h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

But what if you ended up with an eternal hangover?

Oh, silly me, that'd lead to eternal hair of the dog!

Hoh yus :- But more seriously, it'd be so amazing to see into the future say fifty years (which I might just manage to do if I live that long), then 100 years etc., etc., see the change in society, in technology, the environmental changes etc the advances in science etc space travel blah blah blah but mainly itd be cool to have that much drinking up time

I'd go for it, mainly to see the variations in the shape of continents.

If you did live forever, would time seem to pass faster?

I don't think time as such would exist for you.

Well, in some sense it would - there would still be a way of expressing the gap between two events happening.

There was a fascinating series called "THe Future is Wild" which did predictions of what would happen to the animal kingdom 5,10 and 100 million years in the future (I think those were the dates). They postulated continents continue to move in the direction they are going now (so that Antarctica will become a jungle, but never having been near other continents will have only birds, for example). They also introduced one mass extinction due to volcanic eruptions at around the 100 million year mark, so all vertebrates die out. It was fascinating.

I'd like to see are they right.

You would cease to obey the rules of the physical universe. It is very difficult to imagine how you would perceive your surroundings - you would presumably have a completely different frame of reference to explain what we call time. Everything else in the universe would obey cycles, but the monotony of these may leave you unable to focus at this level.

Another mad theory I had recently was what if humans eventually became the only major land vertebrate left on the planet? Would we eventually all split up into different species in order to occupy particular ecological niches? So, say in 15 million years time, a traveller would come across grazer humanoids that had long necks and extra stomachs so they could eat leaves and grass, other types of humanoids would have evolved into fierce predators with acute vision and hearing, sharp teeth and padded feet, other humans would reduce in size to become burrowing creatures eating roots and small insects, maybe even a few would develop wings and echolocation. Heck we might even have humans evolving into marine creatures, no longer needing legs - just becoming streamlined with fins etc. I think you get the idea...

Stephen Baxter has done some interesting stories about another Ice Age, populated by modified humans.