Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Back-story of His Epic, 3,099-Panel 'Time' Comic

vikingpower writes "Randall Munroe, the comic author best known as the creator of the xkcd webcomic, reveals the secret backstory of his epic, 3099-panel 'Time' strip in an interesting interview with Wired. He says, 'In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more ... The Earth’s axis wobbles over the millennia, and some individual stars move visibly, so I used a few different pieces of astronomy software–with a lot of hand correction and tweaking–to render the future night sky. When the Sun sets in the night sequence, one of the first things you see is the gap where Antares should be, which was the first clue that this is taking place in the far future. Later in the night–which lasted for several days of real time–more astronomical details let readers pin down the date more precisely.' The comic can be seen as an animation on YouTube. There is also a complete click-through version available on geekwagon. This comic inspired a dedicated wiki and has its own glossary."

Comments

Re: xkcd is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

The Oatmeal. Also I've written a lot of South Park fanfic, which is a hell of a lot more than xkcd does.

Re:"Future" as future?

[gl4ss]

or we're just on the edge of eternity and there was no ancient atlantis civilization, nothing that made it this far before. that humans didn't have plastics before our time I'm quite sure of, of that there were no intercontinental information networks I'm quite sure of. I'm quite sure that they couldn't move from any point on the planet to any other at will(even if they devoted their whole life to it) before "current" civilization. that is to say that in history it's very, very unlikely that there were a phase like current ever before, so saying that none of the one's that had written language lasted more than 5000 years is quite bullshit and attention whoring because we're actually still in the first global phase of having writing. this is the first civilization - all the old systems we have found are things that are in direct(or shards) advancement path to what we have today(even the signs of native americans are part of our current stream).

btw. pentti linkola is a nutjob.. this goes on a tangent but he took the easy way of writing the world will end books - his stuff didn't make sense back in the context in which he wrote it and it certainly doesn't make it now.

the dude was at our door once when I was a kid, at least at some point he was doing door to door selling of fish(to get money, which he hates), but according to his earlier stuff we should already be almost all dead and his stuff feels like he _wanted_ 90% of _people_ to die and was trying to invent why/how it would happen, not that he had any good reasons to start believing in the shit except the one polluting paper mill he didn't get cash money from(the paper mill in my hometown used to be quite visibly polluting and smelly, back in the day, currently it's much less so). so he's feeling like a victim of civilization - the dude lived as a professional fisherman on a lake(bad fucking idea to begin with) downstream from a '60s paper mill(making the first idea even worse). the idea that 90% of people should _die_ is a recurring and pretty much the carrying force of his "ecological" thinking(how it happens, gas chambers, starving.. doesn't really matter to him - he just wants people to die off, because then we would use less resources, resources which he told us would be all used up now decades ago). a harmless guy? maybe, but if he was given a button that would do the death lottery 90% of people he would press it, according to his own statements anyways.

many nutjobs such as him exist and personally I feel that many of them are like that just because they're assholes and it gives them comfort to think that everything will turn to dust and that everything the others are trying to achieve(civilization) is for naught. if you ask me the real waste of resources is giving these kind of guys time in nutjob conferences as giving "factual" lectures. it's useless to even start a discussion with them, because it's not logic that drives their thinking or love for nature but just plain old hatred and envy.