The Million Year Man

You arrive, as planned, to the base of Mount Everest with your friend.  After a brief interaction with the locals and settling your mountaineering plans, the two of you begin your long trek higher up the mountain. Higher and higher you climb into the chilly heights with your friend until the wind picks up and threatens a dangerous storm.  Night falls, but mist and swirling snow hide the stars.  Between the failing light and the rising winds, the two of you seek shelter in a cavern.  After stepping within, you notice that it goes far into the mountain, and a strange light beckons from within.  The two of you explore, and find strange artifacts of seeming alien origin.  You stand on a curious platform to play with a control panel and your friend suddenly calls out when a light flashes and then...

A million years pass. You are, of course, trapped in a Stasis Field, but you don't know it. To you, an eyeblink has passed.  What happened in that million years?

Because ten billions years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness. -- Now and Then, Here and There

Scale fascinates me, mostly in how little I understand it, whether it be size, distance or time. I watched a rather depressing anime quoted above and noted the desire to explore such remote deep time, and I understand it: the creator wanted to explore the expansion of the sun and its desolate imagery on the world. Of course, such an expanse of time has some issues, namely life will likely cease on this planet within a billion years. Numenara does it too, putting the setting many billions of years in the future with a handwave about something extending the life of the sun (plausible!). But I wanted to narrow my scope down from such a gargantuan number, and I had already explored millennia. I wanted to explore what a million years looked like. I figured that was more than enough deep time to explore some interesting concepts. 

I've explored specific concepts of deep time, such as some exploration of geology or evolution, but I wanted to bundle it together to get a sense of what that world would look like, what the totality of the change would be. Now, I'm not an expert, and this post is the result of the most superficial exploration: I ask myself a question and then try to answer it. So don't expect high level analysis of geology of biology. Most of this is just a quick read of Wikipedia and some basic internet searches.

So, what happens in a million years?

After the flash fades, you blink your eyes and look around. You stand in a cavern room not that dissimilar from the one you left, but with bits of debris and dustier floors. The air is much colder and very thin. Your friend has vanished.   You walk out of the cave.  A clear night sky with unfamiliar, with no constellation you can recognize. Did you teleport to another world? You stand high up a mountain, the world laid out before you. With your supplies, you start to descent.

I got most of my material from the Timeline of the Far Future on Wikipedia, and according to it, the stellar motion would be such that no constellation would be recognizable in 100,000 years.  In most space opera, people (myself included!) tend to treat the stars as fixed, like terrain, but they're actually fluid, like grains in a whirlpool of amber or honey, slowly moving about in relation to one another.  It might not surprise you to learn the stars move, but what surprised me is that they're more fluid than a lot of other things here.

Next, geology.  I chose Everest because it was the only mountain whose erosion rate I could find: it's being worn away at a pace of about 3 cm a year.  But the Indian Plate continues to crash into the Eurasian Plate, and will for the next 10 million years, and as it does so, Everest rises at a pace of 5 cm a year, so on average, it increases in size about 2cm a year.  Over the course of 1000 years, that's 2 meters, and over the course of a million that's two kilometers (over a mile). That would lift Everest up to over 10,000 meters, as it's already over 8,000 meters. Now, I suspect that it actually can't get much taller: stresses on stone will break, so I suspect the top sheers off periodically in an avalanche, so perhaps the mountain is the same height, more or less, but if we imagined it sped up, it's rising and then bits fall off and rises and bits fall off, etc.  Either way, to our hero, it looks like a new mountain range.

What about the cave? Well, it's mostly a device.  I'm not sure about the geology of caves.  I imagine they're rather ephemeral on these sorts of time scales.  Humanity has a history of being in ancient caves, but those are tens of thousands of years, not millions of years.

Alright, so, as our hero descends, what sort of climate will greet him? We've heard so much about global warming, but any debate around it or its effects are mooted largely by the fact that 90% or more of the C02 emissions by humanity will have left the atmosphere allowing more natural cycles to return, unless humanity stirs it up again, but back to humanity later.   So if we're not concerned with global warming by this point, what does dominate our climate? Well, from what I can see of climate cycles, you can just pick, because it cycles around, but the overall trend seems to be down: natural processes seems to remove more and more C02 from the atmosphere over time, and despite the sun warming up, we seem to be cooling.  And the Quaternary is a fairly young epoch, one defined by ice age, so while I think you could probably argue anything, I'm going to go with "we return to a cycle of ice ages, and one approaches as our hero descends."

Between the chill of the night and what feels like an early onset of weather, you pull your coat tighter as you look for shelter.  You see no mountaineering sites, no built up shelters, but eventually, you come across two people, a man and a woman.  The woman rides the largest dog you've ever seen, who moves on long legs that end in three hoofed toes. The humans are willowy and slender, and you cannot make out their ethnicity; they certainly don't match your own. They wear simple garb, like ancient farm people. They stare at you, then raise their arm in greeting and shout unfamiliar words.  You shout back. After you join up, you soon realize you share no language in common and you cannot even identify what their language is.

So, the fate of humanity.  I'm calling a mulligan on this one, because humanity can potentially have such an enormous impact the environment, especially over the course of a million years that I find it impossible to extrapolate what they would do.  So I've opted for a what Bill Stoddard calls "a technologically regressed and mainly agricultural world" in GURPS Future History.  This is not because I predict it will happen, but because that makes it easier to work with.

The culture would obviously be completely different. Morris Swadesh argues that only about 1% of a language would remain roughly intact after 20,000 years, and we're discussing a length of time 50 times that length, so any similarity in language would either be the result of a coincidence, or a fantastic effort at maintaining antique languages.

According to Pulver and Peters, it takes a minimum of 200 years, give or take, to go from our happy TL8 selves all the way to TL12 and the end of the book. Add that on to the 11,000 or so years since the Neolithic Revolution and we get a technical lifespan from stone knives to Singularity of about 11,200 years. Posit a "Bright Ages" tech track that moves from Hellenistic heights to the High Medieval Scholasticism without that annoying Fall in the way, and you can shave another 800 years off that time; you can probably skip the Bronze Age Dark Ages as well for another 600 years. We get, thus, a bare minimum of 9,800 years for the tech tree to grow. More likely, Pulver and Peters' "medium" estimate puts the climb up from TL8 to Star Trek closer to 2,000 years --13,000 years all told. The "slow" estimate (assuming many small dark ages, rabid safe-tech or Luddite tendencies, and so forth) extends the entire techspan of humanity to 17,000 years at the most. Which means that the conventional lifespan of the human species so far could contain between ten and twenty full-blown technical civilizations, each rising from the ruins of the previous one, assuming that H. sapiens had started growing its own food right out of the gate.
-- Kenneth Hite, Cities in Rust, Alternative Ultra-Tech

Let's consider the scale of how much culture would probably change. Let us assume that humanity, first of all, survives (in contrast to the Doomsday argument, which seems to imply we'll all be gone within 100,000 years).  Second, let us assume that we either have, or will shortly (within a thousand years) reach a point of technological stagnation and decline, followed by a period of essentially no technology, followed by a rise of a new civilization, which faces the same fate, over and over again.  All recorded history dates back about 5000 years, and some of the oldest structures in the world date back 10,000 years.  If we assume a cycle of a rise of 10,000 years, and a decline of 10,000 years, we get a 20,000 year cycle, which lines up nicely with Hite's 17,000 long-term estimate.  We would have fifty of these over the course of a million years. If we wanted a longer timespan, say 100,000, we must first note that humanity has only 300,000 years old, and we left Africa 100,000 years go, so this is an enormous length of time. We would still have ten of these civilizational cycles. 

That's so many that you'd need to break them down into groupings. We might use something like a dawn age, a rise to power, a golden age, degeneration and catastrophe, and then an exhausted decline into a dark age, analogous to the early Roman kingdom, the Roman Republic, the early Roman Empire, the Crisis of the 3rd Century, and then the fall of Rome, and assign these themes to each of our civilizations, except if we did that, we'd need to assign between two and ten civilizations to each theme: these are the dawn civilizations, these are the rising civilizations, these were the great civilizations and so on.  And they would have so much time between them that they're only knowledge of one another would be their ruins, but not that much of them would remain: the pyramids, for example, would be unrecognizable after 1 million years, and all of our glass artifacts would have disintegrated totally.  Of course, if we assume civilization after civilization, then the remnants of the last few would remain, layer after layer of civilization after civilization built atop one another, each a different era at least as extensive as our own, with their own languages, histories and conflicts, between ten and fifty of them.  Our first would be on the verge of being totally forgotten, but there would be newer ones remembered. If our hero learned the language and claimed to be from one of these past civilizations, they would likely assume one of the mid to late ones, not the very first, of which barely anyone would remember. This would not be akin to finding someone from ancient Rome, or ancient Egypt, or even from the Yamnaya culture or the people who built Gobekli Teppe, but to the first people to step out of Africa.  You would be impossibly ancient to them.

But would there even be humans? Well, mammals tend to last 1-2 million years, so it's plausible that humanity would survive. I tend to lean towards a pretty high likelihood of survival.  A lot of the existential threats we fear aren't actually effective enough to wipe us out completely, and if even a few of us survive, our technological knowledge would probably see us through.  Realize that there were several human species and the last ice age wiped all of them out, all of them except us.  We survived that extinction event; I think it's likely we'll survive many more. In fact, my approach is quite pessimistic: 1 million years is about the time it would take for humanity to conquer the galaxy.  Our hero could easily awaken to an Earth completely covered in forests and reclaimed by nature and tended only by some transhuman demigods and robots as a nature preserve and the ancestral home of a humanity that formed a galactic empire.  This is the sort of thing I mean when I say "It's hard to predict what humanity would do."

But could we evolve? Would new species form? Well, we're approaching a total mixture of humanity, so that our genetic pool no longer has regional variations, thanks to modern travel and interbreeding. If that sort of thing keeps up, and humanity remains highly successful, I don't see why there would be major selective pressures. On the other hand, if we have a series of catastrophes that kicks civilization back to the stone age, that might be just enough time to create new regional variations that could start to push into new species.  What would these new species look like? I don't know, that sort of speculation, while fun, isn't the sort of thing you could easily model.  I suspect you can do whatever you want.  I would suspect the wouldn't be much diverged.  Many of our cousin species weren't especially different from us: perhaps a bit more robust, perhaps a bit shorter.  We might see taller humans, or more gracile humans, or things like toe-walking become a norm, or smarter humans, or humans with more pronounced sexual dimorphism, or even less. But I don't think you'd see huge changes: you'd need to be a biologist in many cases to really point out the differences: more like elves vs humans (and lions vs tigers) than something truly alien or strange.

But we would certainly see other animals evolve. We are in the midst of an extinction event now, which puts considerable pressures on life.  Domesticated animals, like dogs, have been vastly more successful than wild animals, so we might see an era were domesticated animals, after the fall, slowly radiate back out into the environment to occupy empties ecological niches.  I suspect an animal like a dog, which already manages to create things as different as a chihuahua, a dachshund and a St. Bernard all within the same species, would be highly effective at occupying a variety of niches. But I really have no idea, except to note that you might see some different animals, but the difference might be quite subtle. After all, when was the last time you noticed most animals of the wild?

With some effort, you learn the local language and join the local farming community. You teach them some of what you know, but it's difficult and ill health plagues you for years.  Eventually, you gain the strength and resources to start to travel the world.  You discover that most of the geography remains the same: the mountains look different, but the ranges and the oceans and the valleys all occupy the same spaces, and the continents look the same. Careful cartographical measurements would likely reveal a million changes, but you're struck by how similar the maps look.  You do manage to find the ruins of your home, long abandoned except for a nearby farming community.  Painstakingly, you dig and dig beneath the layers and layers of ruins, of the countless civilizations that came before until you reach your own layer, which has been reduces to fossils. But the ruins do remains.

I went into this wondering what the continents would look like.  I was stunned to realize how slowly continents drifted.

It's not really that clear to me how much the landscape would change. The Rockies won't wear away for 50-100 million years, but Niagra Falls would be long gone.  Rivers would probably change their course but still mostly exist, and the grand canyon would lose a lot of its shape and widen out into a broad valley and most of the interesting rock formations of the badlands of the US would have eroded away.  If we get new ice ages, they might carve out some new lakes and valleys.  The Sahara might green again, then turn into a desert again, then green again, who knows.

Obviously, no bones from your era would survive, but fossils can start to form in as few as a thousand years. In fact, our remains might show up in the museums of a much later civilization, which itself would collapse and become fossilized for a later museum, before we even reach our one million year mark.  But the "urban stratum" of our civilization should be discoverable for at least 100 million years. So we could find it, if we looked for it.

Looking Back

My big takeaways from this exercise were:

• Cultures, language and history is barely an eyeblink to deep time.
  
• Stars move fast 
• Climate moves quickly
  
• Speciation moves somewhat slowly
  
• Geology moves slowly
• Continents crawl

Our lives are just dust in the wind compared to deep time.  Even our civilizations are ephemeral. Eternal mountains become pliable and change their face over deep time, and immortal constellations vanish away.  But the map stays the same. We will be gone before the Himalayas wear away.

This sort of thinking can be very sobering, but I also find it somewhat heartening.  I often view time and space as a stage for the dramas of our lives.  How much time do we actually have on that stage? From a human perspective a million years is so vast as to begin to beggar the ability of the human mind to really grasp it (it's also, clearly, more than enough time to set a game like Numenara; you don't need to reach for billions of years). But in all that time, barely anything will change about our planet on the grand scale. The day will have slowed down by a few seconds. The sun will barely have warmed at all (life will cease in 1.5 billion years or so on earth, and 1 million years is less than a percent of that time).  We have time enough for grand adventures and sweeping explorations, if we're patient.