Timeline of the far future

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

by microtherion • 14 years ago

294 88 14 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

gee_totes• 14 years ago

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

xnxn• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

moocow01• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

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

uvdiv• 14 years ago

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.

benihana• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

“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...

Groxx• 14 years ago

The quote is great, but I wish you had linked to some other article. That sums up as:

  You cannot predict the results of a shuffled deck of cards.
  Similarly, our current universe is impossibly improbable.
  Therefore, God did it.

It's a massive lack of understanding, whether it's right in the end or not.

lukifer2• 14 years ago

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.)

stan_rogers• 14 years ago

Lawrence Krauss's longer talk in Toronto†[1] has a better explanation of the "privileged time" idea (and doesn't invoke string theory except to poke a bit of fun at it).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvWrI_oQjY

† Krauss has given more-or-less the same talk elsewhere, but the version recorded by TVO (the Ontario provincial public broadcaster) is probably the best recording. [Edit: I misremembered the location of the talk. Most of the physics talks on Big Ideas are from the Perimeter Institute; Krauss's wasn't.]

nodemaker• 14 years ago

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

prawn• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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

fdej• 14 years ago

I'll see your Ackermann function, and raise you TREE(3).

Plus one.

lotharbot• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_number#Examples_of_number...

There are numbers and notation schemes there that make Ackermann look pretty insignificant. I'm particularly fond of Conway Chained Arrow Notation for ridiculously large numbers.

josefonseca• 14 years ago

That timeline made me feel very, very small

jpeterson• 14 years ago

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

kghose• 14 years ago

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.

aneth7• 14 years ago

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.

eliben• 14 years ago

Isn't this just a simple matter of probability? Given an event, however unprobable it is, it can happen given infinite time? From a purely mathematical standpoint, this is correct.

majmun3• 14 years ago

Error in Boltzman brains theory is that he assumes that universe with brains randomly fluctuated into existance into its current form , and concludes that this form is more complex than just brain and therefore brains without environments are more common (maybe iPhones or Bible are even more common then), and assumes that brain can exist without environment. also second law of thermodynamics states that resulting entropy would never be decreased. and doesnt tells us about entrophy dynamics in intermediate steps.

jamesjyu• 14 years ago

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

Devilboy• 14 years ago

We are Boltzman brains, no?

paol• 14 years ago

No, I'm a Boltzmann brain. The rest of you are just a figment of my imagination.

Symmetry6• 14 years ago

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

kartman• 14 years ago

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.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

konceptz2• 14 years ago

Sounds like a chronar eclipse.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

Probably a lot of information about the state of the universe just after the Big Bang.

kijin• 14 years ago

> 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.

diminish2• 14 years ago

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

brazzy• 14 years ago

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

spurgu• 14 years ago

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

diminish2• 14 years ago

"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]"

alperakgun• 14 years ago

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

adavies42• 14 years ago

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....)

jberryman• 14 years ago

We better start preparing for Y2KKK92.

munkydung• 14 years ago

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

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

dsirijus• 14 years ago

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.

joering2• 14 years ago

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.

mustafa0x• 14 years ago

We are certain of one, not the other.

obtu2• 14 years ago

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.

krschultz• 14 years ago

Based on what we believe the laws of physics to be, which isn't yet a fully settled question.

acqq• 14 years ago

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/

hogworth2• 14 years ago

>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.

calinet6• 14 years ago

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

Ha, as if it needs our permission.

weavejester• 14 years ago

You're assuming that a future society will have the same interest as we do in conserving physical artifacts. A physical structure like a coastline takes up a lot of space and matter compared to the amount useful information it holds. If we're going to be efficient about it, you could map California down to the nearest micrometer and save the data to some form of very high density storage.

cgh• 14 years ago

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

Syaiful• 14 years ago

Huh bye3

charlieok• 14 years ago

Also: the galaxy song

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

Timeline of the far future

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