Want to know how the world ends? 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
- See more from our column Internet wormhole, where writers share their favourite corner of the internet
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 5 million years from now.
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