History of the Future

 As Yogi Berra once said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." Of course it's easy to make predictions about the future, but I think Yogi meant accurate predictions about the near future. The far future is easier to predict accurately, based on the laws of physics, so that's the history of the future outlined here.

For the sake of having a far future, let us assume that we make it through the near future by not blowing ourselves up, by preventing global warming and pollution from destroying the Earth's habitability, and by anticipating natural threats such as killer asteroids, and deflecting them away from collision courses with Earth.

Even without greenhouse gas emissions, Earth will continue warming as the sun brightens until it becomes uninhabitable in 1.3 billions years, if our descendants do not intervene. If I were them, I would deploy sunshades at Earth orbit's L1 point, about one million miles from Earth in the Sun's direction. More sunshades can be launched as the Sun warms up, just enough to let through the same amount of solar energy we have today. They would have to block 8% of the sunlight 1.3 billion years from now, and for every billion years after that at least an additional 6% of sunlight. Earth can remain habitable for another 6 billion years by adding more sunshades until they block half of the Sun's disk.

Shortly after that the Sun will balloon into a red giant and swallow the Earth, ending future history on Earth. By then Mars and a few other places will surely be inhabited by our descendants, enabling future histories to unfold.