The book is broken up into 4 parts.
Only the final part is about the future:

Chap 8: Next 100 years
This chapter was disappointing.
It spent half the chapter talking about global warming, not shedding any new light or offering a different perspective beyond conventional wisdom.

Table 8.1 was the best part of that chapter because it broke the Existential Risk into subcategories.
He took these odds from Toby Ord.
Humanity has a 1 in 6 chance of destroying itself in the next 100 years.
AI poses the greatest risk.

Chap 9: The human lineage
In this chapter, Christian imagines humanity thousands and millions of years in the future.
He spends most of the chapter imagining the year 3000.
He lacks original ideas, but what we describe will sound novel to the reader who spends little time thinking about the future.
He doesn't write about O'Neill Cylinders, even though most futurists think they will house most of humanity in 1000+ years.

Chap 10: The rest of time
Christian observes that the universe was born 1.4 Solar lifetimes ago.
It will continue for at least a trillion solar lifetimes.
So our universe is a newborn.
He talks about the universe's cold death in trillions of years from now.
I learned nothing new, but if you haven't read about such ideas, you will enjoy the summary.

Authors often use the bulk of the book for fluff and save the meat for last.
They could have written an article or a Kindle Single, to sum up their views, but instead, they have a long preamble.

Part II is interesting because it discusses how bacteria, plants, and animals manage the future.

Read a sample on Amazon if you're on the fence.

I hope that's helpful.

This book from historian David Christian is all about thinking about the future. The book is divided into four main parts, with ten chapters, and a total of about 320 pages.

In Part 1 – Thinking About the Future, Christian starts with some ideas about the future and time itself: defining the future, different approaches to thinking about time, causation, determinism, relativity and predictions. In Part 2 – Managing Futures, Christian discusses how different organisms deal with time; adapting to environments and predicting the future. He covers all kinds of biological processes, and organisms big and small; from tiny bacteria to plants and animals.

Part 3 – 'Preparing for Futures' is more focused on humans and how we think about the future. Christian discusses language, cultural differences, and how concepts evolved over different eras. He talks about the roles of conflict, and predicting future events. The last chapter in this section covers modern technologies, probabilities, statistics, weather and the economy. In Part 4 – Imagining Futures, Christian gets more into speculation about what will happen in the future. There are chapters discussing the near future, middle future, and remote future; all the way up to the end of time.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. Christian covers a wide range of subcategories in his analysis of time and the future, and I found every single section to be engaging and thought-provoking. He includes both philosophical musings and precise science, and even a little humor along the way. This is my favorite kind of book, and I will be looking for more from this author ….. in the Future.

David Christian's books are always illuminating, here on how living things shape the future and what it may behold. Of course he will be wrong, like all futurists, but still an interesting read for all of us.