13 HN users recommended this documentary12 months2019–2025score 13
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN people recommend it as a stunning, mind-bending and existentially humbling view of deep time, and it appears on lists of favorite YouTube videos.
A 29-minute cinematic timelapse by melodysheep that journeys trillions of years into the future, covering the death of the sun, the end of stars, proton decay, black hole evaporation and the fate of the cosmos.
“does a great job with visuals and voiceovers about what will happen over the next trillions x trillions of years” (HN, 2023)
One of my favorite YouTube videos does a great job with visuals and voiceovers about what will happen over the next trillions x trillions of years: [this video] No idea how accurate it is against anything that might be more theoretically accurate but it’s still a great watch.
Great visuals and voiceover on the next trillions of trillions of years.
Journey to the End of Time - [this video] Veritasium on Thermite reaction - [link] Problems of a Shared Office - [link] History of the entire world, I guess - [link] Colin Furze Underground Activities - [link] Future of Reasoning - [link] Sex in Trek - [link]
Listed first among the commenter's favorite YouTube videos ever.
I wonder if there is a documentary with visual explanations. It would be amazing to watch and understand. I recently saw a mind-bending documentary[0] titled "Timelapse of the future", there's a brief mention of Voyager, it shows what happens to the universe in the long run and how it ends. [0] [this video]
This video from melodysheep puts the long, long, long future in perspective for me: [link] [this video] -- DESCRIPTION FROM YOUTUBE -- Support my work on Patreon: [link] | Get the soundtrack: [link] | How's it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be. We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few. This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found. To me, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species. Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss,
When you consider the potential age of the universe [1], we can also argue that the universe is currently in its extreme infancy and we many in fact be one of the very first civilizations to start thinking about other civilizations, and all other "firstborn" civilizations are similarly constrained by technology. [1] [link] , more dramatically portrayed in this excellent video: A Journey to the End of Time [2] [2] [this video]
Dramatic portrayal of the universe's potential age
From my understanding the universe is but a toddler - the longest stretch of its life will be AFTER the last stars have died - this video is somewhat existential dread inducing [this video]
Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [link] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [link] history of the entire world, i guess: [link] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [this video] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [link] [link] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [link] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [link] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [link]
One entry in a list of recommended long-form science videos.
This stunning video / visualisation features the evaporation of everything. Ultimately everything cools to absolute zero. Time becomes meaningless. Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time [this video] edit: discussed previously here: [link]
Stunning visualization of everything evaporating and cooling to absolute zero.
> Does 4k matter? The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units). I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for "cinematic" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like "Timelapse of the Future": [this video] - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines. So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.
Cinematic video whose fine detail benefits from 4K resolution.
[this video] If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
29-minute accelerating timelapse of the universe's future, existentially heavy.
I haven’t watched them again now to check if it’s one of them you’re searching for, but these two videos have been posted everywhere last year: [1] [this video] [2] [link]
> If so, anything we can observe of seemingly another universe is in actuality part of our universe. Yes, this is how I would interpret the definition of THE UNIVERSE. My personal interpretation of "another universe" would be something like- a multidimensional vacuum populated with matter/energy that currently exists from our inertial frame of reference, and there is nothing linking our own sparsely populated vacuum to this other universe. i.e. if you can observe it, then it's not a different universe. As Penrose states, this is merely an earlier version of the same universe, which existed before the Big Bang. Here is a different prediction, a timelapse, of the fate of our universe (as told by Brian Cox), which assumes the universe will continue expanding... [this video]
Prediction of the universe's fate with continued expansion
But presumably you've also then been living very different variations of the same script, since there have been infinite combinations of matter that were close enough to give rise to you, but different enough to have very different outcomes. Also, doesn't physics and the Big Bang rule out this eternal recurrence idea? [this video]
There's a video on that. The end of the universe: [this video] This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.
Visual tour of the universe's far future ending in emptiness and cold.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
20 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more