While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, present scientific understanding in various fields has allowed a projected course for the farthest future events to be sketched out, if only in the broadest strokes.

These fields include cosmology and astrophysics, which have revealed how planets and stars form, interact and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time, and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

But here is the best minds’ most ambitious set of scientific predictions yet – from what could happen in one thousand years time to one hundred quintillion years (that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years).