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Timeline of the far future

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Re: Timeline of the far future

#71

Post by johnchristopher »

maxerickson wrote: post #46
johnchristopher wrote: post #10

While the topic is on. I am trying to find a short story I read some years ago (4-5) about the evolution of life on our planet in the far future. Warning, massive spoilers: There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then i…

Maybe Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. It's a good book to check off the list but it is stylistically tedious.

I'm adding it to the list, thanks.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#72

Post by nemothekid »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #65
21 wrote: post #8

> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. 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. Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 5…

That's the good way to write code, surely? Then you can just change it once to DAY_SECONDS=86401.

And they can also pray that their development environment still works on Linux 9.21

Re: Timeline of the far future

#74

Post by TangoTrotFox »

Some of these are ironically myopic: "10,000 years: 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. This does not mean homogeneity, as minority traits will still be preserved, e.g. the blonde gene will not disappear, but it will be rather evenly distributed worldwide."

That prediction makes the rather questionable assumption that humans will still be primarily, if not entirely, on Earth in 10,000 years! Interplanetary colonization will likely dwarf the regional evolutionary isolation we've experienced on this planet. In the longrun it will likely even trend towards speciation (as a more reasonable prediction further on does hit on.) Consider that a European, an African, and a Japanese all share an incredibly recent ancestor.

The exciting thing about interplanetary colonization is once the technology starts to become robust, our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited. It would be like if the western frontier in the US was uninhabited and somehow went on to infinity. The implications of this are difficult to even imagine.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#75

Post by mrighele »

mikeash wrote: post #13
21 wrote: post #8

> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. 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. Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 5…

It will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.

I would just change the duration of a second. It would be probably easier to change a few physics constants here and there than to fix all the broken code.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#76

Post by improv32 »

mikeash wrote: post #13
21 wrote: post #8

> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. 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. Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 5…

It will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.

It's been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they've done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#77

Post by djsumdog »

A number of Science Fiction works talk about how prediction is more accurate the further out you go into the future, but how predictions in the short term are not so much.

Like the episode of Deep Space 9 where Bashier works with the other genetically modified humans. They talk about how eventually the galaxy will come to an end due to entropy, but their predictions for the Dominion War had too many variables to accurately predict close up.

Psycho-history and Foundation is sorta like this, but I think Issac Asimov doesn't do as good a job with this story/theory/believably.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#78

Post by Joeri »

cknoxrun wrote: post #6
schintan wrote: post #4

The further I read, the smaller I feel.

The further I read, the smaller some of the issues we face today seem. I could spend my life fighting to prevent global warming or fix the world, but this list just makes me want to enjoy the time I have here with my loved ones... I don't know how I feel about these feelings.

Well, if you take the long view then the earth will be consumed by the expanding sun and the entire history of everything on it will be erased as if it never existed. So nothing any human has done or likely will do matters. Hitler is as insignificant as gandhi.

But ... there are many lifetimes between now and then, and the quality of those lifetimes (at least the earliest ones) is something we can have an influence on, so what we do matters a lot.

So, really, it boils down to what scale you choose to measure the consequences of your actions by.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#79

Post by rtkwe »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #39
lakshayg wrote: post #35

> 230 million - Prediction of the orbits of the planets is impossible over greater time spans than this, due to the limitations of Lyapunov time. > [...] > 3.3 billion - 1% chance that Jupiter's gravity may make Mercury's orbit so eccentric as to collide with Venus, sending the inner Solar System into chaos. Possible scenarios include Mercury colliding with the Sun, being ejected from the Solar System, or colliding w…

They're from different sources, which presumably don't necessarily agree on how far out their predictions are likely to be reasonable.

It's more like the first says we can't know exactly where the planets will be while the second is talking about some of the extremes that divergence will go.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#80

Post by cknoxrun »

maxerickson wrote: post #47
cknoxrun wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The further I read, the smaller some of the issues we face today seem. I could spend my life fighting to prevent global warming or fix the world, but this list just makes me want to enjoy the time I have here with my loved ones... I don't know how I feel about these feelings.

Maybe try to make room for both? Life can have purpose without consisting solely of it. They are even connected. Making the world incrementally better now will impact the lives that your loved ones and their loved ones are able to lead.

I agree, I guess I'm just expressing my feeling as I read this list. It is about balance, and I do my best, but thanks for reminding me of the connection between the two.
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