Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter

 

This is the first book in the Manifold trilogy.  Manifold is not one story so long it requires three volumes to hold it.  Rather, it is more like three alternative histories for the same characters.

 

In this variant, Malenfant heads the Bootstrap company, making big cheap rockets to try to get humanity out into space.  But as an intermediary step between remote control probes and spaceships with humans, a genetically-engineered intelligent squid crews the first ship to start asteroid mining.

 

The story branches of to the side with Malenfant getting involved with an eschatology group that juggles figures to predict a catastrophe ending humanity in less than 200 years.  Somehow, the proper way to deal with this is to build a device to receive neutrino-based messages from the future.  (There's a famous "Grandfather Paradox" in discussions of time travel: What happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he fathers any children?  This sounds like a "Grandson Paradox": You're going to die before you have any children, so you use a message from your grandson in the future to tell you how to avoid dying.  But perhaps we're making assumptions here.) 

 

They build the device and get messages indicating humanity does face an extinction event.  They are also directed to check out a near-Earth asteroid, Cruithne, and an artifact there.

 

Thrown into the mix is also a batch of mutant, super-intelligent children on Earth.  This, of course, is stirring the people of the world into a frenzy.  The government rounds them up and gathers them in isolated places.  But that just means the kids can work together.

 

And it seems our spaceship squid is preparing to raise new generations of intelligent squids in space...