Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future ...

Earth may be due for a supervolcano eruption within the next 100,000 years. (Photo: Manjik/Shutterstock)

Treehugger has a long and interesting take on the distant future. Reminds one of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as he delves into this topic as well. Enjoy. It's worth a read for sure.

Humanity has its hands full right now with global climate change, which promises centuries of stronger storms, longer droughts and other magnified disasters. Earth has seen a lot of climatic chaos in its 4.5 billion years, although usually at a much slower pace. Our species is just too young to know what it's like, having evolved only about 200,000 years ago during a relatively tranquil window in time.

Now, by overstuffing the sky with carbon dioxide, we're beginning to realize how lucky we've been. The human-aided greenhouse effect is already wreaking havoc with climates and ecosystems around the planet, threatening to undermine all our success over the last few millennia. Yet despite the world-changing urgency of climate change, nature is also capable of even greater devastation. Just ask the dinosaurs

The near ...

100 years: A sweltering century

Earth continues to heat up, possibly by as much as 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (a change of 6 degrees Celsius) from today's average temperature. This spurs a cascade of crises around the world, including more severe droughts, wildfires, floods and food shortages caused by changing weather patterns. Sea levels are 1 to 4 feet (0.3 to 1.2 meters) higher than today, and the Atlantic generates more "very intense" hurricanes. The Arctic is ice-free in summer, amplifying climate change even further.

The far ...

250 million years: Continents, unite!

Continental drift once again smashes Earth's dry land into a supercontinent, which resembles the ancient Pangea. Scientists are already calling it Pangea Proxima.

The end? 

1010^10^76.66 years: Second (uni)verse, same as the first?

The universe may be in ruins, but given enough time, some futurists think something incredible will happen. It's like an endless string of poker games: Eventually you'll be dealt the exact same hand many times. According to 19th-century mathematician Henri Poincaré, quantum fluctuations in a system with fixed total energy will also re-create similar versions of history over inconceivable time scales. In 1994, physicist Don N. Page estimated the duration of "Poincaré recurrence time," describing it as "the longest finite times that have so far been explicitly calculated by any physicist."

Even if dying black holes leave nothing behind, however — and if quantum quirks don't grant us a cosmic mulligan — many physicists and philosophers still think nothing might actually be something. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said in 2013 during a debate on the nature of nothingness, "If laws of physics still apply, the laws of physics are not nothing."

In other words, we have nothing to worry about.

Quite a trip, is it not? :)