Billions of years

I was reading The Last Question by Isaac Asimov and he spoke of human civilization at several points of time. Points of time so far apart that I had never imagined them. It went from today to a hundred years from now to a thousand, million, tens of billions, even a trillion years from now.

The first was a civilization with an early superintelligence that required a massive room to support it. That could describe today's world. As billions of years passed, the superintelligence grew in scale and shrunk in size. Mankind changed with it, turning from people on Earth interested in a new technology to people living in billions of worlds beyond the Milky Way.

As generations looked back, trying to think of where humanity began, they had no idea. No one knew. They asked the superintelligence, and it searched and searched its data until it eventually found a puny planet that had long been abandoned because its star had turned into a white dwarf.

Humans went from foraging to farming 12,000 years ago. The wheel was invented 6,000 years ago. The steam engine was made 300 years ago. The transistor was invented 70 years ago. Humanity will set up bases on the moon and Mars in the next 20 years. And mass immigration will follow after that. I wonder when humanity will leave Earth for good, leaving our fellow species behind for their inevitable death. But do we have to leave them?

When God sent the flood to wipe out humanity because they were consumed by greed, Noah was spared because of his virtue. Noah was tasked to gather two of each species and place them on an ark. After humanity was nearly wiped out, God promised Noah that he would never wipe out humanity again. The Sun doesn't seem to care though.

So where's the next Noah's ark? Is it Elon's starship?

We classify species in an interesting way. A few months ago, I saw a video where someone was scraping barnacles off a sea turtle to save its life. The comments on X were praising the individual for saving an innocent creature. One comment stood out, pointing out that we're fine with killing tens of barnacles to save the life of a sea turtle. Very utilitarian. Prioritizing human life over other species is obvious since human life is sacred (by our nature), but we've also brought that to other species. The most satisfying power-washing videos of old gravestones destroy entire moss populations, but no one cares. Should anyone? But how many neurons will make a species worthy of the ark? Some humans I know may be left back in place of a smart orca. Anyways. People will probably debate this in 2,000,024.

VCs always ask, "what will the world look like ten years from now?," driven by their fund's hold-period. Instead, I wonder what will the world look like a billion years from now.