What you see
Futures runs from tonight to a billion and a half years ahead, and the further it goes, the less anyone knows. Captions on the walls keep count. The images move from a model of the town as it stands, through the weather we have, to worlds that exist only as calculation.
It opens on Albany now: the town as a model, its buildings raised from their footprints in OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap contributors, 2025), seen from the water at dusk between Mt Clarence and Mt Melville.
The near future is where speculation is loudest, and the captions say so plainly: the arrival of artificial general intelligence, and then of artificial super intelligence, placed at 2036 and 2042. These are guesses, not forecasts — and they are the part of the future still open to choice. Over the town at night the aurora burns, and the sky fills with the lights of orbiting machines.
Past a thousand years the captions stop naming events. Patterns persist: the weather shown is today’s — the water vapour of Earth’s atmosphere as the Himawari-9 geostationary satellite sees it, in three infrared bands, a frame every ten minutes (Bessho et al., 2016) — standing in for the weather of ten and a hundred thousand years ahead.
Then the continents move. The globe is the one built for Earth (Composition II), carried forward. At 35 million years ahead it is today’s surface moved on the future branch of the PALEOMAP plate model (Scotese, 2016), Australia pressing into Asia. Beyond a hundred million years that model fails, and the geography becomes published science: Amasia, the next supercontinent — gathering over the Arctic (Mitchell, Kilian & Evans, 2012) or by closing the Pacific (Huang, Li & Zhang, 2022) — its land and sea floor taken from climate simulations of Earth’s next supercontinent (Way et al., 2021). That grid is coarse, about 500 kilometres a cell; the fine grain of ridges and coastlines is borrowed from the Earth we have. Cloud, haze and night-side city lights are graded against a photograph of the whole Earth taken from deep space by NASA’s EPIC camera.
The Sun decides the rest. It does not swell — not for billions of years — but it brightens, slowly, as it ages. A warmer world weathers its rocks faster: rain carries carbon dioxide into silicate rock, and the carbon is washed to the sea and buried there as carbonate, drawn out of the air faster than volcanoes return it. In time the air holds too little carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and plants starve in a world that is still wet — about a billion years from now in the classic account (Caldeira & Kasting, 1992). Recent models revise that: if weathering proves less sensitive to heat, or slows as the carbon runs low, the drawdown stalls and plants may hold on for 1.6 to 1.9 billion years, until heat rather than hunger ends them (Graham, Halevy & Abbot, 2024; Zhu, Graham & Abbot, 2026). The oceans go as the hotter air fills with water vapour and loses it to space (Wolf & Toon, 2015). The figures are still being argued, and revised.
The last image is the Earth a billion and a half years ahead, its seas gone, the Sun rising over its dark edge — composed after the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
