This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a … slurp? According to my favourite Wikipedia wormhole, that’s just one of the many possible ways our universe could bite the bullet some 100 quindecillion (give or take a few septillion) years from now.
To me, Wikipedia’s seemingly innocuous Timeline of the far future page (along with its existentially harrowing cousin, Ultimate fate of the universe) is the perfect encapsulation of the internet’s inbuilt dissonance: monolithic in meaning but oh-so pedestrian in its presentation. It offers a snapshot of mind-boggling scientific theory wrapped up in a boring, colour-coded spreadsheet, built and tended to by faceless back-end contributors who are probably goosing up Elon Musk’s own Wikipedia page at the same time as they’re casually cataloguing the theoretical extinction of the Y chromosome 5m years from now.
Every year of human history has its own dedicated Wikipedia page, going back as far as 719BC (when apparently not much happened other than Zhou Huan Wang becoming ruler of China). Some years are leaner than others, naturally, but in general these pages offer a useful TL;DR snapshot of major world events, famous births and deaths and astronomical phenomena.
As you scroll through the 2020s, though, you’ll notice that the pages keep going: 2026, 2027, 2028 and so on. The reliably dull Wikipedia interface remains unchanged, even as recorded history cedes to speculative history.
It’s possible to surf Wikipedia into the far future, with each page offering a best-guess as to what that year, decade, century or millennium might have in store. In 2029, “The digital time capsule ‘A Message from Earth’ will reach its destination on the planet Gliese 581c.” In 2085, “The ‘secret’ letter of Queen Elizabeth II will be opened in Sydney.” In 2140, “All of the roughly 21 million Bitcoins are expected to be mined.”
It’s a heady mix of asteroid near-misses, grim climate catastrophe and bizarre geopolitics until about the 24th century, when things start to get really trippy: a “negative equinoctial paradox” in 2353, every person in Japan having the same surname by 2531, and “the 639-year-long performance of John Cage’s organ work As Slow as Possible” concluding in 2640.
From there, all roads lead to Timeline of the far future, an online abyss that absolutely gazes back at you. Here one can learn about exploding red supergiants visible in the daytime sky, the addition of leap seconds to every day on Earth, planetary collisions, evaporating oceans, spacetime singularities, the erosion of the pyramids, the terraformation of Mars, black holes, Boltzmann brains and the final demise of JavaScript (time of death: 13 September 275,760 CE).
The truly adventurous can delve even further into the Ultimate fate of the universe page, which reads like a tasting menu for total annihilation: will it be the Big Freeze, Big Crunch, Big Bounce, Big Rip or, indeed, the Big Slurp?
Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, was never designed to spark emotion – but sometimes the sheer psychic weight of its information can’t help but instil a kind of awe in me. When I read these wholly benign chronicles of “astroengineering projects” and “femtosecond laser-etched nanostructures” I can feel my tiny human brain butting up against the limits of its imagination.
Some people describe looking up at the stars on a clear night and feeling reverential and small. I get that same feeling by scrolling these Wikipedia pages, reading history before it’s happened; me at my little desk with my little keyboard doing my little jobs, trying to wrap my head around a world in which future archaeologists identify the “urban stratum” of fossilised coastal cities – just like mine – 100m years from now. Then I close all my browser tabs and race off to pilates.
