> in 10k years (…) the average length of a solar day will be 1⁄30 of an SI second longer than it is today.

Looks like a new test case scenario for libraries that handle time/date.

Am I misreading something, or isn't that already in 1,000 years?

You are correct, I made a typo in the grandparent comment - it should have been 1k years. Unfortunately I can no longer edit.

Insertion of a leap second every month.

Well at least the datetime library would be a perfectly reasonable place to handle leap seconds. The place that outputs the timestamp to a human readable format wouldn’t at all be that hard pressed to add a second when printing out the local time with timezone considered. It really wouldn’t add that much complexity.

Could you imagine if anyone was stupid enough to think the right place to handle such a thing was the internal counter of seconds rather than the datetime library though? Ha! That’d be ridiculous right! Imagine all the bugs if someone put something that’s only relevant to local timezone time printing there! It’d cause so many unexpected bugs!

At 10^78 years we could use 512 bit time stamps and be safe from overflow and measure all the way down to Planck time.

Time is so /weird/ that I don't know how computers will ever wrangle it comprehensively.

Just consider the weird but valid scenario in relativity where A can occur before B, B before C, and C before A. I'm not sure how you would wrangle something like that in a data format.

Can that happen in relativity? How?

I’m guessing for different observers. No idea how for a single observer all those could possibly be true

Here's my favorite youtube version of this:

https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

In video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

For dramatic effect, my monitor turned off right after "By this point, distant galaxies and starts are receding so fast that their light has become undetectable."

My favourite sleep aid video.

There's also this lovely musical video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJNta-okRw

The "no more strength, no way out" part kills me every time I watch it.

Seems like unproven mumbo jumbo after about the halfway point

Great wiki page! It even mentions Boltzmann Brains! “ This infinite future could allow for the occurrence of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.”

Boltzmann Brains usually mean something is wrong in your cosmology

But taking this the other way around : it's also interesting that some cosmologies are known to be incorrect, because they would enable alternative forms of consciousness.

Or with our philosophy around anthropic reasoning. Or both.

So given these finding, that page will need to be overhauled a lot

To survive beyond 1 Gy from now, life will need to move underground where the water is and hopefully much cooler than the eventual surface. Also, such life may/will become necessary to relocate to Mars, hopefully taking resources with them. (I don't say "us" because of likely dramatic evolution.)

1 Gy ago, life wasn’t multicellular.

I don’t think we have the ability to meaningfully predict such scales.

The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.

At that scale of time, it's not implausible that we have the technology to relocate Earth itself by then (e.g. increase its orbit).

Completely in line with our propensity for destabilizing harmonic systems in nature. Imagine we do that and all of the other planetary orbits degenerate or become dangerous.

I feel like you could build an entire meditation practice around reading this article.

That or existential dread.

I mitigate that by choosing to interpret it as a circle rather than a line.

It pairs well with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

and with http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp

If Reid Malenfant or Jim Bolder aren't involved, this isn't the deep time future I'm interested in.