Futurologists envision a world a million years from now in which the entire solar system has been turned into computronium and nanobots transform our garbage into foie gras. But in my experience, the repeated sin of futurologists is that they often extrapolate from what is new rather than from what is old. Computers and nanotechnology, impressive though they are, are things of relatively recent origin. As such, they are unlikely to be around for very long.
To find something that will pretty certainly endure into the distant future, we are obliged, paradoxically enough, to go back much farther into the past. And if we could cast a look back several million years, we would see, among other things, laughter and numbers. So we can be pretty confident that laughter and numbers will survive long after most of what we’re familiar with is gone.
The insight that old things tend to last and new things tend to disappear flows from the Copernican principle. This principle says, in essence, “You’re not special.” Before Copernicus, we imagined that we occupied a very special place at the center of the universe. Now we know better: We are on an average planet in an average galaxy in an average cluster. But the Copernican principle applies to time as well as to space. If there is nothing special about our perspective, we are unlikely to be observing any given thing at the very beginning or the very end of its existence. And that rather obvious point can lead to some interesting predictions.
