Although it may be of little consolation in the face of the outright evil that this nation is about to experience over the next thirty days, as Trump enters into his “cornered rat” phase, I’ve found at least some comfort in considering today’s events in the context of geologic time.
For those not simply content with knowing that the oldest Greenland shark now swimming around in the Arctic and North Atlantic is likely to have been born in 1624 (or earlier); that is, for those who take some solace in the incomparable expanse of time that surrounds the miniscule sliver of our existence, bordered by two eternities, there is always the Timeline of the Far Future to contemplate. In fact, it takes "doomscrolling" to a new level.
As described by the Atlantic’s Ross Anderson, this timeline, as published on Wikipedia, incorporates multidisciplinary scientific assessments of the probable occurrence of certain events well into the far far future. The timeline, which at present includes the editorial input of some 1500 futurists and other scientific ne’er- do-wells, extends all the way through the “heat death of the universe.”
As Anderson writes:
It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Anderson notes that some events in this future scenario are fairly well-understood: The slow-motion collision of the Earth’s continents, the loss of Saturn’s rings, the probable occurrence of a life-
Good times.
extinguishing massive asteroid strike.
But some matters, he notes, remain in dispute, including the prosaic question of how long life will actually exist on this planet.
... Astrophysicists have long understood that in roughly half a billion years, the natural swelling of our sun will accelerate. The extra radiation that it pours into Earth’s atmosphere will widen the planet’s daily swing between hot and cold. Continents will expand and contract more violently, making the land brittle, and setting into motion a process that is far less spectacular than an asteroid strike but much deadlier. Rainfall will bring carbon dioxide down to the surface, where it will bond with the silicates exposed by cracking earth. Rivers will carry the resulting carbonate compounds to the ocean, where they will sink. About 1 billion years from now, this process will have transferred so much carbon dioxide to the seafloor that very little will remain in the air. Photosynthesis will be impossible. Forests and grasslands will have vanished. A few plants will make a valiant last stand, but then they, too, will suffocate, wrecking the food chain. Animals on land will go first; deep-sea invertebrates will be last. Microbes may survive for another billion years, but the era of complex life on Earth will have ended.
Hope that helps. I will be out tonight either celebrating the Phillies or mourning them.
