The BBC’s Timeline of the Far Future: It’s Not Pretty

A few months back, the BBC gave us a timeline predicting events that may occur before the year 2150. Now they’ve returned with a much, much, much longer forecast: looking ahead to 100 quintillion years. That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from today.

It’s a little hard to get your head around that length of time, but you can begin much closer, with 1,000 years from now when most of today’s words will be extinct due to the evolution of language (does this include callipygean, we wonder?); or 18,860 years from now when the Islamic and Gregorian calendars share the same year (20,860). But things get very interesting the further you look ahead. What about 1,450,000 years in the future, when the star Gliese 710 passes just 1.1 light years from the Sun? Or 5.4 billion years from now when the Sun has exhausted its hydrogen reserves and begins to devolve into a red giant. Good times.