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Timeline of the far future

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Re: Timeline of the far future

#181

Post by mpfundstein »

adrianN wrote: post #168
mrkstu wrote: post #115

This reminded me of a question I've had knocking around in my head since I've heard of hawking radiation- the prediction is that the black holes slowly evaporate into subatomic particles. However, it seems to me at some point a critical juncture would be passed and the black hole would cease being bound gravitationally and the matter would be released similarly to a supernova or just spontaneously form a neutron star…

The intensity of Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the black hole. It shrinks as it radiates and its output increases. Once the black hole is tiny, the level of radiation is intense enough that you could call it an explosion. This is why small black holes are excellent generators. You just dump some mass into them and they convert it rather quickly to radiation.

I think we found a solution to our garbage problem abd at the same time solve the energy question as well. Now we just need a tiny black hole!

Re: Timeline of the far future

#182

Post by baxtr »

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…

Why don’t we just 6 minutes at the end of each year? Seems to be more practical to me

Re: Timeline of the far future

#184

Post by kulu2002 »

The Timeline talks about Nuclear waste but what about cumulative effect of daily garbage, solid waste, plastic degradation until human beings survive on earth...

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-long-does-it-take-garbage-...

I think this should have been mentioned somewhere in 'Human constructs' section

Re: Timeline of the far future

#185

Post by wierd0 »

mkempe wrote: post #180
jersully72 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this near extinction compare to previous ones?

We're not currently witnessing a near-extinction.

Scientists consulted when creating the tv show Blue Planet II seems to disagree. According to them we are in fact in the midst of an extinction.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#186

Post by cpeterso »

walrus01 wrote: post #144
cpeterso wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky novels, the characters in the far future track time using megaseconds (~11.6 Earth days) to sidestep the problem of days with different lengths. They still count from the 1970-01-01 Unix epoch, but the characters mistakenly think that date is when humans landed on the moon.

There's also such a thing as a Programmer-Archeologist, can you imagine dealing with 14,000 years of nested dependencies? One key plot point in one of the novels, a totalitarian group is running a omnipresent surveillance network but has no idea about the software running underneath it. They set it up using the GUI and are using it but never looked under the hood. The group attempting to get out from under the grasps…

I forgot about the Programmer-Archeologist! Another point from (I think) these novels that stuck with me was Vinge's description of the "software midden heap". I'd like to think we can clean up some middle layers from our computing stack in the future, but with some old software only available in emulators (possibly running in WebAssembly in a browser), I am not so sure.

In fact, I realized I made an nearly identical comment here on Hacker News back in 2011. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702231

Re: Timeline of the far future

#187

Post by mkempe »

wierd0 wrote: post #185
mkempe wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not currently witnessing a near-extinction.

Scientists consulted when creating the tv show Blue Planet II seems to disagree. According to them we are in fact in the midst of an extinction.

There are wide varieties of corals and of their symbionts. To claim that they are all simultaneously going extinct in all seas and microclimates is absurd, and contradicts the evidence of their repeated adaptations to past climate variations over 500 million years as well as ignores the observation of their thriving across countless local seasonal and weather variations.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#188

Post by teekert »

lowdest wrote: post #26

If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend "Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur" available on Youtube and in other formats.

I love Isaac Arthur, I look forward to his stuff every week. I listen to him using Pocket Casts, although the visuals can also be very nice.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#189

Post by ithkuil »

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.

Code that assumes that is wrong today already. In fact there is no time.Day constant in the Go standard library

Re: Timeline of the far future

#190

Post by adrianN »

mpfundstein wrote: post #181
adrianN wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intensity of Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the black hole. It shrinks as it radiates and its output increases. Once the black hole is tiny, the level of radiation is intense enough that you could call it an explosion. This is why small black holes are excellent generators. You just dump some mass into them and they convert it rather quickly to radiation.

I think we found a solution to our garbage problem abd at the same time solve the energy question as well. Now we just need a tiny black hole!

It's not as hard as you think. Check out this paper here for some pointers https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803
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