Timeline of the future: 1,000 years time to one hundred quintillion years

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Huh? I didnā€™t know www.bbc.com was region-locked from the UKā€¦

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Itā€™s AndroMilk, dammit! Not weak-ass, milquetoast ā€œMilkomeda,ā€ ugh.

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Seems pretty ridiculous. Oh well, no infographic for me.

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The forum is going to resize the picture, but hopefully you can either right-click and open them in another window to see the full-size or use the .co.uk link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140107-far-future/assets/images/far-future-timeline (dot) png

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I feel insignificant, as usual.

But on a grander scale, at least.

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Whenā€™s the singularity? When do we convert the solar system into a Matryoshka Brain?

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Why donā€™t people ever consult a linguist before they make linguistic claims? Itā€™s absurd to say that no single word will survive in 1000 years. If we judge based on our current data, many words will survive, just as ā€œquid pro quo,ā€ survives. And if you allow for spelling variations (which are pretty trivial in a linguistic sense), then words from Old English are still in common usage a thousand years later.

Now, if you said ā€œno single language will survive,ā€ you might be on slightly firmer ground, although Iā€™ll still scoff. If you define ā€œsurviveā€ as ā€œnot undergo change,ā€ then no single language will survive the night.

I know most people donā€™t realize there actually is a science of linguistics. Still. A claim like that casts into doubt a lot of the rest of it, for me, because I know Iā€™m not equipped to find similar errors in the biology or cosmology bits.

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Dead languages donā€™t undergo changes. Living languages do.

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People canā€™t even predict what theyā€™ll do over the weekendā€¦

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Perfect time and place for my all-time favorite Wikipedia page, Timeline of the far future, with mind-blowers such as the year 10ā‹€10ā‹€50 (10 to the power of 10 to the power of 50):

Estimated time for a Boltzmann Brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease.

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Well thatā€™s comfortingā€¦

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extinction of humans in 5 million years

pretty optimistic.

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Wait! No heat death of the universe? It feels kinda lackingā€¦

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Iā€™m convinced that there must be a better name for ours than ā€˜the milky wayā€™ (or equivalents in other indo-european languages). Thatā€™s not a name, itā€™s just a (pretty inadequate plesioreligious) description. It deserves a better name. Whereā€™s the IAU on this?

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How about ā€˜Trevorā€™?

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Thank you for reposting that.

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ā€œEarthā€ is a pretty crap name too

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ā€œThat is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may dieā€

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I know itā€™s just the power of suggestion, but now all my Y-chromosomes feel weird and crumbly.

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