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 5m years from now.
