The Far Future of Our Solar System 122
An anonymous reader writes "Sure, the Universe is expanding, the galaxies are accelerating away from one another, and it's looking more and more like they'll never re-collapse. The timeline of the far future looks pretty grim on large scales. But what's to come of our Solar System: of the Earth, our Moon and our Sun? This tour of the far future of the Solar System, scaling the timescales to the Big Bang being '1 Universe year' ago, puts it all in perspective."
Re:What about the future of Slashdot? (Score:1, Insightful)
"half-assed, hipster-inspired "web design"."
LOL
Re:Starts with a bang (Score:5, Insightful)
Over that time scale genetic drift alone would mean we wouldn't see them as human.
Re:What about the future of Slashdot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny thing is, the new beta is neither "half-assed" nor "hipster-inspired," and that's the worst part - that somebody obviously put a lot of effort into that horribly-designed, utterly unnavigable, visually confusing kludge of shit. The misprioritization of the beta design is Ballmer-esque in scale, as all of the things that made Slashdot good (strong sense of community, lack of censorship, elegant simplicity) are deliberately being phased out and in their place being put paid shills and inline ads; topped off with a UI so horrible that, unlike every other damn site on the 'net, cannot be avoided or made better by script-blocking.
Wanting to be another ZDnet or whatever just might have worked if Slashdot had that big corporate visibility from the get-go, but the only way to go from here is pissing off the small but fierce fanbase which made Slashdot great, without all the big corporate visibility required to maintain a site like ZDnet. Good going, Slashdot, you've fucked yourself. But you will be vindicated -- when your baby finally tanks, and you are laid off or reassigned to writing paid-shill articles and product-placements full-time and comments have been abolished entirely, you can sit in your skid-marked office chair with a smug grin and mutter to yourselves,
" Heh heh heh, good riddance Ethanol-fueled...you'll never troll me again! "
Re:Stuff that matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Can somebody explain why this stuff matters? I mean speculation without a chance of experimental verification?
Thinking about things -- why they happen, how they may happen -- in great detail without actually experiencing them is one aspect that makes us human beings. Thinking about the eventual fate of the universe and our current home is something that we should all do at some point.
It also is several notches above the other rampant speculation without experimental verification here and lifts the profile of /. a bit from where you have to shovel down to the level sometimes.