Timeline of the far future

[kghose]

Even more "mind shivering" than this one was a linked article about Boltzman brains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain) which I had never heard of before.

[jamesjyu]

Thanks for sending me down hours of engrossed reading in which I constantly question the nature of my existence.

[kartman]

Fascinating, wonder if this can be generalized to - for any local state that has observably occured, its subset will likely occur some where in the universe.

[Symmetry]

The idea of Boltzman brains is a good reason to hope that the universe ends with a big crunch.

[aneth]

What's more likely: nearly infinite sentient universes complete with false memories of human experiences emerging from entropic chaos, or that we don't quite understand the nature of entropy?

The Boltzmann theory is one of those thought experiments that should draw into question it's assumptions out of the pure absurdity of its logical conclusions rather than be taken seriously itself.

[Devilboy]

We are Boltzman brains, no?

[prawn]

"10^{10^{26}} is 1 followed by 10^26 (100 septillion) zeroes. Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that they would be the same in whichever conventional units one could list them in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans."

All you people who've been saving your OMGs for something a bit more ridiculous than an inane celebrity reaction, now could be the time to use one...

[scarmig]

If you want to go for big numbers, check out the Ackermann function. It quickly makes 10^10^26 hard to distinguish from nothing =)

[moocow01]

I wonder what this list would have looked like if put together 10, 20, 50, 100 or a 1000 years ago. I also wonder what people a 1000 years from now would think of this one.

[kristopolous]

Probably something like "Based on the antiquity models of Physics, the ancients thought the following" and then the school children will all have a good laugh.

[acqq]

It's estimated that by 500,000 years from now on the Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter.

http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/geol204/impacts.htm

Here are the results of current attempts to track the objects that can potentially impact the Earth:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/

[hogworth]

>by 500,000 years from now on the Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter

Nah. Let's be optimistic. Within a few decades we will have developed the ability to deflect all dangerous asteroids.

Also, the idea in the article that we will allow the historically priceless Californian coast to disappear 100,000 centuries from now is preposterous. Our ability to alter geography has increased by orders of magnitude in the last century alone thanks to the development of earth moving machinery.

Ditto permitting the Sun to destroy the solar system, etc.

[diminish]

"At 15:30:08 UTC on Sun, 04 December 292,277,026,596 AD, the Unix time stamp will exceed the largest value that can be held in a signed 64-bit integer.[84]"

[jberryman]

We better start preparing for Y2KKK92.

[adavies42]

i like that they give a precise time and date, given that the Gregorian calendar is basically meaningless on such scales. (also neither the earth nor the sun will still be around in any recognizable form....)

[alperakgun]

that seems to be one true Armageddon among all in the list.

[Natsu]

I find it interesting how several of the events limit what anyone living then can observe about the past. It's almost as if the past itself is vanishing.

[tybris]

I always wonder what obvious truth about the universe we fail to see because of just such an event in our past.

[albertzeyer]

You might also be interested in this (with much more): http://www.futuretimeline.net/

[uvdiv]

It's a nice concept, although I'd more interested if it were written by someone who knew what they were talking (enough not to be proposing things like which blatantly violate conversation of energy, i.e. "antimatter power plants"), and who didn't structure their predictions in the form of a narrative exposition of Malthusianism.

[kijin]

> 600 million : As weathering of Earth's surfaces increases with the Sun's luminosity, carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere decrease. By this time, they will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants which utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of species) will die.

Interesting. We should save up our fossil fuels and burn them all at once in 600 million years to save the trees!

But in all likelihood, a lot of new fossil fuels will have formed by then.

[josefonseca]

That timeline made me feel very, very small

[cgh]

Well, after reading that article, I now have 20+ tabs open in my browser. Goodbye, day.

[Syaiful]

Huh bye3

[joering2]

aint that funny how we paint future in such a dark colors (since sun will die in 5 billion years) and assume we all gonna die with it at the end, but yet we don't put humans evolution taken into consideration. "in 600 million years plants will die" -- seriously now? look when we have been 1,000 or even 100 years ago. think when we will be in next 1,000, given nuclear war will not push us back to the stone age. otherwise, in 600 million years we as humans will be able to scan entire universe and find perfect new home and teleport ourselves all plants and everything out there. think this is sci-fi? go back in time to 1900 and tell someone in 100 years you will have a palm size device of grapefruit weight that can gather information literally from air, play sounds, show motion picture, and you can interact with it by touching its colorful screen.

[obtu]

We've done things that seem like magic to some hunter-gatherer; that doesn't imply everything that seems like magic to us will come true. (does anyone have a catchy name for this fallacy?)

The boundary between things we know to be possible and impossible is in fact stronger now, because (for most of the events in this timeline) we're now basing this knowledge on the laws of physics.

Sidebar: future events that derive solely from thermodynamics don't really have a get-out-of-jail card; deflecting some of the others would require us to meaningfully harness much larger amounts of energy at the scholar system scale, bootstrapping that sort of thing would require multiple jumps of a few orders of magnitude which might be solvable as an engineering problem, but is economically dicey when we're already squandering the fossil fuel dividend on our current, unsustainable needs. That is to say, please solve politics or economics before dreaming of magitech.

[mustafa0x]

We are certain of one, not the other.

[munkydung]

This is not a list of future events. It's Roland Emmerich's list of ideas for his next project.

[josscrowcroft]

Clearly everybody missed this little gem which will no doubt be removed:

"7 May 2012 at 16:45 - Andy Murdoch creates a post on twitter referencing this page. Universe invites celebration by all."

[timothya]

Looks like that change was live for a total of 3 minutes.

[dsirijus]

If I learned anything at college, it is highly likely that things will unravel in a completely different way than it is anticipated by anyone and predicted by any system.

[charlieok]

Also: the galaxy song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

[diminish]

Betelgeuse red giant supernova explosion, can it hurt the life on the earth?

[spurgu]

I would really want to be around when it blows up. Stasis pods please!

[brazzy]

According to Wikipedia, Betelgeuse is at least 500 light years distant, while a supernova would have to be closer than 100 to be dangerous.

[gee_totes]

Why are the events at the far end of the scale dated to pi^foo-power years?

[xnxn]

The pi symbol is an icon denoting that the event was determined by mathematical principles. It's not part of the "years from now" value. See the legend above the TOC.

[notJim]

Note that it's actually a symbol from the legend, not the base of the exponent. The base of all the exponents is 10.

[jpeterson]

Amazing. I'd like to see a similar one going backward in time.

[benihana]

Our entire perspective on existence is based on where we popped up on the cosmological timeline. If we'd come along earlier, we may not have been able to perceive the expansion of the universe, and the apparent disconnect between the hard limit of the speed of light, and the size of the universe. If we'd come along later, we may have figured that we were completely alone in a static sphere, with no observable matter outside our galaxy.

I also find it fascinating that if we had come along a few thousand years earlier or later, our entire history would have been completely different. How effective would we have been as travelers if the north start didn't exist for us as guidepost in the northern hemisphere? So much of our existence is based on lucky chance.

[js2]

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

http://www.dyeager.org/blog/2008/04/probability-evolution.ht...

[lukifer]

What's really spooky is thinking about the things which we would have been able to observe if we had been around much earlier. Perhaps seeming constants have changed over the history of the universe, or other universes which drifted away from us along now-imperceptible dimensions. (I'm guessing you saw the same Brian Greene TED talk I did.)

[nodemaker]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle