fond of saying: "So this is it. We're going to die."

Want to see if that charming English fatalism has any basis in fact?

More to the point, if you know the meanings of the words anthropocene and paleoecology, you will want to attend the last in a series of novel free public lectures that takes place this week at SFU Harbour Centre (barring any last-minute intergalactic-bypass construction).

If you don’t, you might want to check it out anyway to discover how humanity can hope to survive the next 35 years while adding another two billion people to this blue-green ball.

Simon Fraser University's faculties of science and environment, with the help of the David and Cecilia Ting Endowment Fund, have been presenting a lecture every Thursday evening since January 30 in its series titled Deep Time, Global Change, and You: The Past as a Guide to the Future.

Generally, the intent was to peer into Earth’s back pages to learn from our planet’s history of natural changes in animal and plant populations and the environment and use that knowledge to make sense of ongoing and future ecosystem changes, some of them drastic.

Thus, paleoecology.

The term anthropocene—technically informal but gaining acceptance in the scientific community as a descriptor of the present “geologic” era, starting about 300 years ago with the Industrial Revolution’s carbon-release baby steps—refers to the present “epoch”.

The "Deep Time" in the series title concerns the so-called Eocene epoch of 56 million years ago, about 10 million years after the end of the dinosaurs’ reign, when major warming events turned what we today call the Arctic into a forested paradise.

Using that as a starting point, visiting lecturers and SFU professors have looked at everything from what fossil insects reveal about global biodiversity to how we found out that the biggest earthquakes on the planet have happened—and will happen— right here to a discussion about how extinction is possibly not like diamonds, i.e., forever.

And this Thursday (March 13) brings Prof. Anthony Barnosky up from the University of California, Berkeley, and his curator’s job at the Museum of Paleontology. Barnosky will speak about and discuss “Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century”, otherwise known as stayin’ alive.

The good professor’s focus will be on five “negative trends” that have been cramping our style since the 1950s: climate disruption, increased extinctions, loss of wild ecosystems, pollution of everything we come into contact with, and our exploding population.

To prevent massive global “state shifts” that can have semi-apocalyptic outcomes, we’re going to have to all get along real nice and work together.

But will we? Or can we?

Or will we—as rabid capitalists and believers in sky pixies will undoubtedly agitate for—continue on as we always have, with fingers crossed and whistling past the graveyard while we eat our way down the food chain and grudgingly accept electric cars into our lives?

Barnosky gets underway Thursday at 7 p.m. in Room 1900 at SFU downtown, 515 West Hastings Street. No cost, but reservations are recommended because of limited seating.