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Timeline of the far future

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201–210 of 272 posts

Re: Timeline of the far future

#202

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…

It's a bit ironic because you made the exact same mistake they made. Interplanetary colonization only makes sense if humans are even around in 10,000 years. It's possible they will not be -- the speed of light being finite makes interplanetary colonization much less probable. Making any kind of 10,000 year prediction on a population thousands seems myopic.

Interplanetary is not the same thing as interstellar. Interplanetary just means different planets. E.g. after we colonize Mars we will be an interplanetary species. That's also where the divergence will begin. The development and evolutionary characteristics of individuals that grow up in low g will likely quickly begin to create a group of people radically different from anything on Earth.

You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Understandable as relativity is really really weird. We can get into the hows/whys if you like, but the long and short is that if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g then we can colonize places that are billions of light years away, all in a single human lifetime. Of course indeed billions of years will have passed for everybody else. It's going to make notions of time, progress, and even extinction get really really weird.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematically that's irrelevant to finding planets with an integer ratio of days per year. Integers are still integers no matter what base you express them in.

What if the base isn't an integer? Base e for life.

Or a prime based number system.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#204
Years from now: 2.4 million

Java is still at the top of the TIOBE index. Moreover, the familiar Java update progress dialog will display "100 Trillion Devices Run Java Across Thousands of Galaxies".

Re: Timeline of the far future

#205
post #187
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Straw man, no one claimed that there will be a complete extinction of coral, only that it will be 2 million years for coral to recover to pre-industrial levels.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#207
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…

A few centuries earlier that would have been worrying about adding extra teeth to the gear wheel driving the mechanical clock.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#208
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…

I'm pretty sure some nifty JavaScript code will come to save the day!

Machine learning will analyze your thoughs and output wasm, then run it a os that is sandboxed in a webrowser.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#209
post #2

Fascinating: "10^(10^50) years: Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain > [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]

Just spent some good hours reading about Boltzmann brain related stuff...it's indeed a fascinating topic.

The most interesting part is the related Boltzmann brain paradox: we are far more likely to be isolated brains randomly popping out of chaos and imagining a universe, than actually living in a real universe.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#210
post #205
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Straw man, no one claimed that there will be a complete extinction of coral, only that it will be 2 million years for coral to recover to pre-industrial levels.

Indeed. Coral reefs are important nursery's for many fish species, and reducing the areas for fish to safely grow up puts yet another pressure on declining fish stocks. Not to mention marine crustaceans that are also affected by rising acidity, and the overall warming trend of the ocean itself is pressuring all kinds of marine life that humanity depends on as a major food source.

Not only that, but the ocean is rising due to land-based glaciers/ice melting, the continental rebound involved from the reduced ice load, and yet more: the warming ocean is less dense and expands. The rising seas along with other factors mentioned also puts pressure on coral reefs, as they often cannot grow fast enough to catch up with that sweet-spot near the ocean surface!

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