Watch Earth Change 100 Million Years in the Future

This. Is. Earth... 335 million years ago. I wasn’t around then, but there’s just one supercontinent, Pangaea. See? Let’s watch it shift around in fast-forward. Ok here we go, it just split into two huge pieces! Australia goes this way, North and South America go that way. Africa, Asia, Europe, forming, forming... and there we go, the planet as it is today.

Let’s keep going, I mean, the continents are always on the move! Over time, some of them will crash into each other, others will break apart. But that’ll take about 100 million years! Better put it on super fast-forward! 100 years from now. Humans keep spitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the planet’s already warmed up a bunch. The world’s ocean levels have risen about 4 feet. The Bahamas? They’ve totally disappeared!

200 years from now. The Earth’s population is about 19 billion people. The climate’s gotten even warmer, we’re packed in like sardines over here! New medical tech makes it possible to live to 180! But why? Fossil fuel reserves of oil and gas... long gone. Oh, and the continents have drifted over 16 feet!

The Voyager 1 space probe’s about to enter an asteroid cloud at the edge of the solar system. It’s the most distant man-made object in the... universe, I guess? 1,000 years from now. Thanks to better quality food, humans are now 7 feet tall, on average. Technology’s solved the pollution and fuel shortage problem. Humanity’s doing just fine, robots do all the work, we just play around all day!

Ocean levels have crept up another 10 feet. Islands like the Seychelles, Maldives, Galápagos, and many others have gone underwater. Denmark, the Netherlands, Eastern England, Thailand, and Vietnam are only partially underwater, there’s been a huge human migration these last hundred years! Fast-forward about 5,000 more years, and it’s the year 8113, humanity’s getting ready to open the Crypt of Civilization! It’s a hermetically sealed room in Georgia, in the states. THAT Georgia.

It was created in 1940, and it’s full of about 800 books on microfilm, recordings of famous people’s voices... It’s also filled with bits of technology from that time, like a toaster, a radio, and a typewriter. Some awesome people created the crypt of civilization in case humans experienced a major catastrophe in the distant future and had to rebuild civilization from scratch. We’d all go back to using typewriters!

15,000 years from now. Our planet has changed its tilt, and the Sahara Desert is now a tropical paradise. Years of rain turned the dry desert into a wild jungle! 30,000 years from now. The Voyager 1 space probe has finally left the asteroid cloud at the edge of our solar system. If it doesn’t collide with anything, it’ll be flying in the dark, wide-open outer space for a very long time.

50,000 years from now. The climate’s changing a lot. The temperature on Earth is beginning to drop, and we are approaching the beginning of a new ice age! The radio signal with a special “hello all you aliens out there” message sent into space in 1974, has reached its destination. The message contained the human number system, and data about our DNA and our Solar system. If there was someone on the other end to receive this signal, we might have a response from them.

100,000 years from now. One of the largest known stars in our galaxy, Canis Majoris, explodes with enormous force. The explosion of this supernova can be seen from Earth, even during the day! And the nights are much brighter because of the new strong glow in the night sky.

What’s new on Earth? Super volcanoes start erupting all over! These volcanoes spew colossal amounts of lava and ash everywhere. Thick black clouds cover most of the sky. This prevents the Sun’s rays from reaching the ground, and the temperature on our planet drops even lower.

Humans mostly live underground anyway, so it’s no big deal! Because the stars are gradually moving in different directions, the usual constellations are starting to change shape. Soon we’ll need to come up with totally new constellation names!

250,000 years from now. Oh, a new island’s on the map! Back in 2021, it was just an underwater volcano, somewhere in the Pacific. After thousands of years of spouting out lava, it finally reached the ocean surface and busted out into the cool fresh air! Not much growing on it yet... Niagara Falls has long since disappeared, and Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have teamed up to form one huge super-lake!

300,000 years from now. The triple star system WR 104 is about to explode! It’s spinning crazy fast, and there’s a chance that the radiation from the explosion could eventually reach Earth. That would do a lot of damage to all life on our planet! Voyager 1 reaches the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius. Not a very funny star at all. It’s really serious. It’s 8.6 light-years from Earth.

500,000 years from now. Scientists are pretty sure that a huge meteorite could fall to Earth any day now! It might even be the size of eight football fields. The impact of such a massive meteorite would cause an explosion so powerful that its sound would be heard on every continent. That would be followed by super strong earthquakes, and tsunamis higher than the Bright Side Empire Municipal Building-Tower Thingee! Ok I just made that up, but who knows what we’ll be building in the future!

1 million years from now. The rogue star Gliese 710 comes very close to our Solar system. We’re surrounded by a huge shield of asteroids, called the Oort cloud, and the rogue star’s beginning to affect the asteroids hanging out in there. It grabs them, spins them around and throws them towards the center of our Solar system. Comets start to fall on our planet all the time, big ones, causing more tsunamis and earthquakes! 10 million years from now. The Red Sea is gradually expanding into the East African Rift. Africa is now divided in two by a new oceanic gulf.

The human DNA molecule has completely decomposed. But it’s no big deal. We’ve become totally digital, without any pesky aging problems. The really cool thing is that other animals have evolved a lot, and changed ridiculously! Thanks to a simple interface, we’re actually able to talk to dolphins, chimps, dogs, and cats. Turns out cats aren’t grumpy, they’re just busy contemplating life.

25 million years from now. The San Andreas Fault has been crazy recently, and has caused the Gulf of California to flood the Central Valley. There’s a new sea on the West Coast of North America!

50 million years from now. Africa just collided with Eurasia. The Mediterranean Sea is totally gone. There’s a new “tallest mountain in the world”. It’s name? Mount Everest of course! Australia’s continuing its journey North. It already collided with Southeast Asia a few million years ago! The few human colonies still left on Mars need to do some serious packing. Phobos, one of Mars’s moons is beginning to orbit at a lower and lower altitude, that’s not good! It’s about 14 miles wide [14 mi (22.5 km)], so...that’s gonna be unpleasant!

60 million years from now. The Canadian Rocky Mountains have completely eroded, it’s just one gigantic flat plain!

80 million years from now. All that remains of Hawaii is one island. All the others have long since gone underwater. But just next door, a whole new chain of Hawaiian islands has emerged! Finally.

100 million years from now, we made it! The Atlantic’s shrinking down to nothing, the Americas are almost rubbing up against Africa, Africa’s already merged with Eurasia... We’ve got ourselves a super continent again! Hello Pangaea Proxima!

All traces of human life are gone, or buried deep underground. The movement of the continents has destroyed tunnels, roads, buildings, bridges... Animals and plants now reign supreme on Earth. So where are all the humans?

Well, remember we made the jump to digital about 90 million years ago? Things are still going strong! There are trillions of human minds living on a huge hard drive on a spaceship orbiting Earth. The super low space temperature is good for keeping the drive nice and cool.

We have millions of different societies, languages and cultures, just like we had 100 million years ago. The only difference? We’re all little 1’s and 0’s in a huge digital universe... that we created! And yes, there’s still football.