ONE BILLION YEARS

A scientific report has stated that life as we know it will no longer exist on the Earth in about one billion years. A few microbes may hang on, lurking next to the last few remaining water droplets but in about 2.8 billion years, even those will have been extinguished and planet Earth will be just another dead rock hanging in space and waiting to be consumed by an exploding star.

That kind of makes you think, doesn't it...? No matter what you decide to get up and do today, no matter what you or your descendants achieve, what art or science or other philosophy you come up with, no matter what battles you fight and win or lose, or what piece of land you plant a flag on and claim in the name of another piece of land, one day it will all be reduced to nothing more meaningful than the race memory of a few rats or cockroaches for a while, before being forgotten as anything other than a sliver of strata in a lump of rock and eventually being blown to atoms by an exploding star anyway.

Hmm... It makes me look at all of the recycling and ask myself (slightly wickedly) whether it's worth all the bother...

On the other hand, you could argue that atoms are exactly what we came from, so that returning to that condition is just returning to our most natural state anyway and all of the atoms in you, me and that goldfish bowl in the corner that's crying out for its water to be changed have already been transformed many times, and will be again, and it's all just part of the great big cycle of life in an expanding universe.

The trickier bit to get a handle upon, of course, is consciousness, or this thing we like to think of as life. This precious something that means that we can interact, talk, care and do all of the other things that we do as living, breathing entities (including, unfortunately all of the killing off of other living, breathing entities that some of our fellow entities seem prone towards doing) and which we can't perceive of an inanimate object like a teapot doing, as far as we know.

Of course, in far less time than that billion years that they're going on about (although you wonder why they bothered, given what it ultimately told them about the sheer pointlessness of everything), in fact in maybe only 250 Million years, all of the continents that we currently recognise will most probably have smashed together and recombined into another supercontinent not dissimilar to the long-lost Pangaea, and everything we recognise of the Earth as it is now and has been for most of humanity's existence will be lost. Chewed up and swallowed by the very earth itself apart from perhaps a slightly grubby layer in the fossil record. 

Of course, if you think about it, even one million years might be a stretch for humanity and all of its works. After all, we've not even been here that long as yet, and only one thousand years ago most of the members of humanity were still living in mud and straw and hitting each other with bits of metal and claiming that it was in the name of civilisation.

The greatest achievements of our most successful but already long-lost civilisations are already crumbling to dust after only about four thousand years, so that anything we do is unlikely to survive that long, especially if whatever comes along to replace us doesn't know how to access the remnants of what was once the internet and find out what we all reckoned about everything.

So...

One billion years and all of our hopes, dreams and aspirations will have come to nothing in exactly the same way as everyone else's.

Better get on with it then, I suppose...