Spoiler
This section lists several rare astronomical events expected to occur after the year 10000.[1][2][3]
All dates are in a uniform time scale like Terrestrial Time. When converted to our ordinary solar time or Universal Time, which is decidedly non-uniform, via ΔT, the dates would be a few days earlier. Because of this difference, these dates have no anniversary relation to historical dates. Furthermore, they are only astronomical dates, so they are given in the astronomical format of Year Month Day.
[edit] Arecibo M13 message
* 25000: The 1974 interstellar radio message sent by the Arecibo Observatory finally arrives at its destination, the M13 Great Globular Cluster.
[edit] Barnard's Star
* 11800: Closest approach of Barnard's Star to the Sun at 3.8 light-years.[4]
[edit] Earth's orbit
* ~12000: Axial tilt of Earth will reach a minimum, near 22°.
* ~14000: Vega will become the North Star.
* ~28000: Eccentricity of Earth's orbit will reach a minimum, near 0.
[edit] Pioneer 10
* 12,490: Pioneer 10 passes 3.8 light-years from Barnard's star.
* ~34,000: Pioneer 10 will pass the star Ross 248.
* 864,047: Pioneer 10 will approach the vicinities of eight other stars, including Altair, a star nine times the size of the Sun.
[edit] Pioneer 11
* ~4,000,000 years from now Pioneer 11 will pass near stars in the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle).
[edit] Voyagers 1 & 2
* In about 40,000 years Voyager 1 will come within 1.6 light-years of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis.[5]
* In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass within 4.3 light-years of Sirius, the brightest star in our sky.
[edit] Satellite reentry
* ~52005-52010: KEO satellite time capsule expected to reenter.
[edit] Coincidences of nodes of planets
* 12720: Coincidence of the nodes of Mercury and Venus.
* 67730: Coincidence of the nodes of Mercury and Venus.
[edit] Special transits
[edit] Simultaneous occurrence of solar eclipse and transit
* 10663 August 20: Total solar eclipse and a transit of Mercury.
* 11268 August 25: Total solar eclipse and a transit of Mercury.
* 11575 February 28: Annular solar eclipse and a transit of Mercury.
* 15232 April 5: Total solar eclipse and a transit of Venus.
* 15790 April 20: Annular solar eclipse and a transit of Mercury.
[edit] Simultaneous transits of Mercury and Venus
* 13425 September 13: In a time interval of only 16 hours a transit of Mercury and a transit of Venus takes place.
* 18713 October 08: Simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus takes place on Mars.
* 19536 August 09: Simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus takes place on Mars.
* 20029 May 21: Simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus takes place on Mars.
* 69163 July 26: Simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus.
* 224508 March 29: Simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus.
[edit] Transit of Uranus from Neptune
* 38172 October: A transit of Uranus from Neptune takes place, the rarest of all planetary transits.
[edit] Mutual planetary transits
* 40396 December 1: Uranus transits Neptune
[edit] Misc. transits
* 571741: A simultaneous transit of Venus and the Earth from Mars will take place.[6]
[edit] Occultations of bright stars by planets
[edit] 10000-11000
* 10032 November 1: Venus occults Regulus.
* 10494 November 9: Venus occults Regulus.
* 10674 October 5: Mercury occults Aldebaran.
* 10956 November 16: Venus occults Regulus.
* 10974 April 28: Ceres occults Antares.
[edit] 11000-12000
* 11398 December 11: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 11418 November 24: Venus occults Regulus.
[edit] 12000-13000
* 12063 July 28: Mars occults Regulus.
* 12115 December 5: Venus occults Regulus.
* 12233 December 23: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 12308 January 10: Mars occults Regulus.
* 12347 July 30: Mars occults Regulus.
* 12812 December 15: Venus occults Regulus.
[edit] 13000-14000
* 13189 February 9: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 13207 January 25: Mars occults Regulus.
* 13534 November 28: Mercury occults Aldebaran.
* 13595 January 11: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 13744 December 29: Venus occults Regulus.
[edit] 14000-15000
* 14121 January 18: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 14161 March 11: Venus occults Regulus.
* 14384 January 22: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 14619 August 10: Mars occults Regulus.
* 14647 January 26: Mercury occults Regulus.
* 14910 January 29: Mercury occults Regulus.
[edit] After 15000
* 22767 April 18: Ceres occults Aldebaran.
* 23527 August 1: Pallas occults Castor.
* 40529 January 11: Ceres occults Aldebaran.
* 41367 January 7: Ceres occults Aldebaran.
[edit] Predicted events after year 1,000,000
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)
Please note that there are many different theories and models about our universe and its past, present and future behavior. Because of these factors, the events listed in this section should not be considered definitive, complete or necessarily consistent with one another.
* 8,400,000: LAGEOS 2 satellite time capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
* 600,000,000 to 3,500,000,000 (estimates vary): Slow but steady increase in solar luminosity will cause Earth's oceans to evaporate, leaving it inhospitable to life.[7][8]
* 1,000,000,000: The last total solar eclipse on Earth will occur, due to the Moon's orbit gradually becoming larger and spreading away from the earth (see Tidal acceleration for more on this).[9]
* 3,000,000,000: The Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way Galaxy are predicted to collide.
* 5,000,000,000: The Sun becomes a red giant and any remaining life on Earth, and possibly Earth itself, is destroyed.
* 7,000,000,000: The Sun becomes a white dwarf about the size of the Earth.
* 17,000,000,000: The Sun will become a black dwarf.[10]
* 100,000,000,000: The Virgo Supercluster merges into one super galaxy, millions of light-years across, filled with Red Dwarfs and small amounts of White Dwarfs. Other superclusters have also merged, yet have been separated from each other by distances of more than a billion light-years due to the acceleration of Dark Matter and Energy.
* 100,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion): The Big Freeze according to many cosmologists. Intelligent life existing then may flee to other universes, as suggested by the physicist Michio Kaku. Beginning of the Degenerate Era of our universe. End of normal star formation and normal stars in the Milky Way/M31 super-galaxy. New stars formed only via brown dwarf collisions every hundred billion years or so.
* 100,000,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quadrillion): The Universe ends in a Big Crunch according to Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory, but its inhabitants experience an infinite subjective lifetime.
* 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 quintillion): The Galaxy relaxes gravitationally. Ninety percent of stars escape into intergalactic space while the rest merge with the central Black Hole.
* 1040: Beginning of the Black Hole Era of our universe, unless proton decay does not occur.
* 10100 (one googol): If the theory of black hole evaporation is correct, it is predicted by many astronomers that all the black holes in our universe will have evaporated by around this year, the beginning of the Dark Era of our universe, unless proton decay does not occur.
* 101500: Cold fusion occurring via quantum tunneling should make the light nuclei in ordinary matter fuse into iron-56 nuclei (see isotopes of iron.) Fission and alpha-particle emission should make heavy nuclei also decay to iron, leaving stellar-mass objects as cold spheres of iron.
* 10^{10^{76}}: Quantum tunneling may make iron stars collapse into neutron stars.
One theory holds that the universe will stop expanding and start to contract, ultimately disappearing in the Big Crunch, the event where the universe collapses back to singularity. Others postulate that the universe may experience the Big Rip, where the expansion of the universe becomes so powerful that even the spacetime breaks apart. A third theory anticipates that the universe will continue expanding indefinitely at an ever-increasing pace, with the universe eventually approaching heat death.
Spoiler
* 12,004-12,006 : The events of Eureka Seven take place.
* 12,005: According to the Doctor Who episode End of the World, a new Roman Empire has been established on Earth by this year.
* 12,090: The events of Vampire Hunter D take place.
* 12,569: The setting of the science fiction project Orion's Arm.
* 13,851: The events of The Shadow at Evening (Book 1 of the Lamb among the Stars trilogy) take place.
* 14,090: The events of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust take place.
* 14,292 July 6: Takaya Noriko and Kazumi Amano will return to Earth after detonating the Black Hole Bomb in 2048, according to the last episode of the Japanese animation OVA series Gunbuster.
* 17,276-17,278: The events of the game Xenogears begin.[12]
* 20,001: The events of the epilogue to 2010: Odyssey Two occur.
* 20,031: The events of the game Tyrian take place.
* 23,341: The current date in the MMORPG Eve Online.[13]
* 24th millennium: The events of Frank Herbert's Dune take place. In Dune it starts as 10,191 A.G. (after guild).
* 25th millennium: The events of Isaac Asimov's Foundation take place.
* Early 30th millennium: The Fall of the Eldar occurs. Slaanesh is born (Warhammer 40,000).
* 28,702: In the Anarchy Online universe, the planet Rubi-Ka is discovered by the Omni-Tek Corporation.
* 30,200: In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Horus Heresy begins.
* 37,166: In the Doctor Who serial Planet of Evil, a geological survey is almost annihilated by anti-matter creatures.
* 40,000: The character of Barbarella travels to Planet Lythion and defeats Durand Durand and his positronic ray, the Magmous, several twins with killer dolls, and the Black Queen of Sogo with her entourage of Black Guards.
* 40,999: The current year in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
* ca. 60,000: In the Empire of the Petal Throne universe, mankind first visits Nu Ophiuchi d, the planet Tékumel, and starts to terraform and then colonise it.
* ca. 61,000: Tékumel is abruptly thrust into a "pocket universe", the cataclysm (known as the Fall of Man) bringing about the Time of Darkness (chùstlaqólkoi in modern Tsolyáni).
* ca. 66,000: Tékumel emerges from the Time of Darkness and enters the Latter Times.
* 85,271: Many of the events of the DC Comics' DC One Million series take place. Superman emerges from his 15,000-year exile in his Fortress of Solitude inside the Sun.
* 100,000: Rise and fall of the Patagonians; the First Men enter in eclipse. - Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
* 200,000: The year that the British science fiction television program Doctor Who episode The Long Game takes place.
* 200,100: The year that the British science fiction television program Doctor Who episodes Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways take place.
* 802,701: The year that the Time Traveller meets the Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
* 1,001,986 One million years later from 1986, when the events of Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos have taken place and humanity has evolved to seal-like creatures with limited thinking.
* ca. 1,000,000: In the Babylon 5 universe, approximately one million years after the founding of the Interstellar Alliance (2262 AD), humans evolve into beings of energy. They leave Earth for the old Vorlon homeworld - and ultimately destroy the solar system to keep any remaining technology out of the hands of younger races.
* April 27 of 2,774,020 : Murcheson's Eye explodes into a supernova and becomes a black hole (from The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle).
* 3,000,000: In the show Red Dwarf, Red Dwarf is a gigantic spaceship belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. An on-board radiation leak kills everyone except for Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation at the time. Three million years later, Lister emerges from stasis as the last human being alive.
* 5,000,000: In the documentary The Future Is Wild, scientists believe that in 5,000,000 years time, the world will be in an ice age. The Mediterranean Sea will be a vast salt plain and the Amazon rainforest will be no more. Creatures of this land include huge killer birds, thin-legged pigs, sticky-frilled lizards and birds that act like whales. Humans, by this time, have either gone extinct or have left the planet.
* ca. 8,000,000: The time of Zothique, last continent of Earth, and home to the dying remnants of the human race. The culture is on a barbaric level, and magic has become dominant over science. - (Clark Ashton Smith, The Zothique Cycle)
* 10,000,000: The year that the British science fiction television program Doctor Who episode The Ark takes place.
* 10,000,000: Rise of the Second Men; the Martian Wars, and the Ruin of Two Worlds. - Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
* 15,000,000: Humanity has completely died out according to Isaac Asimov's book The End of Eternity.
* 18,000,000: A "half-plastic denizen" of the interior of a planet beyond Pluto is among those that exchanges mind with the Great Race of Yith. - (H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time)
* 20,000,000: The approximate date when The Night Land is set.
* 30,000,000: The Time Traveller finds himself on a shoreline with a thin atmosphere, a black sky with few stars, the moon gone, and no evidence of intelligent life - H. G. Wells' The Time Machine
* 50,000,000: Following the final end of humanity, a new race of beetle-like insects arises. These are possessed by the Great Race of Yith, leaving their previous home on a planet orbiting a dark star near Taurus. Eventually, even the beetles die out, and the Yithians send their collective minds into a vegetable species living on Mercury. - (H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time)
* 100,000,000: In the documentary The Future Is Wild, scientists speculate that in 100,000,000 years time, the world will be very hot due to excess volcanic activity. Antarctica will be a lush rainforest. Creatures of this world include enormous tortoises, amphibious octopuses, four-winged birds and rodent eating spiders. At this time, there is also only one species of mammal left, which is preyed upon by the spiders.
* 200,000,000: In the documentary The Future Is Wild, scientists speculate that in 200,000,000 years time, the world will contain one global ocean and one continent, like Pangaea. Approximately 100,000,000 years before this time, there was a mass extinction and now most of the world's land is desert, with a couple of rainforests around the edge. Creatures of this world include air-breathing flying fish, giant plankton, various huge worms, highly specialized insects and intelligent, arboreal land-squid. There are no mammals, no birds, no reptiles, no amphibians, only one species of flowering plants and only sharks left to represent aquatic fish. Other creatures have moved in to fill these niches.
* 100,000,000: Main characters live in this year in the show Time Squad.
* 500,000,000: The first primitive life develops on Venus. A Venusian is among those that exchanges minds with the Great Race of Yith. - (H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time; Brian Lumley, The Transition of Titus Crow)
* ca. 1,000,000,000: The last inhabitants of Earth, a species of arachnids, live within the interior of the dying world. - (H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time)
* 1,000,000,000: Human extinction occurs across the galaxy - (Brian Aldiss, Galaxies like Grains of Sand).
* 1,000,000,000: Migration of the Ninth Men to Neptune. - Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
* 1,000,000,000: In an episode of Pinky and The Brain, nuclear fallout has created a species of super-intelligent cockroaches who intend to take over the world with use of a "world domination kit". Brain, obsessed with taking over the world, steals the kit and returns in a time machine to the 20th century.
* 2,000,000,000: End of Man (the Eighteenth Men). - Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
* ca. 5,000,000,000: The year of The End of the World in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who. The date is given as 5.5/Apple/26 - implying that the explanation of 5 billion was an approximation.
* 5,000,000,023: In the British science fiction television program Doctor Who, in the episode New Earth, Humans are shown to have moved to a new planet and called it New Earth in the galaxy M87.
* 7,500,000,000: Middletown propelled into future - from City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton.
* 10,000,000,000: Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Against the fall of night, takes place.
* 17,000,000,000: In Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars - Mad Mind battles Vanamonde.
* 20,000,000,000: The War of Worlds occurs. - Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
* 30,000,000,000: The Second Galactic Utopia occurs. - Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
* 40,000,000,000: The First Colonization of Dead Stars occurs. - Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
* 50,000,000,000: The Supreme Moment of the Cosmos occurs. - Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
* ca. 100,000,000,000: The consciousness of all Human beings fuses into one Man and attempts to solve the entropy problem with the Cosmic AC in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
* 400,000,000,000: The Ren and Stimpy show-within-a-show "Commander Hoek" takes place in this far future era
* 5,000,000,000,000: The Sun dies in Olaf Stapledon's history of humanity Last and First Men.
* ca. 10,000,000,000,000: Man fuses with AC and Entropy destroys the universe in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
* 100,000,000,000,000: In the British science fiction television program Doctor Who, in the episode Utopia, Humans are shown to have moved to a new planet as refugees and are waiting to fly to Utopia to escape what is implied to be The Big Crunch or heat death, also known as the End of the Universe. As indicated in dialogue in the episode, after having evolved into different forms over the millennia, humans by this time have re-evolved back into the same humanoid form known today.
* 1,500,000,000,000,000: Stars evaporate from galaxies in Stephen Baxter's Ring.
* 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 (500 quintillion): In Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time novel, the last descendants of humanity, close to the Big Freeze, make some changes to our near present in order to release the universe's vacuum energy, spawn new universes, and avoid letting the Big Freeze happen.