Watch Telescope, An Awesome Time-Travelling Sci-Fi Short About A Desolate Earth

No one knows what Earth will look like hundreds of years from now, or even if it’ll be habitable. Thank goodness then for science fiction, which has been happy to predict our planet’s demise for some time now, be it from aliens, out-of-control nanotechnology, nuclear annihilation or environmental abuse.

Telescope, a 10-minute short, speculates what lengths a far-future archaeologist might go to in search of answers about Earth’s fate.

The influences on the full production (which you can watch above) are clear. While the creators cite 2001: A Space Odyssey and Moon — among others — as starting points, I can see a bit of Back to the Future in there too, though I don’t remember Marty McFly or Doc Brown having to manually click through each year as they travelled to the past.

According to the video’s description on Vimeo, the year is 2183, though the heads-up display in the clip states 2108. I’m not sure which one to believe… not that it makes much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

[Telescope, via The Awesomer]