Our Schedule for the Future Trivia Quiz

Answer: Antoni Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi was born in 1852 in Catalonia (an Eastern region of Spain), the youngest of five children and a sickly child. He quickly showed an interest for architecture, though, gaining his degree in 1878 from the Barcelona Architecture School. The school's director wasn't too confident in Gaudi's abilities, saying, "We have given this academic title either to a fool or a genius. Time will show."

It didn't take long for the second choice to become apparent. Gaudi's modern style was popular in Barcelona, where he designed works like the Casa Vicens, Casa Mila, and Park Guell. Undulating, fluid facades and colorful mosaics called trencadis defined his work. In 1883, Gaudi was commissioned to build a cathedral in Barcelona called the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family, in English). He began focusing on the project in earnest in 1915, until he died in 1926, hit by a tram that didn't recognize the celebrity genius.

Construction of the Sagrada Familia went on, though. The church became something of a legend, utilizing Gaudi's designs as well as modern adaptations. What's taking so long? The building's three facades depict the Nativity, the Passion, and the Glory, and are covered in elaborate sculpture, towering spires, and ornate designs. Theoretically going to be finished in 2026, the church would be the tallest in the world. In November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI visited the Sagrada Familia and consecrated it, apparently sick of waiting for the masterpiece to be finished.

Answer: Google

Google Inc. origins come from Stanford University in 1996, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin criticized most existing search engines on the Web. Unhappy with the engines' ability to provide useful, relevant searches, they created a new technology, PageRank, which uses a page's hyperlinks to determine its overall relevance, and, from there, its importance. Page and Brin originally named the search engine using PageRank "Backrub," but the name got changed to Google instead. A googol is the number one followed by 100 zeroes; already, the founders wanted to find a way to index unthinkable amounts of information.

Everything snowballed from there. The corporation went public in 2004 and began dominating the Internet industry, with its Search features as well as more modern features like Google Earth, which provides maps from satellite imaging. Although it has been wildly successful, Google has nevertheless attracted detractors, who claim that its mission statement to organize the world's information is overly intrusive and dominating. The motto "Don't be evil" guides the company's practices. Company headquarters (the Googleplex) located in Mountain View, California are a testament to the relaxed, fun-loving Google culture.

Answer: John Cage

John Cage (1912-1992) was to the music world what Jackson Pollock was to the art world--to some, incomprehensible, and to others, unforgettable. Student of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer who essentially invented atonality, Cage was influenced by Asian cultures in his works, especially the Confucian "I Ching."

Cage used new instruments in his compositions, in addition to new styles. He popularized the "prepared piano," an instrument in which various objects (screws, nuts, rubber, bolts) are placed in between the strings, in pieces like "Sonatas and Interludes." Radios and turntables are used in the "Imaginary Landscape" sequence. Certainly, though, his best-known work is titled "4'33"" (Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds). A performer comes out to the stage, sits in front of a piano, and plays no music. This lasts exactly 4'33". The idea is that the audience can hear its own sounds throughout the three-movement work.

As Slow As Possible (also known as Organ^2/ASLSP) was written in 1987 and is scheduled to last 639 years. Cage made no tempo markings other than the work's title; a special organ was built to accommodate the musical piece, which the German church began in 2001, after Cage's death. Chord changes occur every six months or so.

Answer: Chernobyl's nuclear power plant

Estimates that Chernobyl won't be clean until the 29th century are virtually guesswork; in reality, the place might not be inhabitable for dozens of millennia. Let's stick with this approximation for now, though estimates have been anywhere from between 300 years to 64,000, depending on how far away from the disaster zone you go. Regardless, on April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had a massive failure. What happened?

Nuclear plants require a large amount of water to serve as coolant, even when they're not generating power. Unfortunately, the Chernobyl plant had the water tied to the main power grid. If the power went out, it would take about a minute to get the water flowing from diesel engines, which is too much time when you've got no coolant in a nuclear reactor. The reactor designers tried a plan to use the steam turbines themselves to generate power to run the cooling pumps while the diesel engines were warming up. Unfortunately, initial tests of the system didn't work.

On April 26, the steam turbines were put to the test again, to see if new changes would help the coolant problem. Unfortunately, the late-night testers dropped the power too low. The experiment continued and more safety issues were revealed: the control rods weren't in, to maintain some semblance of power. Late attempts to abort failed, and a steam explosion was followed by a nuclear explosion. The plant leaked 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and caused deaths both instant and delayed. The city of Pripyat, the home of Chernobyl workers, became a ghost town overnight.

Answer: Time Pyramid

Wemding, a small city in Bavaria, was founded in 793 CE. 1200 years later, the city's inhabitants wanted to mark the area's history, so they began construction on a new 1200-year project, the Time Pyramid.

The Time Pyramid will consist of 120 blocks of concrete, each about 2.7 cubic meters (96 cubic feet) in volume, arranged in square levels to form a pyramid. Each slab is separated by 0.6 meters (2 ft), so the pyramid isn't continuous; rather, new layers will be built directly on top of old blocks. Begun in 1993, the project adds one block every ten years, and should end in 3183. Due to the structure's layout, there won't be a "top" block, as the top layer of the pyramid will have a two-by-two square.

Answer: Age of Aquarius

Astrology is a tricky thing to get right; even though there was a huge "New Age" movement during the late 1900s, no one can quite agree if we've entered a new astrological age or not. The scientific idea behind the Age of Aquarius owes to the Earth's axial spin, and a phenomenon called precession. Just as a top "wobbles" when you spin it, so does the Earth wobble on its own axis. The rotation of the Earth's axis takes a full 26,000 years, and the Vernal Equinox (the time in which the Sun shines directly on the Equator) is located in a different constellation. That is to say, from Earth, the Sun appears in a new group of stars, according to the Earth's tilt.

Astrologers disagreed when the Age of Aquarius began, arguing that it could be any time around the third millennium, but a majority agreed that it happened in the 20th century. Each astrological age lasts approximately 2150 years (one-twelfth of the Earth's precession rate), though because each constellation has a different size, it's hard to be sure. Regardless, a ballpark estimate of the 4000s for the Age of Capricorn to replace the Age of Aquarius seems reasonable. Yes, Capricorn follows Aquarius: astrological ages go backward from the order of our horoscopes.

Answer: Mercury

In a solar eclipse, the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, causing the three astronomical bodies to line up, and blocking some portion of light from the Sun from hitting a particular region of the Earth. In a total solar eclipse, all of the Sun's light is blocked from the Earth. Total solar eclipses occur every few years or so; partial eclipses are more common.

A transit occurs when a smaller object moves across a larger object, obscuring a part of the large object from view. A similar phenomenon, called an occultation, occurs when a body is completely hidden because a larger object moves in front of it. Transits of Mercury generally refer to Mercury moving in front of the Sun. Because Mercury is so small and distant compared to the Moon, and because the Sun is so large, all that can be seen is a small black dot moving across the Sun rapidly. Transits of Mercury are relatively common, occurring every 7 or 8 years, mainly because Mercury orbits the Sun so quickly. Transits of Venus are far rarer.

With a simultaneous transit of Mercury and solar eclipse, that will mean that four astronomical bodies will be lined up together-the Sun, Mercury, the Moon, and Earth. The last time this happened was in 6945 BCE, and it is expected to occur once again in 6757.

Answer: An ENIAC computer

ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, was first announced in 1946, too late to fit into the Crypt of Civilization. Sadly, when the Crypt is opened in 8113, future humans will think us technology-deprived imbeciles.

The Crypt was the brainchild of Thornwell Jacobs, a minister credited with inventing the idea of a "time capsule" for future generations to look back on. Jacobs noted that the Egyptian calendar was established in 4241 BCE (sometimes considered the first "recorded date" in history), found out the difference to 1936, and decided that 6177 years was an appropriate time for a time capsule. Thus, he decided his Crypt of Civilization, which the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records decried to be the first true time capsule, would be opened in 8113.

Located at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, the Crypt of Civilization was filled with artifacts housed in airtight containers, representing the pinnacle of culture. Books like the Bible, the Koran, and the Iliad are among the 800 works of literature included in the collection. Audio recordings of world leaders Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin are found alongside dental floss, a cash register, Lincoln logs, Budweiser beer, and a toaster. Hopefully, residents of the year 8113 will be able to figure out the purpose of said toaster.

Answer: Doomsday Argument

Brandon Carter proposed his so-called "Doomsday Argument" in 1983, and since then, it has been endorsed by a number of philosophers and scientists who agree with the overall premise: that human existence is about half over.

The math behind the idea is as follows. Let's assume that the number of humans that will ever be born is some number N, and that an individual human being born today is number n on the planet. That means that that person is in the n/N percentile of human existence. For instance, if one trillion people will live in human history, then person number 500 billion is in the 50th percentile, or n/N = 0.5.

n/N is uniformly distributed over time, which means that 95% of humans are born in the 0.05-1.0 percentile. Therefore, if we took a guess at our current position on the curve, 95% of the time, we're in the last 95% of human existence. Using that logic, the maximum number of human beings that could still be born on the planet is at most 20 times what have already lived before. When Carter formulated the argument, there had been approximately 60 billion humans in history. That means 95% of the time, there were fewer than 1.2 trillion people left to be born. Assuming that the world population doesn't grow significantly bigger than 10 billion and life spans remain at approximately their current levels, the human population will end in about 9000 years.

Therefore, let's hope we're still in the first 5% of the human population!

Answer: Guinness

Arthur Guinness, founder of the famous ale company, began brewing at Dublin's St. James' Gate Brewery in 1759, and on December 31, he signed a 9,000-year lease on the building. The requirements? He would pay just 45 pounds a year to lease, not indexing the value for inflation. The company grew and grew, occupying an area of more than 64 acres by the time of the death of Arthur's son Benjamin. (It also eventually bought out the original 4-acre site, so the 9000-year lease isn't binding any longer -- just a trivial factoid today.)