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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

While the topic is on. I am trying to find a short story I read some years ago (4-5) about the evolution of life on our planet in the far future.

Warning, massive spoilers:

There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then it jumps to another civ. and the earth is totally smooth and people are living in holes in the ground (this might be another story from Baxter). Then it's some earth inner core creatures fungi-like. It ends with the sun expansion making life on earth impossible and a mars creature pondering all that.

Rings any bells ?

View on HN

John Michael Greer - The Next Ten Billion Years

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...

Thank you, that's the one :).

Could it be Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? It's a novel, not a short story, but it has the same structure you've described involving successive sentient races (including bird-like people) and the planets gradually becoming uninhabitable.

Edit: Apparently Last and First Men was heavily influenced by a short story, "The Last Judgment" by J.B.S. Haldane. Source: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall99/end.html. Maybe that's the one you remember?

Thanks, I checked both but it's not it. It really was a short story, no more than ten minutes of reading. Also I distinctly remember the moon rover reference and emphasis that wouldn't likely be depicted as I remember it considering the 1927 date of publication of the short story.

I am pretty sure the author wasn't a published author. It was a blog post.

Now, here's the interesting part.

I was sure I first read that story when it was first submitted on HN. Sure enough here it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860839, I even put out a comment in a discussion.

The funny thing now is that someone mentioned the very wikipedia article `Timeline of the far future` in that short story submission.

Ah, patterns.

I came across this article by looking up Neptune and going down a wikipedia rabbit hole after seeing another submission that's currently on the front page: `Supersharp Images from New VLT Adaptive Optics`

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17556955

That sounds fascinating; try https://old.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

Maybe Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

It's a good book to check off the list but it is stylistically tedious.

I always thought the style was part of the intention to express the enormous amount of time described. When you get to the end of the book you are left with the feeling like you have lived a billion years :)

I'm adding it to the list, thanks.

Sounds like The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

How could the Earth be totally smooth?

Extreme weather with atmospheric acidification that slowly eats away at everything on the surface like a polishing a rock. It would take hundreds of thousands or millions of years but it's plausible as the sun slowly expands, which causes tidal stresses and significantly increases surface temperatures making the landscape a lot more dynamic.

Dunno. Also, the author hints than the night is endless and cold and the child, which the author uses to convey that part of the story, is scolded by his parents and ordered to get back underground where it's warmer.

Hmm... maybe it only looks smooth from space, like Venus or Uranus? An impenetrable cloud layer (like in The Matrix) would explain the cold on the surface and the endless night.

Someone probably deployed a plot device.

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