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Timeline of the far future

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Re: Timeline of the far future

#31

Post by civilitty »

tzahola wrote: post #12
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…

How could the Earth be totally smooth?

Extreme weather with atmospheric acidification that slowly eats away at everything on the surface like a polishing a rock. It would take hundreds of thousands or millions of years but it's plausible as the sun slowly expands, which causes tidal stresses and significantly increases surface temperatures making the landscape a lot more dynamic.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#32

Post by KozmoNau7 »

l1k wrote: post #21
schintan wrote: post #4

The further I read, the smaller I feel.

The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there's a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%2.…

I dunno man. I'm already quite aware of how insignificant I am on a cosmic scale. So it would be interesting to gain a proper sense of scale of the ridiculous vastness of space.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#33

Post by luos »

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.

He publishes it in a podcast format as well without the background music, which I am very thankful for.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#35

Post by lakshayg »

> 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 with Earth.

Are these statements contradictory or am I missing something?

Re: Timeline of the far future

#37

Post by mockingbirdy »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #14

> Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus, will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains. I always thought that the universe will just reach zero Kelvin and the party is over. That it will just continue to do improbable stuff…

Ok, thanks guys. Quantum uncertainty is the reason we can't reach zero Kelvin, so it's kind of nonsense to ask why quantum effects still work at absolute zero.

> It's not physically impossible for order to increase, it's just ridiculously unlikely.

Would love to see resources that explain this (I think it comes down to quantum uncertainty again).

> the basic idea is that the probability for anything to happen is different than 0

Yeah, quantum uncertainty.

Still can't wrap my head around it, but in conversations with physicists, they also weren't sure why the heck it works that way. Gonna read my quantum mechanics book, but the math is not easy-going and especially quantum logic with its 3 states (true, false and flying spaghetti monster superposition) is extremely difficult to grasp using intuition. It contains a lot of thinking from statistics which essentially is just extremely unintuitive as well.

- - -

Edit: I really wonder if something like a "gravitational quantum electrodynamics" (don't know if we achieve it with this specific theory) or string theory (I don't really like it due to its unscientific nature) - in essence a Theory of Everything - will really explain everything like it really is or just happens to be a fitting model without being any meaningful representation of reality (in the sense that it explains how the underlying reality really looks like).

We won't be able to verify if our models are actually representing reality anyways (any theory that explains all observed events and which has some plausible and strong predictions can be treated as a possible reality), but would be nice to know. Guess it can't physically happen, unfortunately.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#38

Post by chipperyman573 »

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…

After 230 million years we lose the ability to make accurate predictions. The second statement says that we are guessing (odds 100 to 1) that Jupiter might do that.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#39

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#40

Post by shadyarmsdealer »

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…

Could it be Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? It's a novel, not a short story, but it has the same structure you've described involving successive sentient races (including bird-like people) and the planets gradually becoming uninhabitable.

Edit: Apparently Last and First Men was heavily influenced by a short story, "The Last Judgment" by J.B.S. Haldane. Source: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall99/end.html. Maybe that's the one you remember?

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