Physicists have found a way to open a door 100,000,000 years into the future, and you’re the chrononaut. You’re also part of the panel of engineers and other scientists to figure out how to protect and equip you for your jaunt. You’ll be there for at least 2 hours, maybe more.
Let’s say for [reasons] all attempts to send probes have had catastrophic instrument failure in recording conditions, and sending animals across the time-expanse has led to failure for return. This could be that conditions are inhospitable to contemporary life, or that, for some reason, they couldn’t find their way back. Any sort of tether has always been severed by the portal.
Bottom line is, they’re sending a human to an unknown environment of limited predictability. You’ve volunteered. Let the guesstimations and preparations begin for the best chances of your safe return…
Make no preparations whatsoever. Enter the transport chamber completely naked and freak out the future humans at the ugliness of my flabby early 21st century body.
Trying to predict and plan for a 1 million year advance might be feasible. But 100 million? There’s probably been at least one major extinction and rebound in that period. Mountain ranges could have been uplifted and worn down to a peneplain in that time. So I guess just give me a shortsleve Tommy Bahama shirt, shorts, some Crocs and a thermos full of Mountain Dew and I’ll wing it and hope for the best.
Which is precisely what I find so interesting. A million years is but a blink on the geological/cosmological scale… but 100 million? Now we’ve got some things to think about.
The turkey sandwich (with mayo, maybe some bacon) is at the top of my list.
You don’t need technobabble. Just actual physics. Time travel into the future is a one way street. There are ways to do it, but you can’t send information back.
Of course, *you *can’t go back either, any more than the machines. So there’s that.
Sealed suit with self-contained breathing apparatus, high-powered semi-auto rifle, hi-res digital camera, air- and soil-sampling devices, a few containers for any biological samples that might turn up.
And a towel, of course.
Coming back, I hope the portal dumps directly into a sterilization chamber, 'cause the chances are high of inadvertently bringing back…something…for which we have no biological defences.
I would prepare for the worst case - some kind of sealed environment suit and survival gear, including food rations and a good chemistry set. It’s not that I’m so pessimistic about mankind’s odds, but I wouldn’t necessarily count on mankind living on Earth by that point. There’s a good chance that it has been 1) polluted or irradiated or 2) set aside as a nature preserve.
Other than that… there’s no point in bringing anything for dealing with people. For a moment, I thought about bringing a language translator but then I thought of the time scale. A thousand, or even ten thousand, years and we might have some similarity in languages. But a hundred million? No, there’s just nothing we can prepare for other than a return to wilderness conditions. Anything that involves a thriving human race will be so completely foreign even 100,000 years from now that preparation is impossible.
Also, human evolution would have progressed beyond the conceivable, even if just left unto evolution’s own devices; humanity’s descendants will be unrecognizable after so long. And, after a certain amount of time, certainly within the next 1,000 years, we’ll most likely control our evolution. Image what would become of us after 100,000 times that amount of time. Impossible, really.
You know what, I think I’d read the word “peneplain” just once in my entire life before this post. That is, one reference in one book, though I’ve ready it more than once. And even then it was kinda metaphorical.
“Providence Island”, Calder Willingham. Tedious detail available on request.
Is there any sort of geological outlook for Earth on that sort of timespan?
Will the earth be eroded beyond recognition? Will new continents form; old ones merge or separate? Also the possibility of it being terraformed into something wholly alien by our super advanced descendants, if we come to that despite all odds.
This video projects what the Earth’s continents looked like in the far distant past and projects what they’ll look like in 100 million years (skip ahead to about 2:20 to see Earth today and then the projection).
Based on that, at least, a swimmin’ suit would be a prudent choice to take on this trip.