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Timeline of the Far Future
- maxwell 6y agoTimelapse of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- haunter 6y ago>The red supergiant star Antares will likely have exploded in a supernova. The explosion should be easily visible on Earth in daylight How would that look like? Can't imagine it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pavlov 6y agoVenus is visible in daylight but not that easy to find. So maybe the Antares supernova would be like a brighter Venus.
- icegreentea2 6y agoThe wiki links seem to say that they expect the supernova to register at -12.5 apparent magnitude. The sun has an apparent magnitude of -27, and the full moon has an apparent magnitude of -12. So the supernova will first appear as a single dot approximately as bright as a full moon hanging in the sky. I don't know how large the explosion will appear, but the article on the Crab Nebula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054) which was probably observed by Chinese (and other) astronomers in has some descriptions, as well as a simulated image of the skyscape the astonomers may have seen. SN 1054 was estimated to have an apparent magnitude of -6, so like 250 times dimmer than they think Antares will be.
- cletus 6y agoMandatory Isaar Arthur links: - Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars [1] - Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming [2] - Boltzman Brains and the Anthropic Principle [3] [4] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk&t=1080s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk&t=1080s [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ&t=10s [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UfQb_-XAuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UfQb_-XAuY [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrK9EaQRp2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrK9EaQRp2I
- undebuggable 6y agoStill too early to invest in real estate on Lōihi, dammit. Post-glacial rebounds in Scandinavia and Canada are much more promising.
- qwertox 6y agoSomewhat related: "The End of the World", which is an 8-episode podcast which presents some of the ways how the world could come to an end. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-of-the-world-with-josh-clark/id1437682381 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-of-the-world-w...
- moh_maya 6y agoSome of Stephen Baxter's [1] books in the xeelee sequence explore a sci-fi version of this [2]; it's a fascinating ride, if you are interested in thinking of how sci-fi has dealt with this.. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter_(author) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter_(author) [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel)
- zantana 6y agoMade me think of the Dancers at the End of Time books, although they're more philosophical than sci-fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancers_at_the_End_of_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancers_at_the_End_of_Time
- standardUser 6y agoThere is a lot of awful naming throughout the scientific community, but "Milky Way" has long been my personal least favorite. '...the Andromeda Galaxy will have collided with the Milky Way, which will thereafter merge to form a galaxy dubbed "Milkomeda"' Now it's my second least favorite.
- dredmorbius 6y agohttps://www.etymonline.com/word/galaxy#etymonline_v_1225 https://www.etymonline.com/word/galaxy#etymonline_v_1225
- 627467 6y agoMaybe you'll prefer the original (dead-language) Latin version: Via Lactea. Sounds cooler to me, maybe because it's a Dead language name.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoSounds like how the Ancients in StarGate series would call it.
- darkvertex 6y agoIncidentally that is exactly what we call it in Spanish. Fun tangential fact: "Star Wars" in Spanish is known as "Galaxy Wars" (La Guerra de Las Galaxias.)
- cheerlessbog 6y agoWell "Andro-milk" sounds like a muscle supplement..
- Sharlin 6y ago"Galaxy" and "lactation" share etymology. Funny, isn't it? …and it's not like the scientific community even existed when Milky Way was named like that in English.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThe most mind-bending parts are those that occur beyond Heat Death.
- nabla9 6y agoRoger Penrose has really mind-bending observation and theory about the time past heat death in the 'Cycles of Time'. After 10e100 years when there is only massless particles like photon's left and black holes have evaporated, time essentially stops existing. Photons, gluons and gravitons just go without any new events to infinity.
- seiferteric 6y agoAlso listened to this and was mind-blown. But my take away was that at this point photons can then "make it to infinity" which sort of meant they will get through to (or cause?) the next big bang. Maybe all the photons combine and cause the big bang? One thing I didn't understand was that he said this meant that signals could make it through to the next iteration of the universe. However my understanding was that all photons are scattered by the surface of last scattering (CMBR), so how could this be possible?
- Robotbeat 6y agoSpontaneous entropy decrease that leads to Big Bangs at least every 10^10^10^56 years. Well after heat death and "final" energy state of the Universe. 10^10^10^56 years sounds like a long time, but it's way smaller than infinity... Imagine Graham's number, which is still finite and thus much smaller than infinity... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number
- eternauta3k 6y agoCan't those photons scatter off each other? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics Similarly for the other bosons, they can probably scatter off each other, mediated by virtual particle-antiparticle pairs.
- at_a_remove 6y agoI have often thought about what it would be like in the far, far future. After the age of baryons comes to an end, we would also see an end to structure: you cannot build anything out of leptons larger than a positron and electron orbiting one another, delicately, at a distance. No chains, no three-way bonds or glorious carbon four-way bonds, just a froth of electrons, positrons, and variously-flavred neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. If the Big Rip were to happen, one might imagine civilizations forming around the event horizons of black holes ("dead stars still burn") fizzing out Hawking radiation, getting ever closer to avoid the Big Rip, a controlled fall designed to balance against the stretching of space while harvesting what you could get from Hawking radiation. I've seen projections, sketches, really, of computation that involved states only changing as energy became free, and so these civilizations would be almost frozen in amber to outsiders but ticking along from their vantage point, up until the black holes' "temperature" drops too far below the ambient themal bath. The decay gets faster and faster as the curvature of the event horizon increases, so that civilization's end would have an incredible speedup right before the black hole itself evaporated.
- qubex 6y agoThe last bit you mention reminded me a lot of The Physics of Immortality (Frank J. Tipler, 1994) which I first read in when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. This was before it had been proven that the cosmological constant existed and was positive, so he was musing about how a quantum computer instantiated in the final moments of a Big Crunch would have asymptotically infinite processing power and could simulate everybody who ever lived (and everybody who didn’t actually live, but could have, too).
- eternauta3k 6y agoAn electron-positron bound system decays in under a nanosecond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positronium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positronium
- at_a_remove 6y ago"Delicately."
- caiobegotti 6y agoSome events have a 5k years period between them but the first one "far" in the future is 10k years from now. I wonder though, are there any imminent or very likely event to happen between today and the next 5k years? I mean, that would fall in the categories listed there...
- undebuggable 6y agoFor Europe that would certainly be post-glacial rebound. Gulf of Bothnia cut off from the Baltic Sea, and England slowly sinking (many people would have strong opinions about it, I guess). Netherlands and Venice are a league on their own with sea flooding problems. Then pale skin and blonde/red hairs evolved when humans started to reclaim land after withdrawal of glacier in the same region of Europe, so 5k-10k years is sufficient for a new appearance feature in humans to evolve.
- RivieraKid 6y agoRelated ideas that seem kind of obvious but haven't seen them mentioned anywhere yet: 1. We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history. The rate of progress has never been so high, one notable example of why this period is special and unprecedented is that it's the first time humans or any species has visited the Moon. It's quite a mind-blowing coincidence. 2. Human history will probably look like a sigmoid curve - long period of stagnation followed by rapid progress followed by a long period of stagnation. We were born into a very short period of something like 1000 years with the highest rate of progress. After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations). The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time. You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Has there been any debate about how this long period of equilibrium could look like?
- jbay808 6y agoThis is the optimistic scenario! There's no shortage of reasons why there might not be humans at all in 300,000 AD.
- Nux 6y ago"You can't invent", AI might.
- whatshisface 6y ago>You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Or can you?
- qubex 6y agoI don’t know what about “200 year period” is particularly exciting. For us humans, maybe... but the 4.5 billion year time-span suggests you’re taking a wider view. From the planet’s point of view there’s just a mass extinction going on whilst the anthropogenic climate change gets into full swing. It’s neither exciting nor unprecedented.
- DenisM 6y agoThere was an artistic video about the far-future timeline, part of it was post-humans first jumping form star to star, then making new stars from hydrogen, then splitting stars into small stars to conserve hydrogen, then sitting out the rest of their existence around one last decaying star. Anyone remembers that video? Wish I could find it now.
- Donald 6y agoHeat death is also the central plot of Asimov's short story, "the last question": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
- tim333 6y agoI came across that just yesterday funnily enough through Scott Adams going on about a podcast featuring it. (American Red Pilled, Let there be light)
- pzumk 6y agoI haven’t watched them again now to check if it’s one of them you’re searching for, but these two videos have been posted everywhere last year: [1] https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA [2] https://youtu.be/SUelbSa-OkA https://youtu.be/SUelbSa-OkA
- radihuq 6y ago+1 for that first video
- rafaele 6y agoA prediction for 1.1 billion years in the future: > The Sun's luminosity has risen by 10%, causing Earth's surface temperatures to reach an average of c. 320 K (47 °C; 116 °F). The atmosphere will become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans.[65][70] This would cause plate tectonics to stop completely, if not already stopped before this time.[71] Would somebody be able to ELI5 the connection the Earth's average temperature and plate tectonics?
- noneeeed 6y agoNot a geologist, but I rember reading something about this a while back, so this might be BS. I believe it's because the water being pulled down at the subduction zones (where one plate gets forced down under another) help lubricate the whole process. I think that without that water I think the mantel becomes too stiff.
- arithma 6y agoAre there similar predictions but on a short time scale. Like from now until 10,000 AD? Culture, technology, and geology (and hey, everything else, biology, astronomy..) I find it hard to try and see what the future may hold, and it seems that is the case since we're at an event horizon of human culture change. Talks of singularity already having come upon us is relevant in terms of predictability to a certain extent, but I kind of feel comfortable to say that humanity will indeed stabilize in at most 5k years, since we're already hitting marginal returns in technology investments. There might be two more singularities that can unlock more unpredictability: AI and biology.
- baxtr 6y agoI was always looking for some “realistic” SciFi for the next let’s say 500-1000 yrs. I couldn’t find anything that didn’t include some stuff that was clearly coming out of the Fantasy domain
- reanimated 6y agoWell, 120 years ago moon landing was from fantasy domain too :)
- baxtr 6y agoFair enough :)
- Trasmatta 6y agoThere's this, but it only goes to 2280: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_near_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_near_future
- tim333 6y agoAI overtaking humans and maybe some kind of merging with that is bound to be a big change. Bit hard to see beyond that.
- mke 6y agothank you for this wonderful rabbit hole into Boltzmann Brains! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- davidw 6y agoMakes cleaning the garage seem a bit futile.
- RobertoG 6y agocertainly, why bother? :-) In the same vein there was a joke that goes something like this: A professor is giving a lecture and he says: -"In 4 billion years Andromeda will collide with our galaxy". Somebody in the audience stand up and says: -"Excuse me! did you say 4 billion or 4 million?" -"Four billion" -"Dude... you worried me there for a moment.."
- FillardMillmore 6y agoLooking at the future of humanity section: > 10,000 - If globalization trends lead to panmixia, human genetic variation will no longer be regionalized, as the effective population size will equal the actual population size > 10,000 - Humanity has a 95% probability of being extinct by this date, according to Brandon Carter's formulation of the controversial Doomsday argument, which argues that half of the humans who will ever have lived have probably already been born. So in 10,000 years we're either all going to look the same or we'll all be dead? Yikes.
- Green_man 6y ago"no longer be regionalized" implies greater but not absolute homogeneity to me. There will likely still be variation, but it won't be associated to different countries or continents as it is now.
- stephenr 6y agoSo, a slim chance racism will cease to exist.
- GeneralMayhem 6y agoThose aren't (and aren't implied by the article to be) the only two options. Globalization could recede (or at least not progress); the Doomsday argument could be totally wrong (it's logically sound, but based on some strange statistical assumptions); or we could colonize other planets to a point that would both inoculate us against most extinction scenarios and create isolated genepools, just to name a few others.
- baxtr 6y agoFun fact: this link has already been submitted 27x on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22Timeline%20of%20the%20Far%20Future%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- ganstyles 6y agoI thought I had seen this posted here before. Regardless I re-read the entire thing every time it is posted.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoMe too. And every time I get to oceans boiling out I get somewhat depressed and worried for my children. No kidding.
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoReminds me of how the Graphing Calculator Story has been submitted around a similar number of times. I don’t mind it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Graphing%20calculator%20story%E2%80%9D&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- dang 6y agoBest to fish for the nontrivial threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E4%20%22Timeline%20of%20the%20Far%20Future%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- slg 6y ago>50,000 years - The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds due to lunar tides decelerating the Earth's rotation. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second. I guess we have another annoying clock problem to work on once we get done fixing the Y2038 and Y10k bugs.
- viach 6y agoSo, GWT 3 won't happen ever. OK.
- henearkr 6y agoI love this kind of long term timeline. One science-fiction author writing about far futures is Stephen Baxter.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoBtw, what I don't get about black holes: why is everyone so fixed on the event horizon and calls everything below 'a singularity'? From our point of view, of course, we don't have much use for it. But inside it might be rather interesting. For one thing, everything under the event horizon is unlikely to be homogenous. Captured matter is likely to form a much less object in the center of the hole, with a much smaller radius. Between EH and this 'core' many things can happen. For example, if matter forms N accretion disk spinning around the hole and just above the EH, why should it stop doing the same thing after it goes below? Only because we no longer can see it doesn't mean it stops existing and loses all energy and angular momentum. Or it does?
- pdonis 6y ago> why is everyone so fixed on the event horizon and calls everything below 'a singularity'? They don't. The event horizon is at r = 2M. The singularity is at r = 0. There is an interior region in between, so the singularity is not "everything below" the horizon, and I'm not aware of any reputable source that says it is. > why should it stop doing the same thing after it goes below? It's not that infalling matter will suddenly change its behavior as it crosses the horizon: it won't. It's that infalling matter has very little time once it crosses the horizon, before it hits the singularity. For example, in a 1 solar mass black hole, it's only 10 microseconds from the horizon to the singularity. Since the time is linear in the mass of the hole, that means that for, say, the 3 million solar mass hole at the center of the Milky Way, it's only 30 million microseconds, or 30 seconds, from the horizon to the singularity. And even for the most massive hole we've observed, 66 billion solar masses, it's only 660 billion microseconds, or 660,000 seconds, or less than 8 days, from the horizon to the singularity. On a cosmic scale these times are very, very short. > it doesn't mean it stops existing and loses all energy and angular momentum. Or it does? Any energy and angular momentum of matter falling into the hole gets added to the hole's mass and angular momentum.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago> It's that infalling matter has very little time once it crosses the horizon, before it hits the singularity. For example, in a 1 solar mass black hole, it's only 10 microseconds from the horizon to the singularity. Why should it be hitting the singularity at all? Why can't particles have a stable orbit just under the event horizon? Is it because the orbit speed would exceed the speed of light? > The singularity is at r = 0. Also, why singularity at all? Neutron stars compress to a certain density and then stop compacting any further. Of course, gravity in black holes is stronger, but why people think that all matter would compact into a singularity? Can't it be a very dense object where compacting force is compensated by matter density limit? (i don't know the exact term in english, sorry)