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Comment by stallmanite | Hacker News Reader

My all-time favorite wikipedia article, great to see it getting some attention. I find that along with providing great fodder for small-talk (among certain types), it causes me to experience a psychological effect analogous to the so-called "overview effect" experienced by astronauts. Attempting to conceive of one's place in cosmological time is great exercise.

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I am glad to read I wasn't the only one feeling a deep feeling. The facts about past and present gives one an overview effect already, but man the future... makes you feel really insignificant. I am mostly shocked by how all the predictions about Antares etc. show their death pretty soon. We look at these major big stars with awe and inspiration putting great significance to them, yet in the long scale...; their death is closer to us than that of T-rex... much closer.

If you're into role-playing games, you might enjoy Numenera [0].

A setting that takes place a billion (!) years in Earth's future, after several civilizations have peaked and gone, each building upon the remains of the ones before it and then reshaping the planet yet again to it will, to the point that even the layers of accumulated detritus from the past seem unfathomably magical to future inhabitants (e.g. soil that can reshape itself, or windstorms made up of nanomachines that reshape anything they engulf.)

Consider how mines from wars that took place a hundred years ago are still killing people. [1] Imagine some nomads from a hundred years in the future accidentally coming upon these. After a point, technology simply becomes a feature of the terrain, and indistinguishable from nature (another example would be our selective-breeding and cultivations of animals and plants over centuries to develop new hybrids that are now commonplace.)

All of this really piques my interest in what this world will be like in a few thousand years.

[0] http://numenera.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188135

Made me remember a Carl Sagan quote.

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever"

As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place shall know it no more. -Psalm 103:15-17

Yes, being aware of the scale of any sorts is tremendously valuable. The scale of suffering, complexity, culture (having travelled the world makes it smaller), time, distance puts things in perspective. Knowing the extremes, it's warm and fuzzy in the middle, most of the time.

I still remember the first time I found this page, and the deep existential crisis that followed!

I came here to say this. I peruse this article every once in a while; not intentionally, but I end up coming around to it from time to time, often during Wikipedia binges.

#mefour. I have recommended this article in various conversations over the years. I love how it's grown to include projections from various diverse fields. I feel I have lived forever after reading through it. And the mind-numbing scale eases fears over death for me.

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