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Earth Timeline

steve_bank

Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Joined
Nov 9, 2017
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14,620
Location
seattle
Basic Beliefs
secular-skeptic
There are a number of time lines on the net. This one summarizes all the potential hazards. Asteroid strikes, gamma ray bursts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty,[1] present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. 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; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

All projections of the future of 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 rise over time.[2] Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.[3]

Physicists expect that matter itself will eventually come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles.[4] Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time,[5] and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.[6]

The timelines displayed here cover events from the beginning of the 11th millennium[note 1] to the furthest reaches of future time. A number of alternative future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether protons decay, and whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant.

7.8 million years
Humanity has a 95% probability of being extinct by this date, according to J. Richard Gott's formulation of the controversial Doomsday argument, which argues that we have probably already lived through half the duration of human history
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did. It was first proposed as a reductio ad absurdum response to Ludwig Boltzmann's early explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe.[1]

In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our universe, that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Theoretically over a period of time on the order of hundreds of billions of years, by sheer chance atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain. Like any brain in such circumstances, it would almost immediately stop functioning and begin to deteriorate.[2]

The idea is ironically named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that tried to account for the fact that we find ourselves in a universe that is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. He offered several explanations, one of them being that the universe, even one that is fully random (or at thermal equilibrium), would spontaneously fluctuate to a more ordered (or low-entropy) state. One criticism of this "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, actual humans in the actual universe would be vastly less likely than "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe.

Boltzmann brains gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many existing theories about the Universe, human brains in the current Universe appear to be vastly outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in the future Universe who, by chance, have exactly the same perceptions that we do; this leads to the conclusion that statistically we ourselves are likely to be Boltzmann brains. Such a reductio ad absurdum argument is sometimes used to argue against certain theories of the Universe. When applied to more recent theories about the multiverse, Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved measure problem of cosmology.
 
Quite a bit broader than this topic (but somewhat inclusive) is this awesome timeline from present to trillions and trillions and trillions of years in the future. It's a 30 minute long video where Earth is eaten by our Sun within the first 3 minutes. Within that time they cover billions years.... from global warming effects, impact effects, erosion, loss of photosythesis, death of all life on Earth, and finally destruction of the entire solar system / death of our sun.. and then it gets really interesting...
The scale of the timeline is amazing. It counts 1 year per second, and then every 10 seconds the interval increases exponentially... until it eventually gets to counting trillions of years per second.
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA[/YOUTUBE]
 
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