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