After the horrible cost of the Great War in human suffering and destruction, George Bernard Shaw was driven to imagine humans who possessed the wisdom to live in peace. During the years 1918-1920, Shaw wrote a series of five plays called Back to Methuselah in which he projected five stages stretching 31,920 years into the future. During this lengthy time men and women are perfected and live on indefinitely until they finally die of a fatal accident. Shaw called the five plays a Metabiological Pentateuch, Pentateuch being a Greek word for five books, originally referring to the first five books of the Bible, or the Hebrew Torah. Humans live on and on, not through natural selection, a concept Shaw disdained, but through the life force, an inherent drive toward perfection in all organisms.
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机译：大战给人类带来的痛苦和破坏的惨痛代价之后，萧伯纳（George Bernard Shaw）被迫想象拥有和平生活的智慧的人类。在1918年至1920年间，邵氏创作了五部剧集，名为《回到玛土撒拉》，其中他计划了五个阶段，这些阶段将延续31,920年。在这段漫长的时间里，男人和女人都处于完美状态，并无限期地生活，直到他们最终死于致命事故。肖称这五部曲是一部《元生物学的五经》，《五经》是希腊语中的五本书，最初指圣经的前五本书，即希伯来律法。邵氏不屑于人类的生存，不是通过自然选择，而是通过生命力，这是所有有机体追求完美的内在动力。
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