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 5 million years from now.
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.
Try this Wikipedia page Every year of human history has a dedicated Wikipedia entry.
But surf far enough into the future, and you’ll find evaporating oceans, planetary collisions, and the ultimate apocalypse: the Big Slurp.
