Just a flick of the wrist, a click of the mouse, and one can fast-forward in time. A fifth grader showed me how. He approached my desk, eyes crinkled almost shut with the delight of discovery, and showed me the calendar app on his iPad. The display showed the month of April 2124. He waited while I caught on.

“Hey!” I said, “That’s one hundred years from now.”

The student nodded and said, “now watch this.” He held down the scroll button, and the years started flickering by like something out of H. G. Wells*. He then slowed and stopped the scroll on April 3024. I stared at the strange display, wondering what, and who, might be occupying my bit of space-and-time a thousand years from now.

The concept gave me a touch of the Total Perspective Vortex**, but I laughed and asked him what he thought we might be doing on the date in question. Some kids would have stared at me and said, “we will be dead,” but he grinned and replied, “We’ll be telling jokes! Why should you always wear your glasses to math class?”***

Now mind you, I am no stranger to messing with the timeline. There’s that moment of childhood that burns ever bright in my mind, when, at age eight, I grabbed a hairbrush and began singing an impromptu song into my vanity mirror. I’m sure I went on for a while, but the only line that I remember is “So what do you think—of back in the day—when—I—was—NINE?” Oh, cringe. Cute little critter, wasn’t I?

But I digress. So, what are we doing out here, anyway? The space probe Voyager One, which left earth in 1977 and recently passed Pluto, is trundling along at a cool 40,000 miles per hour. It will reach the edge of the Oort cloud–technically still part of our solar system–in 300 years. It will be 40,000 years before it does its first drive-by of an actual star. Makes you wonder. Why, when everything else is something approaching infinite, do our lives only last for a New York minute?

The other day I spoke on the phone with a person that I will likely never encounter again. I was navigating the intricacies of Medicare, and rapidly losing my perspective, when she made me laugh. My current task was arranging permission for me to discuss and make changes to my husband’s account. Dahlia explained to me that she had entered a 14-day permission for me, but that to extend that permission, I would need to write a letter. She told me that, since my husband wanted my permission to extend “longer than” 14 days, I should write the letter to state that this permission would begin now and extend until December 31, 4000.

I digested this idea for a moment, and then I said, “Well, if I call, you better answer!” She replied, with a grin in her voice, “If I answer, I’ll be in more trouble than I thought.”

In the year 4000, who will be calling whom, and how?  And what will Voyager One be looking at?  

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*The Time Machine, 1895. Total classic.

**Remember Douglas Adams, who wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? He had a whole bit about thinking about your relative place in the universe and feeling utterly insignificant.

***Because they help with da vision!