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 1Let’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.