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The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula
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The Voyager missions were such a part of my childhood. National Geographic articles filled with new pictures of planets so far away. Space being huge. And a fictional Voyager 6 having a prominent role in Star Trek The Motion Picture.
In Star Trek, one Voyager probe turned into a sentient super intelligence; the other was destroyed by a Klingon Bird of Prey.
That is about how long Earth will remain habitable... It's a race!
It's wild to think that a few hundred thousand years from now (probably sooner than that) everything about humanity will be totally gone. Even the most famous humans to have ever lived will have been lost im the mists of time.
All our history, everything we've ever done as a species, even our most fundamental presence in they universe will almost certainly be gone.
And within half a billion years we probably won't even be seen as fossils.
But even then, a few pieces of our burned-out technology that we pushed out of the a Solar system will still exist.
Unlikely. Wikipedia can be backed up on a thumb drive, and millions of various storage media are being produced every year, perhaps into perpetuity. The damaged media are replaced faster than they break. Even something as cataclysmic as Chicxulub isn't going to wipe all of them, and probably not even all humans who will continue carrying the content forward. We are the species best suited for eternal preservation so far as we know.
Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won't last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth's core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can't build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we're pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that's supposed to last.
