Timeline of The Far Future

Timeline Of The Far Future

While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, present scientific understanding in various fields has enabled the course of the far future to be plotted if only in the broadest outlines. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales, and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

All predictions of the future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must increase over time. Stars must eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out; close encounters will gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies. Eventually, matter itself will come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles. However, as current data suggest that the Universe is flat, and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, the infinite future potentially allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of a Boltzmann brain.

These timelines cover events from roughly eight thousand years from now to the farthest reaches of future time. A number of alternate future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether humans survive, whether protons decay or whether the Earth will be destroyed by the Sun's expansion into a red giant.