Top scientists have predicted events far, far into the future

Thing we were happiest to learn: You could clean up on real estate if you had tens of millions of years of advance notice. Hawaii will get an extra island in a quarter million years, when Lōʻihi, the youngest volcano in the chain, finally rises above the surface (don’t get too excited, though, as the whole island chain will be submerged within 80 million years). Within 2 million years or so, the Grand Canyon will become a wide valley surrounding the Colorado River. In 10 million years, the tectonic plate containing East Africa will split off from the rest of the continent, creating some beachfront property in Ethiopia. And by 50 million years, Africa will collide with Europe, replacing the Mediterranean Sea with a mountain range. And within 250 million years, every continent may merge into another Pangaea (and The Smiths still won’t have reunited).

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Whatever happens to humanity in the far future, the Earth is doomed either way. In 600 million to a billion years, increased heat from the sun will cause nearly all surface water to evaporate. On this drier earth, for various reasons, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will decrease to the point where photosynthesis will be impossible, killing all plant life. With no plants to produce oxygen, animal life will die out as well. By 1.5 billion years, a still hotter sun will mean Mars will have an Earth-like temperature, and Earth’s temperature will be unlivable even if anything is still alive. By 4 billion years, the sun will be so hot that the average temperature on Earth will be 2400 degrees, hot enough to melt rock. Another 4 billion years after that, the sun will become a red giant, and consume the Earth and the other inner planets.

Also noteworthy: Extrapolate far enough into the future, and it’s not just the Earth that’s doomed. The supposed expansion of the universe means the galaxies are moving apart from each other at a rate at which, within 100 billion years, everything but the Local Group will be too far away to see. By 450 billion years, the 47 or so Local Group galaxies will merge into one supergalaxy. But after a trillion years, there won’t be enough gas clouds to form new stars, and the supergalaxy will start to dim, beginning the Degenerate Era, in which the galaxy gets drunk before noon and starts dating a high school girl. One-hundred twenty trillion years from now, each remaining star will have exhausted its fuel, leaving only stellar remnants, like white and brown dwarfs and black holes. Eventually these will either be flung out of their respective galaxies or sucked into black holes. After an unimaginable span of time, those black holes will dissipate, and all matter in the universe will have been broken down, leading to the heat death of the universe and possibly another Big Bang. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: A few long-term projects are also listed here. One of the most fun to contemplate is terraforming Mars, turning the red planet blue by adding an atmosphere and water. According to the list, doing so simply by letting plants create an oxygen-rich environment would take roughly 100,000 years. However, the terraforming page has lots of theoretical ways we could speed up the process.

Further down the wormhole: One casualty of the future is Niagara Falls, which within 50,000 years will have eroded all the way back to Lake Erie. That lake’s shores were home to the Steel Belt (eventually renamed the Rust Belt), and numerous factories dumped enough pollution into the lake that it became a catalyst for environmental law. Regulations were able to clean up Lake Erie considerably, but even at its worst, it was far from the most polluted body of water in history. A serious contender may be the Thames River in London, which became infamous in 1858 for the Great Stink. We’ll wade into that unpleasantness next week.