BY RIGO TESORO

STAFF WRITER

Another five hundred years pass. We have now entered the realm of Timeline of the far future – Wikipedia. (It started 401 years ago.) Human society will be less and less feasible to predict. By now the gravitational pull of the Moon will have made the Earth spin slower enough that a day is a thirtieth of a second longer. Also, Polaris isn’t the North Star anymore, since it no longer aligns with the North Pole.

Five thousand years pass. A bunch of stuff humans have made specifically to last long probably just deteriorated beyond repair, which is kind of funny, I guess. Humanity has almost certainly gotten to other star systems, but depending on what the laws of physics actually allow, relative to what you may expect, disappointingly little progress may have been made.

Another five thousand years pass and finally something else happens relatively for certain. Some theories state that the human race may have either gone extinct or annihilated its own technological civilization by now, but the interesting part is that both Betelgeuse and Antares may have gone supernova. The explosions will be visible to the naked eye in daylight from Earth. Also, the Earth’s axis of rotation will have spun around a full 180°, and the seasons will be backwards because of that.

Five thousand more years pass. The Sahara Desert may or may not be a tropical rainforest, for the second time ever in recorded human history.

Ten thousand years pass. The Chernobyl Exclusion zone finally has normal radiation levels again. (At least, assuming something else didn’t happen. To be honest, I wouldn’t bet on it.) The Arecibo message⁴ (sent in 1974) was just received. (School WiFi doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?)

A bit more than five thousand more years pass. Windows just forgot what the date is.⁵ (Assuming they don’t fundamentally change how the system stores numbers, the system time just became too large of a number to be properly stored in memory.)

A bit less than five thousand years pass. (No, I’m not gonna actually do the math to see how much that is.) The satellite Pioneer 10 passed within a few lightyears of a different star a while ago. (It’s probably long gone from there now, unless it somehow ended up in orbit.)

Another ten thousand years later. Both Voyager satellites have also passed within a few lightyears of stars other than the Sun. Sadly, neither of them are still operational to make observations about them. (Probably.) Again, they’re probably long gone, unless they started orbiting.

Five thousand years pass. All greenhouse gasses released anytime at all near when you’re reading this have disappeared from the atmosphere, which is nice. Of course, that doesn’t mean more greenhouse gasses haven’t been piled back in later on.

Fifty thousand more years pass. (They were surprisingly uneventful, actually.) It’s now a hundred thousand years or so in the future. You look up at the night sky and notice that you can’t recognize any constellations because the stars have moved. Also, it literally took this long for North American earthworms to return to their natural habitat after a glaciation event that ended 20,000 years BCE. (Seriously.) This is also about the earliest point at which Mars could have finished terraforming, if literally all we did was just plant a bunch of normal trees and do nothing else.

Two hundred thousand years pass. (Less and less things are happening per unit time that I can be at all certain about, but bear with me. We’ll just speed up proportionally anyway.⁶) The radiation from the plutonium stored away in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is probably not lethal now. (Very reassuring, I know.) On the other hand, New Mexico might not be. (It’s anyone’s guess whether or not there’s still a place called New Mexico.) The programming language JavaScript just forgot what date it is like Windows did. A whole bunch of programs just crashed, in the event that they’re still running. (Like, I’m not trying to imply that software engineers are lazy enough that things would still rely on programs that are literally three hundred thousand years old, but I’m absolutely trying to imply that software engineers are lazy enough that things would still rely on programs that are literally three hundred thousand years old.)

TO BE CONTINUED…

… Ok, give it a second, it’s gonna load eventually.

…

…Oh, the JavaScript crashed.

Yeah, someone should really fix that.

TO BE CONTINUED …EVENTUALLY

Footnotes for nerds:

0 Whenever I have to convert from years to days (or seconds or something along those lines) for some sort of statistic, I always use a value of 365.2425 days per year, to align with the average year length in the Gregorian calendar. (The Gregorian calendar is the main calendar system the world has adopted that isn’t connected with a particular religion, and is probably the one you know the current date in. Most likely, it’s the main or only calendar you know how to use.) The reason it’s 365.2425 days and not just 365 is because every fourth year is a leap year, unless it’s a multiple of 100, except for multiples of 400. That is, every 400 years, there are 100 – 3 = 97 leap years. Hence, any randomly chosen year has a 97/400 chance of being a leap year, so the average year length is 365 x (400-97)/400 + 366 x 97/400 = 365.2425 days.

4 The Arecibo message was a radio transmission sent out in 1974 towards the globular cluster (basically a mini-galaxy) Messier 13. It was meant to provide a brief description of humanity to any aliens in Messier 13 who might intercept it. For some perspective relative to your local school WiFi, the message was 1,679 bits long, so the upload speed for the Arecibo message will be about 0.0000000000000021 Mbps. (A typical upload rate on an actually half-decent network in the US is about 20 Mbps. On actual school WiFi, I couldn’t get the speedtest page to even load, so I can’t tell you what exactly that amounts to.)

5 Since Windows is a 64-bit system, it stores numbers as strings of 64 bits. Each bit can be one of two possibilities (0 or 1), so since there are 64 of them there are 2⁶⁴ separate possibilities. Hence, each number stored can have any one of 2⁶⁴ values. The simplest way numbers are stored is storing them as an “integer”. Basically what happens there is that nothing happens. Whatever binary number you put in, you get the exact value of that number out. Hence, whichever of the 2⁶⁴ possibilities you choose, you just get that value. That means the highest value that can be stored in that format is 2⁶⁴-1 (since the lowest-valued possibility is 0, not 1). Thus, after 2⁶⁴-1 ticks of the system clock, the amount of time elapsed since the start can no longer be stored properly in this number format. Subsequently, Windows can no longer properly understand what time or date it is. (For reference, the start is January 1st, 1601. It takes until September 14th of the year 30828 CE, at 2:48 in the morning plus 5.4775807 seconds. Yes, that’s unreasonably precise. No, I don’t care. That’s the resolution at which Windows measures time (seriously), so all Windows systems will stop being able to do so at precisely the same time down to that resolution.)

6 If we speed up at a rate proportional to that at which the rate of events is slowing down, there isn’t any noticeable net effect on how much wait time happens between each event, since the slowing event rate and our manual speeding up will cancel each other out.

Image Credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

BY RIGO TESORO

STAFF WRITER

“Here” is currently in the classroom on the second floor in the southmost corner of the school building. We’re starting on October 4, 2023.

One day passes. I’m gonna assume you’re immortal, for reasons that will be relevant later. (Look, I know that’s not a good sign, but bear with me.)

I’m using position relative to the Earth’s surface, so you might be a bit hungry but you’re still in your seat, not thousands of miles to its left.

Another day passes. Not much happens, though you’ve sat through about 8 English classes now.

Read more: What if you stayed in this exact spot forever?— Episode 1

Let’s skip forward a bit. A month passes. It’s snowing now. You might have noticed that the sun doesn’t rise as high in the sky anymore.

A year passes. You no longer recognize anyone in the room, except maybe the teacher and a few chance acquaintances.

2 more years pass. The room’s been revamped 3 times now.

5 years pass. Same old. If this is a history classroom now, you might be a bit disoriented by their study of the COVID-19 pandemic in the past tense.

A decade passes. The building has been remodeled. There’s a Building E now where Horton Orthodontics used to be. (They moved closer to East Ridge High School.)

Another decade passes. The children in the classroom are now a generation younger than you.

Fifty years pass. This place may be a dense city by now, as urban areas expand into the countryside to accommodate the human population on Earth of by now tens of billions. Humans have probably gone to Mars, but it’s a toss-up whether or not any sort of permanent base was established on Mars or the Moon. Either way, an entirely unmanned mining operation has probably started up in the asteroid belt¹.

A century passes. The year is 2201 CE. The building’s been demolished and replaced with a residential skyscraper. If not for that you would be floating three or four inches or something² above the floor by now due to the building settling into the soil. There are probably no areas left on Earth whose ecosystem has not been drastically affected by human activity. Which is actually fine, since by now the majority of the ecosystem isn’t on Earth in the first place. Most likely neither the Moon nor Mars has been full-on terraformed, but there are people living there, and there are almost certainly expansive zoos and arboretums.

Another century passes. The English language you hear spoken is noticeably different from when we started on this journey (or rather, exceptional lack thereof). No matter whether you’ve kept up with slang or not, it’s begun to change fundamentally. You might find it amusing when people use words ultimately derived from memes or internet vocabulary, but they don’t understand what’s funny about it. “Based,” “yapping,” and maybe “stonks” (among other words, of course) have entered generic and maybe even formal discourse.

A third century passes. If global warming had progressed at the same rate it would have with no effort to stop it, living beings on Earth as we know it would largely cease to be able to exist about now. But it hasn’t, and the planet is still definitely habitable. Notably, the population of Earthly humans may actually have started to decrease, as travel between bodies in the Solar System gets cheaper and more people leave the incredibly overcrowded planet Earth.

At this point we enter the realm of pure speculation, so things get a lot less precise. Five hundred years pass. It is now 2901 CE. Humanity has probably achieved interstellar travel. Most likely it uses either wormholes or some sort of spacetime warp drive. Yes, I know both of those sound like super clichéd Star Trek stuff, but according to human scientific knowledge at the time of this writing these are legitimately the most feasible options. (Almost certainly the advance that allows interstellar travel on feasible timescales would not be in the engine, because even going at 99% of lightspeed it would take multiple years to get to just the current nearest star, let alone one we actually might want to go to. There would have to be some sort of spacetime warping shenanigans³ in order to get the ship to move faster than lightspeed.) Whether or not we have achieved first contact with an alien race is a coin toss, but if we have we’ve been very careful about it.

But what happens then, of course, is not exactly up to you or me to decide.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Footnotes for nerds:

0. Whenever I have to convert from years to days (or seconds or something along those lines) for some sort of statistic, I always use a value of 365.2425 days per year, to align with the average year length in the Gregorian calendar. (The Gregorian calendar is the main calendar system the world has adopted that isn’t connected with a particular religion, and is probably the one you know the current date in. Most likely, it’s the main or only calendar you know how to use.) The reason it’s 365.2425 days and not just 365 is because every fourth year is a leap year, unless it’s a multiple of 100, except for multiples of 400. That is, every 400 years, there are 100 – 3 = 97 leap years. Hence, any randomly chosen year has a 97/400 chance of being a leap year, so the average year length is 365 x (400-97)/400 + 366 x 97/400 = 365.2425 days.

1. It’s pretty difficult to get anything off the Earth in the first place, but once you have, it’s not that hard to get it somewhere. Since it’s an unmanned mission anyway, you wouldn’t need it to bring anything more than is necessary to mine stuff, or perhaps go back home on its own. And there is a lot of metal out there to mine in the asteroid belt. (Like, trillions of dollars’ worth.) Therefore, by sheer corporate greed, it’s gotta happen eventually.

2. Since Minnesota isn’t a location that has very much building or land subsidence risk to begin with, there is not very much data that has actually been collected of it, rather than of high-risk areas like parts of China. The only data I could find about Minnesota in particular is that most of it, including the land the building sits on, subsides by at most 1.3 millimeters a year. Some areas in Minnesota subside faster, but not where the building is. Given that, I’ll use a somewhat conservative estimate of 0.6 millimeters per year of subsidence (the only data I could find doesn’t distinguish between 0 to 1.3 millimeters, so I have to guess). At that rate, it would have sunk by 4.025 inches by 2201 CE. (For reference, at the maximum rate that would fit the data, it would sink by 9.110 inches. In theory, at the absolute minimum it could just not move at all, but that’s not really how land nor buildings on land work.)

3. The most common stereotypical warp drive design is what is known as an Alcubierre drive. Basically what happens is that spacetime is stretched out behind the ship and scrunched up in front of it, which effectively pushes the ship forward. As the ship moves, the areas stretched and squished follow. Since what’s really moving is actually spacetime itself and not the ship that’s sitting in it, and spacetime isn’t restricted by the speed of light (otherwise the universe wouldn’t have expanded nearly as quickly as it has), that means the ship can end up much further away than it would if it were moving at less than the speed of light.