Tear Down the Idols: Week 1 • Ps Luke de Jong • LIFE Central

We've come a long way. Let's see where that journey leads a million years from now. A million is a flame number. It's been out to feel almost abstract, whether we're talking about years in the future or subscribers on this channel. And as we hit that milestone, it felt like a good time to ask a much bigger question. What does Shumei look like in the year 1 million AD? By then, we may have spread across the galaxy, reshaped our bodies and minds, and learned to experience time in ways that make a million years feel like a lifetime, or a long weekend. We may not even agree on what it means for human anymore. It was also a chance that some of us alive today might still be around to find out. So, grab a drink and a snack, subscribe if you're not one of the million folks who already have, and let's take a look at year 1 million AD. The galaxy by 1 million AD. When we talk about a million years in the future, the first question we have to ask is a simple one. How far could we actually go? Because the galaxy is big, but not that big. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, surrounded by a halo of stars and dwarf galaxies extending even further out. That sounds enormous, and it is, but on a million year time scale, it becomes surprisingly manageable. If you travel at or near the speed of light, you can cross the galaxy multiple times in that span. Even at just 10% of light speed, you can still traverse the entire galaxy in a million years, and that's assuming a fairly conservative approach to interstellar travel. We have ship signs like Orion or Medusa that can probably get us to a few percent of light speed, and it wouldn't let us get to most the galaxy by then. If we have options like nuclear fusion or anti-matter or beam propulsion, which I think we certainly would by then if they were at all possible, it should make colony ships move at 10% or even much faster, viable to let us expand out from Earth. But in practice, you probably wouldn't expand as a simple slow-growing sphere centered on Earth. You cheat. You see, it takes few notches to speed up, but to slow down, and even even voyages of 10,000 years in generation ships would still use less energy for life support than you need to slow that ship back down from 10% or 20% of light speed. You can go far faster if you break for free in whole or apart. So instead of just spreading outward evenly, you might deliberately see distant parts of the galaxy early, send fleets far ahead, not to nearby stars, but to carefully chosen targets tens of thousands of light years away. A close pass around a black hole, especially a binary pair, connects as a gravitational break, bleeding off enormous amounts of velocity, and then you turn for free to come out of new vector and speed, higher or lower than you begin with as you choose. Or you might skim the ultra thin outer layers of a red giant star using its atmosphere as ample solar wind to slow down. These become natural anchor points, place where a fast-moving colony ship can arrive, shed its speed, and establish a new hub of expansion. Both are also likely to be rich in power generation and raw materials, so instead of one expanding bubble, you get a network. Multiple expansion centers scattered across the galaxy, they then expand outward from them like a raindrop falling on a pond at Ripley and Outward. This is a similar approach to how you might conize things if you had wormholes, which is generally the fast and light method I consider the least implausible, CR wormhole, state-of-ways episode for more discussion. But that leads to another important point. Colonization is not a step-by-step process where you set a one-planet, wait 10,000 years, and then move on to the next, its overlapping waves. When a new system is settled, it won't be the frontier colony that sends out the next wave. It will be order more developed systems closer to the center of expansion. They have the infrastructure, the population, and the industry to keep pushing outward. Those new walls, the ones most recently settled, can't supply information and aid to passing to solar arc ships. They can even send small contingents of people and supplies to join an alchlet that mobilized closer to the core, and may even have left before that colony had actually been established. The anark fleet might pass by a system more recently founded than its origin world on journey to a new system, only to be passed a few decades later by a ship that came from that former frontier outpost. So too, we could have ships that only stopped to resupply fuel and raw materials to new walls and drop off half their colonists and breed back up to four strength and each being decades the next world, what we call a gardener ship. So you don't get a chain where a world gets settled, rose for thousands years and then sends out a ship to the next empty world, Vince and a repeat, as we see in percolation theory. Instead you get what at a large scale appears to be a growing sphere, large expanding shells of sediment driven from the interior or the local black hole hub, the leapfroggy outward. The frontier keeps moving, but it's powered by everything behind it, not just what's at the edge. And once you factor in population growth, things accelerate even more. Even very modest growth rates compound quickly over long time scales when there's room, resources, and will to grow. If a population doubles every couple centuries, a rate that will fuel slow to us now, that's still explosively tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Double just once a century and you go from a million people to a trillion in one star system in just 2,000 years, a quadrillion in another thousand. But pie in years can double the number of multiple times a century when resources permit and when they want to, and for post-biological civilizations or ones using cloning or duplication, those limits might even loosen. They might go from a small sea to a full-dyson swarm in a couple centuries. Probably not faster. There are some real limits on how fast you can disassemble planets even with gray goo. As we saw in the episode, harvesting planets. So filling a solar system, really filling it, building out habitats, megastructures, and industry doesn't take long on these timescails, reaching something like a Kardashev type 2 civilization, harnessing the full output of a star might take thousands of years, or even tens of thousands of years, if you grow slower than we do now. That sounds like a long time. To you remember, we have a million years to work with, which means that even for small sea colony reached a star system early on, it would likely have had more than enough time to fully develop by the present day in our scenario. And that leads us to a striking conclusion. If the galaxy had been broadly settled, even a hundred thousand years before the year 1 million AD, save on 900 thousand AD, then by now you would expect to see a patchwork of early colonies. You would expect maturity, most if not nearly all star systems would already be heavily developed. Mini would likely be operating at or near Kardashev type 2 levels, fully utilizing the energy of their stars, and taking together that starts to look like a Kardashev type 3 civilization, not necessarily uniform, not centrally organized, but collectively using a substantial fraction of the galaxy's total energy output. Of course that doesn't mean every system looks the same. Some regions might remain likely settled by choice or circumstances, others might be intensely developed packed with habitats and infrastructure. Some civilizations might deliberately limit their energy use while others push toward maximum expansion. The Kardashev skill isn't really a latter you climb, it's a landscape you spread across. But the key takeaway is this. A million years is not just enough time to reach the stars, it's enough time to reach almost all of them, and to transform them. A million years before tomorrow. Tomorrow is always just minutes away, at least that's how it feels to us. Creatures running on slow wet hardware, we have thoughts crawl along the speed of nerve impulses. Your brain signals move at something just under the speed of sound while light nature's true speed limit is over a million times faster, and that gap is enormous and important. Because what we think of as "normal time" isn't really time at all, we're engaging it by our experience of passing events. That's truly consistent for us, as individuals and as a species sharing the same brain architecture and hardware, but it's not a fundamental property of consciousness. It's just the speed our biology happens to run at. Here's the hardware, and you change time itself, or at least our experience of it, which is what we mostly mean when we talk about time. Now, mind you, a sufficiently advanced civilization might have ways to actually slow speed of time in localized regions, bubbles of space where a year passes on Earth for every million outside, or vice versa, there are at least some plausible pathways to that known physics. But here we're talking about something else, whether an individual or even entire civilization could transition to digital or synthetic minds and simply accelerate their subjective experience. This is often called "frame-jacking", increasing the number of conscious moments experienced per second of real time, and my friend, Dancy Taylor-Los, excellent Bob-A-First novels, spent a lot of time exploring this idea. The key thing is, once you start changing subjective time, the numbers get wild very quickly. The speed of human thought really the signals. It's curiate, peaks out at just over 100 meters per second, about 250 miles per hour. That's impressively fast by human standards, and tends to a couple of hundred times faster than a slower, un-mila-nated nerves, which operate down around walking to jogging speeds and are often involved in things like pain and temperature. Light, meanwhile, is a few million times faster than your quickest brain signals, and a few hundred million times faster than the slowest ones. Now if you could think a million times faster than a biological human, then one second of real time would feel like about 11 and a half days. You'd have around a week to form a good reply to any comment or question, so when asked you in a casual conversation, while you were still inhaling to respond. Or alternatively, to prepare to ask them to blow your head off, since experience a single frozen moment like that would probably drive you to madness and despair. In practice, we'd expect people to use this in controlled ways, short bursts under their control, or inside virtual environments, wanting to control speed relative to them. Some might prefer to always run a bit faster than the baseline, maybe 10% quicker, just have a little extra time. But more likely systems would adjust automatically. In a dangerous situation, your subjected time speeds up, letting you watch bullets drift by. In a quiet moment it slows back down, you can dial it up and down at will. But there are limits. Speeding up thought isn't just about swapping neurons for faster wiring. Neurons take time to fire, and thoughts involve thousands or millions of them interacting. Simply speedy up communication between them does not solve the whole process. And then there's heat. Your brain is very carefully designed to shed it. That bring up even a little in your risk damage, speed up thousands of times, and your head isn't just hurting, it's catching on fire. And don't assume computers automatically solve that problem. Before chatbots became the big headline, one of the major height milestones in computing was building supercomputers that matched or exceeded what we estimate to be the processing power of a human brain. But your brain runs on about 10 watts, roughly a dim light bulb, while those machines used megawatts. You still have to dump that heat somewhere. And while our brains are three-dimensional structures optimized for cooling and connectivity, most of our computing hardware is still comparatively flat and space inefficient. Biology is slow, but it is astonishingly efficient. That doesn't mean we couldn't do better, but a post-human mind trying to think a million times faster probably isn't just upgrading its processor. It's spreading out, offloading work into larger physical systems. Then again, most of your brain isn't doing you think conscious in the first place, so you don't necessarily need to scale conscious thought linearly with total brain capacity, but you will want a lot more subconscious processing too, especially for things you currently never even notice. But it's probably possible to create a human mind that runs a million times faster, or even more, even if you had to offload some of that processing and tinker with perception and time for the architecture. Such being the case, one year would feel like a million years, and a million years the outside year-verse, and that could be experienced as trillions of years of internal history. You could imagine a group of post-humans who under remained broadly human in modern outlook, decided to build themselves into an ice ball somewhere in the art cloud, running a million times faster, maybe even within a century or so from now. Then when the first interstellar colonists arrived at Alpha Centauri a century later, having experienced very little of that trip thanks to time dilation or suspended states, those minds in that simulated matrix ice ball would have lived through a hundred million years of history. I suspected a great many minds existing by the year 1 million AD would fall into this category too, or be running even faster. By that point, they might have experienced quadrillions of years of subjective personal time, even only a million years had passed in the outside universe. An entire cosmic era, starless forming, galaxies colliding, civilizations rising and falling, might pass by like a brief intermission between thoughts. Or you might either reverse, a digital civilization might choose to spin forward, running at extreme speeds for short bursts of real time, then should itself down for millennia, waiting for the universe to change. They could wake up every million years, checking the cosmos, make decisions, then go dormant again. From their perspective, time would not be as steady flow, but something more like a series of disconnected chapters, intense periods of activity separated by vast, dreamless gaps. They might live in fully synthetic realities, entire universe has simulated accelerated speeds, with subjective time stretches far beyond the lifespan of stars. Stars could rise, stagnant, collapse, and be reborn countless times, all within what to and outside observer was barely a flicker. We've discussed this before in our Civilizations theme time series, particularly in the episode "Eternal Intelligence". But this isn't eternal or infinite. There are limits. Generally speaking, the faster you think, the more energy you burn per calculation, and the harder it is to read that waist you away from whatever switches your mind runs on. More systems are vastly more efficient, but every degree you try to cool something takes far longer and longer to achieve by reading heat away. At some point speed becomes a trade-off, more thoughts per second but at a higher and higher cost per thought. And since your lifespan is effectively measured in thoughts and experiences, you may be better off letting slower and lasting longer. On the other hand, running cooler reduces wear, maintenance, and energy demands, but time and practical constraints limit how far you can push that advantage. There are likely different sweet spots to pay on what you're optimizing for. So even our frame-jacked civilization must choose, do you live fast, burning bright and racing through subjective millennia in moments, or live slow, stretching your existence across the actual lifespan of the universe? Because once you de-couple consciousness from biology, time stops me in something you simply experience and become something you get to choose. How would humanity evolve physically? So how would humanity evolve physically over a million years? The first thing noticed that in many ways the question almost doesn't matter because we won't likely be leaving it to chance. Give us even a few centuries, let alone a million years, and with genetic ingestion and cybernetics we can turn ourselves into almost anything, centaurs, winged butterfly people living in microgravity habitats, aquatic variance for ocean worlds, or even mines to choose across machines or whole planets. You can redesign yourself to fit your environment or redesign the environment to fit you, you can inhabit a world or become one. So if we're talking about what's possible, the answer is almost anything. But the more interesting question is what happens if we don't intervene too heavily, if humanity is left to drift, diverge, adapt naturally across a million years, and a million worlds. Because then things get stranger. And this is plausible enough across trillions of worlds of the galaxy and likely far more numerous and bottleneck prone space habitats we would build. Many may choose to go more natural even tectopruder route. All those different environments alone would start pulling humanity in different directions. No gravity worlds might favor taller or more fragile bodies. High radiation environments might push toward thicker skin, redundancy, or entire different viral chemistries. Ocean worlds might produce aquatic descendants. Mammoths have apparently evolved in the sea and out again, so that could happen again, while microgravity habitats might favor lighter or more delicate forms that barely was implementing we call human. And then there's culture. You would have groups that deliberately enhance themselves, stronger, smarter, more specialized, while others choose not to. Over a million years, even small differences like that could compound a saline like a cast system, or eventually into entirely separate species. How many varying forms of human and human close species did all single world produce in such a time, even without alien suns letting our way down strange new paths? We've imagined this before, of course. The time machine gave us the iloy in the moorlocks, one living in comfort and ease, either adapting to darkness and hardship below. It's a bit dramatic, but the underlying idea isn't unreasonable. Developing a pretrial prey cycle, and indeed you expect any organism that gained dominance over an environment to be quite likely to split into cousins who developed a pretrial prey cycle with each other, especially as they diverged enough that there was no longer a genuptism, because evolution doesn't aim upward, doesn't try to make things smarter or stronger, well, I favor what survives, and a true paradise, a world where all needs are met, all dangerous removed, you might not need to be especially strong or clever or resilient. Over time, those traits could fade. This is sometimes called the "paradise trap", when maintaining a perfect world becomes easier than reinventing it, and the people living in it gradually lose the ability to rebuild it if it ever fails. That doesn't necessarily mean we'd all become foolish or helpless, but it does mean that simplification is just as likely as improvement. On the other hand, harsher environments or deliberate design choices could push in the opposite direction toward hyperspecialized forms, hyperintelligent forms, or entirely [BLANK_AUDIO] kinds of bodies but for survival and extreme conditions. And over a million years, that divergence adds up. You might have some branches of humane that remain very close to us, recognizably human by choice or by tradition. Others might become so altered in mind or body that we never recognize them as all dissidents at all. Some wards might host beings of immense intelligence, perhaps spread across entire planetary networks, thinking it skills we can barely imagine. Others might host a sentence that have simplified themselves so far they barely resemble complex animals anymore. Not because evolution failed, but because it succeeded in a different direction. And that's the key thing to remember, while an eventual make-up point might be something we pursued, there is no final form of humanity way the end of the Darwinian timeline. No perfect vision we are evolving toward. A million years from now, humanity won't be one thing. It will be a spectrum, ranging from beings far beyond us to others that have in some ways left us behind by becoming something simpler instead. As I like to say about the Fermi paradox, travel far and long enough and you will eventually encounter aliens. You know, they're also very distant cousins. Are we still human? Once we start talking about humanity changing physically, the next question is harder and more important. Now what point are we not human anymore? That question is trickier than it sounds because human is not just a body plan. If it was that a person with cybernetics, ultra genes, forearms or gills for an ocean world might stop counting, then so might someone with a missing limb or an extra finger. But I don't think most of us would say that. We tend to assume there is something deeper than anatomy or even DNA that makes someone human. The problem is that over a million years, that deeper thing can change too. Not just bodies but minds. A post human civilization might not merely think faster, live longer or occupy strange or forms. It might outgrow the psychology that shaped humanity in the first place. We evolve for short lives, small tribes, scarce resources and memories brief enough that old pain and old lessons fade before they crush us. But what is the advantage of that psychology to a being as a little for 10,000 years or a million? Or remembers every day of its life in perfect detail? Indeed by subjective frame-jacking, they might have experienced billions of years and they might even be a bit unglued in time, able to access every moment of their life, less like memories and more like replaying of a courting. Many might opt for some mix of that and virtual worlds, revisiting favorite times with small variations over and over. So as psychological adventures go, at that point the answer may be none at all. A very old mind might need to edit memory just to remain sane, or even rebuild itself entirely, discarding the patchwork architecture evolution gave us and design something new from the crowd up. It might damp down boredom, fear, rage or grief. It might split itself into subminds, merged with others, back itself up, fork into copies and rejoin later. It might choose to abandon competition, ambition, romance, tribalism, or even individuality itself. And this is not just a different body, this is a very different kind of mind. And that is where transhumanism becomes post-humanism. Transhumanism is still recognized with us. Humaty enhanced, upgraded, repaired or extended. Post-humanism is where that continuity starts to blur, not because something became monstrous, not because it became different enough in its thoughts, motives, values and inner experience that human starts to feel more like ancestry than identity. Two descendants of Humaty might meet a million years from now and have no more common psychologically than we do with wolves or chimpanzees. They may still share history, perhaps even some fraction of the same genome, but one might think in milliseconds that another in centuries, one might live as a distributed cloud mind, another is a baseline human colony-preserving ancient traditions, one might value individual freedom above all else, another might regard the self as a temporary illusion best merged into a grittle hole. They would not just look alien to each other, they would be alien to each other. That does not mean that Humaty failed, it means Humaty branched. And that may be the real answer here. And one million AD, Humaty is probably no longer one thing you can point to, is a family tree so vast and so divergent that some branches still seem familiar, while others have wandered so far from the trunk that they would never call themselves human at all. No more resembling that original tree than a chair or table that was carved front. CR post-human pathways episode, for more discussion of the strange lanes our bodies and minds, might travel down in the distant future. Earth in one million AD. So what is Earth like a million years from now? In some ways it may be the most familiar place in the galaxy, and others the most alien, because Earth made a longer beach to planet. It may be a Pellum set plant, a world written over and over again by countless generations of civilization, layer upon layer. In order of science fiction, especially in dying Earthshanna, we often see worlds buried on the ruins of past civilizations. Cities built up cities stretching back in a deep time. Indeed this is often already the case, but in our case those layers might not be crumbling ruins. They might still be intact. With sufficiently advanced materials, you don't have to let your cities decay. You can preserve them, seal them, build over them without destroying what came before. You can already manufacture materials like diamond and graphene made from abundant carbon, yet able to handle vast weights and timescales. Advanced automation and nanotechnology might make self-repair for buildings and objects incredibly easy. So over a million years there could be thousands of layers, entire buried roads beneath our feet. Not all of them would be inhabited. Most might be quiet. Storage vaults, museums, archives. There are cities that are kept not for living in but for remembering. After all you don't need much energy to preserve a place. A dark sear chamber can last almost indefinitely. In such a sear set up there is no need to heat it, quite the reverse. You don't need to light a room unless someone is actually there to see it. A person might even seal off a residence and return to its centuries later after sleeping through eras while new layers grew above. Or slumber there in stasis like a mummy. This might be a common way of passing time. Law and custom might encourage people to leave such places undisturbed, building around and over them instead. You might have apartment buildings thousands of meters high and as wide where most of their residents are on ice at any time. So Earth could accumulate vast volumes of preserved history, layer after layer of civilization stacked like geological strata. A necropolis planet, not in the sense of death but of memory, a place where the past is not lost but stored. Of course Earth would not just be layered, would also be engineered. Over a million years this is extraordinarily valuable real estate, the birthplace of humanity, the cultural and historical center of civilization that may span a galaxy of billions and billions of stars and planets. Even if it is no longer politically central, it remains symbolically central, and that matters. You might see continuous construction, new layers, new habitats, new structures built above and below, gradually transforming Earth into something far beyond its original form. Not just buried strata of old cities but simultaneously layers of habitation, storage and preservation. A vertical world where some levels of vibrant and active were all as quiet as archives or museums. The main constraint is not space but energy. Radiant and lighting those layers sufficient for photosynthesis, assuming people still eat regular food. But for storage, lower power environments and occasional use, you can build almost without limit. Over a million years that could mean thousands of layers, most of them dark, stable and rarely visited. Now Earth is no longer just a surface, it's a value. And from there you might decide not just to build Earth up but to move it. Earth will be the cultural center of the galaxy for a long while, but maybe not that long. And it may decide it's wise to pick up and move itself nearer the physical center of the galaxy to help retain that status and maximize tourists and trade too. Over a million years, relocating a plant or even entire solar system is not impossible. You can build literal star drives. So perhaps you go toward the galactic core where stars are denser and energy more abundant. After all, Earth itself has never stayed in one place. It orbits the Milky Way and likely by and far closer to the galactic core. Over a deep time it is passed through very different regions of the galaxy, sometimes closer to the core sometimes farther out, though generally edging outward. So a sufficiently advanced civilization might simply take control of that motion, not to escape but to remain central. Or perhaps in the most extreme and ambitious case you don't move Earth to the center of the galaxy. You move the center of the galaxy to Earth. We've talked before about building artificial shell planets with black holes in their center, and those can be vast and deep. The smallest black hole would permit a shell around at a million times larger than Earth and living area with regular Earth gravity, and there's no limit on how big a black hole can be made, and they can't provide all the power you need for lighting and running your mega planet. So instead of relocating the planet, you might begin feeding material inward, abundant hydrogen, helium, or even dark matter, building towards something like a birch planet, a nested structure around an artificial mega black hole, with layer upon layer of habitable surface stacked inward and outward. We've spoken of building such immense structures around the supermassive black holes in galactic centers, but you could import matter galaxy wide to make Earth bigger instead. A place with living space not for billions or trillions, but for numbers that defy easy comprehension. But even then, through all that growth, all that engineering, all that expansion, Earth would still carry something unique, because no matter how many walls humanity spreads to, this is the one where it began. And over a million years, that alone is enough to ensure that it is never abandoned, never forgotten, and never entirely replaced. Could you still be around? So after all of this, spreading across the galaxy, changing how we experience time, and becoming something far beyond our current forms, we come to a more personal question. Could you and I still be around a million years from now? Not some distant descend of humanity. You, me, people we know today, family and friends, persisting across hundreds of thousands of years. And the short answer is, it's entirely possible. In my opinion, it's even rather likely. When people ask me what technology I most want to see develop in my lifetime, the answer is always life extension. It's the keystone that lets me see all the others yet to be invented, and a billion sunrises to come. We don't need a million years of progress to make that technology happen. We may only need a few decades or centuries. If life extension technologies arrive in the next century, and there's a good chance they might, then me, people live today could simply keep going. Aging could become something we treat, slow, or even stop. And even if that takes longer, we already have rough imperfect options. Critics, for instance, is crude, but it may be good enough. You do not need perfect preservation today, if tomorrow is just to keep enough to repair the damage. And when alive today could be frozen and wake up in a ward filled with vastly more advanced medicine. So the real question is whether some alive now could reach that future, is whether it could keep going once they get there, because surviving a million years is not the same as living one. Evenness staple advanced civilization. One with abundant resources and strong city systems, the odds of accidents, disasters, were simply bad luck, add up over time. No matter what technology arrives to a fissure person, if they go through various periods of depression or futility every few hundred years, there's thousands of bleak periods where they might decide they are done. But the odds of murder, accident, and suicide may also go down. Better medicine, safer environments, and the ability to back up of a store individuals could make long-term survival far more likely than it is today. And people wouldn't need to experience all that time continuously. You might spend centuries or millennia in Stasis, waking occasionally to see what has changed. You might travel between stars on long voyages, hoppy from world to world at relativistic speeds, or in Stasis for the trip, living a few decades here, a few there, gradually making your way to the galaxy's edge and back. Maybe your house is still a city there, tended by machines for your return, even if the planet itself is moose than two or under god, monomorphicists. Or you might do the opposite, stay in one place, but experience vast stretches of time in short bursts, waking once every century to check in on the universe before going back to sleep. There are many ways to cross a million years, including going the long way around and experiencing every day of it, or even more in high subjective rates of experience. You might have spent a billion years spread through a million virtual realms, king of hundreds, or a hermit philosopher and hundreds more. But that leads to a deeper question. Even if you could survive that long, would you still be you? Human memory isn't built for that kind of duration. We forget things. We compress them. We reinterpret them. Over decades, alone millennia, even on normal human life, audio comes a story we tell ourselves more than a perfect record. So to last a million years, you might need help. You might offload memories, storing them externally and recalling them when needed. You might compress older experiences, keeping only what matters most immediately accessible. You might rely on recordings, perfect replayable versions of your past, while your day-to-day mind remains manageable and stable. Ironically, that might mean remembering more accurately and quickly than we do now. But also raises a question. If most of your life is stored outside your immediate mind, if your memories are edited, compressed, or pushed the external, are you still the same person? That answer is not as obvious as it sounds. After all, we already change over time. The person you were twenty years ago is not identical to who you are today. Your memories have faded, shifted, been reinterpreted, and yet we still consider that it continues self. So perhaps continuity does not require a perfect memory. The message just requires enough connection that you still recognize yourself as you. And if that's true, then there is a path, maybe narrow, maybe broad, that leads from here, today, to a million years from now, where someone like you, or me, is still around. Not as a distant descendant, but as a person who simply kept going. Now, of course, most minds that far future will not be us. There will be new beings, new branches of humanity, or something else entirely. Some may be estranged with his aliens, but there may be a few of us who remember, who were there at the beginning. And if I groan about this, if none of us make it that far, then I suppose no one will be around to complain. But if I'm right, perhaps we'll meet up somewhere for a drink in a snack, in the year 1 million AD. Today, we are celebrating benchmarks, looking at a million years in the future, and how humanity might evolve, spread, and transform across vast stretches of time. If you enjoy thinking about those long horizons, that's exactly the kind of idea I explore in Selling Saturn's Rings, this month's exclusive. We look at how one of the sources of supposed iconic features could become a massive construction zone, supporting habitats, infrastructure, and civilizations that might endure not just centuries, but geological timescails. And in Joe Scott's nebula original, oldest and newest, he travels from the oldest rocks on Earth to brand new land emerging from volcanoes today. That's just some of the amazing original and exclusive content on nebula, where every episode of SFA 8 pre-early and completely at free. That includes over 800 episodes, and several years of monthly exclusives like Selling Saturn's Rings. You can see that, and Joe Scott's epic journey through Earth's history. Just use my link or the QR code to get Phinepsin off an annual plan. That's $30 for the whole year. And that brings us to year 1 million AD. A future where humanity may have spread across the galaxy, change what it means to think, to live, and even be human. And yet still, in some small way, remain connected to where we began, and speaking of beginnings. This episode also marks a milestone for the channel. One million subs. And while the big gold play button probably won't arrive for months, I didn't want to wait even days to mark the occasion. When I started the show, it was just a small hobby project, exploring big ideas. I never expected us to reach a thousand subscribers, let alone a million. I actually didn't even know what a subscriber was when I made that first episode back in 2014. It was a couple of years before I even started thinking of it as a show. We did a special when we hit 100,000 subscribers in 2017, and at the time people said a million would be just around the corner, I left that off. By few it might happen someday, and promised I'd do an episode called 1 million AD when it did. And the episode title itself is a nod to 2,000 AD, and all of the science fiction from his kid that was looking forward to the turn of the millennia. It's hard to believe sometimes it's been 26 years since then, and over the years I've written and rewritten bits of this episode, always imagining as a collection of chapterized essays, which was a bit unusual for my style at the time, since I always thought of each episode as a standalone essay. It is a bit amusing then last year or so I've shifted more intentionally to a chapter format anyway, partly because it's easier to film now on camera instead of doing a voiceover, and partly because, during the great "Shorts Push" of 2023 and 2024 by YouTube, it seemed like everything might be heading that direction so that each episode might need to be broken into a dozen shorts to satisfy the algorithm. Before that, live streams were the craze, and for that everyone said I was foolish for doing 30 plus minute episodes when all the other side shows ate at 3 to 10 minutes. I have unlikely yet the couple of shorts I've done since then, only pulled from episodes are handful of times, I just wrote new material since I always seem to have more to say. That is the neat thing about the future. There's always so much more of it. And the show itself has changed in other ways too. A large portion of audience now listens off YouTube on Spotify, iTunes, Nebula, Audible, and elsewhere. And between those platforms, the natural, churn of viewership, we likely pass this million milestone years ago anyway. It's just nice to finally officially market. And it may well be the last big one for a while until we hit a thousand episodes somewhere around 2027. Life has been an interesting journey personally. The show began as a hobby for me after leaving academia and then the military, hoping for a sore pasted and more relaxed life out in the countryside. It became a job and the best one I could imagine. And along that trip I got married, bought a farm, adopted three children, and became president of the National Space Society. Along the way, this has grown into something much larger than I have expected. Thanks to all of you watching, sharing, discussing, and helping shape what this show has become. To everyone who's been part of that journey, viewers, supporters, volunteers, collaborators. Thank you. From the folks who helped model discussion forums on Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, to those who helped edit scripts or make graphics or helped it a dozen other ways, do it your harder and money, time, shared episodes, or just those that hit the like and subscribe buttons. Thank you. We've come a long way, but as we've seen stay, this journey is just getting started. There is so much more to dream and discuss. And until next time, as always, thanks for watching and have a great week.