This is the best way the world ends: not with a bang, however with a … slurp? In response to my favorite Wikipedia wormhole, that’s simply one of many many potential methods our universe may chunk the bullet some 100 quindecillion (give or take just a few septillion) years from now.
To me, Wikipedia’s seemingly innocuous Timeline of the far future web page (together with its existentially harrowing cousin, Final destiny of the universe) is the proper encapsulation of the web’s inbuilt dissonance: monolithic in which means however oh-so pedestrian in its presentation. It affords a snapshot of mind-boggling scientific principle wrapped up in a boring, colour-coded spreadsheet, constructed and tended to by faceless back-end contributors who’re in all probability goosing up Elon Musk’s personal Wikipedia web page concurrently they’re casually cataloguing the theoretical extinction of the Y chromosome 5 million years from now.
Yearly of human historical past has its personal devoted Wikipedia web page, going again so far as 719BC (when apparently not a lot occurred apart from Zhou Huan Wang changing into ruler of China). Some years are leaner than others, naturally, however usually these pages provide a helpful TL;DR snapshot of main world occasions, well-known births and deaths and astronomical phenomena.
As you scroll by means of the 2020s, although, you’ll discover that the pages preserve going: 2026, 2027, 2028 and so forth. The reliably boring Wikipedia interface stays unchanged, whilst recorded historical past cedes to speculative historical past.
It’s potential to surf Wikipedia into the very far future, with every web page providing a present best-guess as to what that yr, decade, century, or millennium may need in retailer. In 2029, “The digital time capsule ‘A Message from Earth’ will attain its vacation spot on the planet Gliese 581c.” In 2085, “the ‘secret’ letter of Queen Elizabeth II might be opened in Sydney.” In 2140, “all the roughly 21 million Bitcoins are anticipated to be mined.”
It’s a heady mixture of asteroid near-misses, grim local weather disaster and weird geopolitics till across the twenty fourth century, when issues begin to get actually trippy: a “unfavourable equinoctial paradox” in 2353, each particular person in Japan having the identical surname by 2531, and “the 639-year-long efficiency of John Cage’s organ work As Sluggish as Attainable” concluding in 2640.
From there, all roads result in Timeline of the far future, a web-based abyss that completely gazes again at you. Right here one can find out about exploding crimson supergiants seen within the daytime sky, the addition of leap seconds to day-after-day on Earth, planetary collisions, evaporating oceans, spacetime singularities, the erosion of the pyramids, the terraformation of Mars, black holes, Boltzmann brains and the ultimate demise of JavaScript (time of dying: 13 September 275,760 CE).
The actually adventurous can delve even additional into the Final destiny of the universe web page, which reads like a tasting menu for whole annihilation: will it’s the Large Freeze, Large Crunch, Large Bounce, Large Rip or, certainly, the Large Slurp?
Wikipedia, like several encyclopedia, was by no means designed to spark emotion – however typically the sheer psychic weight of its info can’t assist however instil a sort of awe in me. Once I learn these wholly benign chronicles of “astroengineering initiatives” and “femtosecond laser-etched nanostructures”, I can really feel my tiny human mind butting up towards the boundaries of its creativeness.
Some individuals describe trying up on the stars on a transparent night time and feeling reverential and small. I get that very same feeling by scrolling these Wikipedia pages, studying historical past earlier than it’s occurred; me at my little desk with my little keyboard doing my little jobs, making an attempt to wrap my head round a world wherein future archaeologists determine the “city stratum” of fossilised coastal cities – identical to mine – 100 million years from now. Then I shut all my browser tabs and race off to pilates.
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