Here ya go .. for all those forward-lookers (dreamers ?):
The timeline of the future …
Ten notable points of interest (for me):
Quote:
i) 1,000 years — time until the Earth's axial precession makes Gamma
Cephei the North Star.
ii) 5,200 years — time until the Gregorian calendar will be one day out of
step with the Sun's position.
iii) 9,700 years — time until Barnard's Star passes within 3.8 light years
from the Solar System, becoming the Sun's closest star.
iv) 10,000 years — time until the end of humanity, according to Brandon
Carter's Doomsday Argument, which assumes that half of the humans
who will ever have lived have already been born.
v) 50,000 years — according to the work of Burger and Loutre, time at
which the current interglacial will end, sending the Earth back into an ice
age, assuming limited effects of anthropogenic global warming. Also,
time until Niagara Falls erodes away the remaining 20 miles to Lake Erie
and ceases to exist.
vi) 100,000 years — time by which proper motion will render the
constellations unrecognisable. Also, time by which the hypergiant
star VY Canis Majoris will have exploded in a hypernova.
vii) 500,000 years — time by which Earth will most likely be impacted by a
meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter.
viii) 1.4 million years — Time until Gliese 710 passes within 1.1 light years
of the Sun, potentially disturbing the Solar System's Oort cloud and
increasing the likelihood of a comet impact in the inner Solar
System.
ix) 100 billion years — time until the universe's expansion causes all
evidence of the Big Bang to disappear beyond the cosmic light horizon,
rendering cosmology impossible.
x) 10^12 (1 trillion) years — low estimate for the time until star
formation ends in galaxies as galaxies are depleted of the gas clouds
they need to form stars.
…
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The list goes on … its interesting to see how far one can project one's thinking into the future, and compare these listed eventualities with one's accumulated expectations ….. and then, how long it takes before one encounters an unexpected surprise !
… Just thought this was an interesting little mind exercise ..
Cheers