
Timeline of the far future - microtherion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
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.

~~~
eliben
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.

~~~
aneth
If your assumption is infinite time and complete entropy, yes it's correct.
It's also why some level of common sense (e.g. Occam's razor) should be
applied before such silliness is seriously proposed. I don't think Boltzmann
assumes infinite time and entropy, just enough for the completely random
emergence of sentient life that thinks (perhaps falsely) that it lives in a
universe populated by similar beings who created iPads from dirt and water.

Does it seem more reasonable that there is infinite time and every possible
state of matter and history exists at some point, or that we simply haven't
figured out the balancing forces of entropy and order?

Infinity is an interesting thought experiment, but it so thoroughly ridiculous
that it should cause us to question our assumptions, not believe in absurdity
conclusions based on faith in mathematics and unproven postulates that got us
there.

We might as well believe the Bible is true. Not only is it less absurd, but
given the infinite theory, there must exist a universe where it is true, and
this could be it (unless it is truly contradictory and impossible even with
infinite states of the universe, which we have no reason to believe.)

~~~
othermaciej
The absurdity heuristic is not a good way to decide what is true. People once
thought that the idea of humans being descended from monkeys was absurd. Or
that the earth going round the sun, rather than vice versa, was absurd.

Occam's razor is more sensible than the absurdity heuristic, but it applies to
the fundamental building blocks of a theory, not to the outputs it predicts.
So it would cut against a hypothetical unknown set of "balancing forces of
entropy and order", since that's an entity not required by our current best
known theories.

~~~
aneth
If a theory implies an absurd outcome, I think it is a reasonable heuristic to
question the theory and it's assumptions. I am not saying absurd implications
indicate the theory is flawed, only that they should cause one to suspect so
and perhaps find a theory that explains reality with less broadly absurd
implications.

------
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 =)

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

Plus one.

~~~
Achshar
Graham's number anyone?

~~~
WildUtah
Meh.

Take however many symbols it takes you to describe your large number. Call the
symbol count N. Then my counterpoint is the Nth busy beaver number. That's a
big number.

~~~
platz
You might as well say 'One plus the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000
characters of English text', if that sort of thing is allowed.

~~~
vecter
Are you alluding to Scott Aaronson's essay on Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
[1]

[1] <http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html>

~~~
platz
Yep!! The point is, if you say 'Take however many symbols it takes you to
describe your large number', that's not well-defined and is fundamentally
ambiguous due to the nature of language.

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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.

~~~
calinet6
> permitting the Sun to destroy the solar system, etc.

Ha, as if it needs our permission.

~~~
hogworth
What will prevent us from removing sufficient matter from the sun to make it
safe?

Remember that we have 100s of millions of years in which to develop the
required technology.

------
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.

------
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.

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

------
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.

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

~~~
obtu
Sure. Quite possibly we'll just see refinements at the edges of what we have
access to (because at most scales, physics is already very accurate) rather
than outright revolutions.

~~~
d0mine
We still know almost nothing about 80% of the matter in the visible universe.
Ordinary matter is less than 5%. Physics has some explaining to do.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy>

------
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!

------
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.

------
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...](http://www.dyeager.org/blog/2008/04/probability-
evolution.html)

~~~
Groxx
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.

