What If Time Sped Up and Couldn't Stop?

Something goes wrong with time. The people on your street start walking too fast. The Sun drops out of the sky. A whole night goes by in six seconds. You stand exactly where you are, and one second for you becomes a minute out there, then a year, then a million years, and it never slows down. The readout in the corner is the date the whole way, and the second one is your own watch. The big numbers are real. The Earth's axis wobbles once every 26,000 years, so the North Star stops being north. Betelgeuse is expected to explode some time in the next hundred thousand years, bright enough to see by day. Ice ages have been coming about every 100,000 years. An asteroid a kilometre wide hits about every half a million years, and a star called Gliese 710 will brush past the solar system in about 1.3 million. The continents move as fast as fingernails grow, which adds up to a new supercontinent in about 250 million years. The Sun gets about one percent brighter every hundred million years: the last trees go in about 600 million, the oceans start boiling away in about a billion, and the last living thing dies in under three billion. Andromeda arrives in about 4.5 billion years. The Sun swells up and reaches the Earth in about 7.6 billion, and leaves a white dwarf the size of the Earth. After about a hundred billion years every other galaxy has been carried out of sight. The last stars burn out after about a hundred trillion. A black hole as heavy as the Sun lasts about 10^67 years, and the biggest ones about 10^100. Some of it is not real, or not known. Nobody knows what cities will look like in a thousand years, or how long they last: the mile-high towers and the century the lights go out are guesses. The next ice age may be held off for a long time by the carbon dioxide we have added. Newer measurements say Andromeda has about an even chance of missing us. Nobody knows whether atoms last forever; if they do, the part about them turning into light never happens. Once the days blur together, the stars are drawn as if the Earth had stopped spinning, so that you can watch them move, and they move faster here than they would. The Sun's glowing shell would be gone in an instant at that speed; it is slowed down so you can see it. The dead stars are shown faintly so there is something to look at, and the ones the galaxy throws out are drawn as streaks so you can see them go. And the very last thing that happens is made up. You stood there for nine minutes. Out there, the year had more than a hundred digits. 0:00 Your street 0:24 Sunset 0:44 Day and night blur 0:52 The seasons 1:16 Ten years 1:28 The year 2100 1:43 The year 3000 1:56 Forest 2:08 The ice 2:40 The canyon 3:06 New mountains 3:28 One supercontinent 3:47 The last tree 4:04 The oceans boil 4:35 The last living thing 4:55 Andromeda 5:19 The Sun reaches you 5:44 The galaxies leave 6:23 The last star 6:58 The black hole 7:24 The last atom 7:44 Only black holes are left 8:25 The last light #whatif #science #time #space #universe