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Timelapse of 4 Billion Years into the Future

Beeyond Ideas | June 3, 2026



In this video, we’ll sit down in our time machine and go forward four billion years into the future.

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Music tracks in this video:
Addicted – VYEN
Gathering Darkness – Kevin MacLeod
Heaven and Hell – Jeremy Blake
Landing On a Dark Planet – Doug Maxwell
Moorland – Underbelly & Ty Mayer
Space Hunter – Quincas Moreira
The Awakening – Patrick Patrikios
The Battle of 1066 – Patrick Patrikios
The Loner – DJ Williams

Gathering Darkness by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Timecode:
0:00 Introduction
0:51 A closer look into the past
1:48 A method to look into the future
3:21 Timeline of the far future
8:44 Conclusion

————————————————————-

Script

Before we look into the future, let’s have a closer look into the past.
The latest results from NASA’s WMAP satellite suggest the universe is 13.75 billion years old. This is with a margin of error of 0.1 billion years. Which makes it clear that trying to gaze into the cosmic crystal ball is always a challenging task. If it’s hard to look into the past, it’s sure going to be a foolhardy exercise to look into the future.

On top of all that, the observable universe is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter. This means that it would take a beam of light to travel for 93 billion years, from one side to the other. I’m just gonna go out on a limb here to say that it’s impossible to explore the whole universe in one lifetime. For us living beings.

But on the other hand, astronomers, with the help of the Hubble telescope, said they can predict the future of stars and the universe. Not only for a few years. We’re talking 10,000 years into the future. So how did they do it?

Well, astronomers used the Hubble telescope to map the motion of 100,000 stars, in the Omega Centauri cluster. This was happening for over a period of four years. Omega Centauri itself is one of the star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy, and is about 15,000 light years away from Earth.
Anyway, back to Omega Centauri. This star cluster could be seen in the southern sky with a naked eye. In fact, the ancient astronomer Ptolemy even cataloged this as a single star.

And fast forward centuries later, now with the Hubble telescope, astronomers know that it was in fact a compact cluster of stars. Millions of them. And they move like a swarm of bees.

So taking that data taken from 2002 until 2006, astronomers created a simulation of these star’s motions. This was then used as a baseline, to predict the future motion of stars projected over the next thousands of years.

Of course, there is a big uncertainty. Like if this baseline is used for the far future, it should account for the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy must rise over time for the next billions of years. Who knows if the baseline model still holds true in the far future. With that in mind, please, take the information presented in this video with a grain of salt. But before we go down the list one by one, I’m just gonna spoil what’s gonna happen at the end of this video.

Now let’s sit back in our time machines, relax and start our journey into the far future.

In 10,000 years.
The red supergiant star named Antares would explode into a supernova due to a shortage of hydrogen in its core. This explosion would be so big that it would be visible on Earth in daylight.

In 15,000 years.
Earth’s axial tilt would be reversed. Because of this, the summer and the winter would occur on the opposite side of our planet. Australia would have their first wintery Christmas for the first time in 20,000 years. But the last time Christmas happened here, there was no Christmas.
Either way, this would also mean that the northern hemisphere would experience a more extreme weather due to a high percentage of land to sea ratio.

In 20,000 years.
Earth would face a supervolcanic eruption which would be life-threatening and could also wipe out the entire civilization. Imagine the Krakatoa eruption in 1800, now multiply that by 1000 and you’d have that super volcanic eruption. If for example the human kind could survive that, pretty much they would be back to the age with no technological development at all.

In 100,000 years.
Due to the constant motion of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, many constellations in the sky would be non-visible. Some of them would have a complete change in their geometrical shape. The hyper giant star named VY Canis Majoris would explode into a supernova and the traces of its explosion would leave precious metals like gold and platinum into deep space.

#Timelapse #Future #Universe

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Written by Beeyond Ideas

Comments

This post currently has 45 comments.

  11. @eoachan9304

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    You DO realize that the average distance between stars in a galaxy would mean star to star collisions are very unlikely? I'd worry more about gas and dust collisions if nebulae causing a burst of star formation and more super novae! Next time, do your research better as you appear to lack a good deal of background…

  13. @LogicalAayaam

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    Your videos are great. I have one suggestion – do not put your logo in between the video, its really distracting. Otherwise, your videos are on point.

  15. @jonathanwu5681

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    At 0:33, your visualization is wrong. 1) the length shown is not 1/3rd. and 2) you should show the 4 billion years elapsed in the right of the scale, because earth's history is 4.6 billion years before now.

  17. @dreamweaver008

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    If you say the universe has a diameter of 93 bil. lightyears, doesn’t that contradict that nothing can travel faster than the light vs. the age of the universe being ‚only‘ 14 bil. years?

  26. @bahamout

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    This is good bullshit, I really admire the team efforts. But if predicting the whole universe for the next billion years is that possible, isn't predicting the earth disasters is more sense to you?!!!! Covid for example?!!!!!

  34. @jc7906

    June 3, 2026 at 7:43 am

    Choose your own adventure. Ending 1, you're dead. Ending 2, you're dead. Ending 3, yes, you guessed it, you're dead.

Comments are closed.

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