The Far Future

2026 – c. 13.9 Ga AP35 items

deep timespace

Artist’s impression of Earth’s night sky about 3.75 billion years from now, with Andromeda looming beside a tidally distorted Milky Way before a possible merger. Illustration: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), and A. Mellinger, 2012. Public domain.

The next fourteen billion years

What happens after us, as far as physics can see: the night sky drifting out of shape, continents closing into a new supercontinent, the Sun swelling into a red giant and shrinking to a white dwarf, and the Milky Way perhaps colliding with Andromeda. The chart runs until the universe is twice its present age, the mirror of History of the Universe.

How it is laid out

Periods frame the Sun’s old age (main sequence, red giant, helium burning, white dwarf), the slow end of Earth’s biosphere, and a possible merger with Andromeda.
Dates are years after present, and present means 1950, the same anchor as radiocarbon’s “before present”. Each carries the range its sources give; far-future science is modelling, and the notes say where the models disagree.

Threads

Filter by sun, earth, life, sky (how the night sky changes), planets, cosmos (galaxies and the universe) or humans: the things we have already sent into the future, from nuclear-waste warnings to the Voyager probes.

Past the edge

Dates here reach 14 billion years ahead, as far as they reach back. The rest of the story is far longer: the last stars burn out after about a hundred trillion years, and the last black holes evaporate after roughly 10¹⁰⁰ years. If this whole chart were a millimetre, that line would be about 10⁶⁰ times wider than the observable universe. The last item lists what lies beyond.

…all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system… — Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship (1903)

Items

2026 – c. 13.9 Ga AP
The Stelliferous Era, the age of stars
≈ 13.9 billion years
2026 – c. 5.75 Ga AP
The Sun burns its last core hydrogen
≈ 5.75 billion years
0.15 ka AP
Polaris is closest to the pole
10 ka AP
WIPP’s warning markers must still work
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, New Mexico
12 ka AP
Vega becomes the pole star
40 ka AP
Voyager 1 nears its first star
50 ka AP
Niagara Falls reaches Lake Erie
Niagara River, from the Horseshoe Falls to Lake Erie
c. 100 ka AP
Betelgeuse explodes, probably
c. 100 ka AP
The next ice age, delayed
c. 105 ka AP
Kamaʻehuakanaloa rises out of the sea
Kamaʻehuakanaloa Seamount, Hawaii
1 Ma AP
Onkalo’s safety case runs out
Onkalo, Olkiluoto island, Finland
c. 1.29 Ma AP
Gliese 710 grazes the Oort cloud
2 Ma AP
Pioneer 10 passes Aldebaran
8.4 Ma AP
LAGEOS falls back to Earth
c. 10 Ma AP
A new ocean splits Africa
Afar Triangle, Ethiopia
c. 15 Ma AP
Los Angeles slides alongside San Francisco
Los Angeles to San Francisco, along the San Andreas Fault
c. 30 Ma AP
Phobos is torn apart
c. 55 Ma AP
Saturn loses its rings
c. 230 Ma AP
One galactic year from now
c. 250 Ma AP
Pangaea Ultima
1 Ga AP – 2.8 Ga AP
Earth’s biosphere winds down
≈ 1.8 billion years
c. 1.5 Ga AP
The oceans begin to boil away
c. 2.6 Ga AP
The Large Magellanic Cloud hits the Milky Way
2.8 Ga AP
The last life on Earth
3.6 Ga AP
Triton falls to Neptune
3.75 Ga AP
Andromeda fills the night sky
3.9 Ga AP – 5.9 Ga AP
A possible merger with Andromeda
≈ 2 billion years
c. 5.75 Ga AP – 7.59 Ga AP
The Sun swells into a red giant
≈ 1.84 billion years
c. 6 Ga AP
Titan warms up
7.59 Ga AP – 7.72 Ga AP
The Sun burns helium
≈ 130 million years
7.59 Ga AP
Mercury, Venus and probably Earth are swallowed
c. 7.8 Ga AP – c. 13.9 Ga AP
The Sun as a white dwarf
≈ 6.1 billion years
c. 7.73 Ga AP
The Sun’s planetary nebula
c. 10 Ga AP
The Sun’s core crystallizes
13.8 Ga AP
The universe is twice its present age