initial commit

crates/loic-gui/src/events.rs

@@ -0,0 +1,758 @@
+//! # Cosmic Event Passages
+//!
+//! Herein dwell the textual accompaniments to the cosmic milestones displayed
+//! upon the Observatory's timeline: sixty of them, one per caret, each a
+//! meditation upon the significance of its event, rendered in prose
+//! befitting the gravity (or, in the case of the early universe, the absence
+//! thereof) of the moment in question. A click on a caret opens the passage
+//! in an overlay, word-wrapped to the window; a click anywhere, or Escape,
+//! closes it again, and the universe resumes where it was.
+//!
+//! These passages are technically accurate. They are also linguistically
+//! unhinged. This is by design. Where the science is settled the passage
+//! says so; where it is argued, the passage says that instead, because a
+//! timeline that presents a conjecture as a date is lying with a straight
+//! face, and the workspace README, section 0, forbids exactly that. Where
+//! the calendar itself takes a position — on the last observation, on the
+//! sanctity of the Julian year — the passage says whose position it is. The
+//! titles and the texts are content, fact-checked, and not to be improved by
+//! anyone who has come to improve the comments.
+
+/// The name by which a marker on the timeline and the passage behind it
+/// know each other: one variant per event, sixty of them, in the order the
+/// universe produced them. The timeline's table carries one of these per
+/// marker and `get_passage` answers to it, so the two cannot drift apart
+/// without the compiler noticing — a match with a variant missing does not
+/// build, which is the calendar's preferred way of being told. It derives
+/// everything a key should: copied by value, compared by value, hashed by
+/// value, and printed by `Debug` as its own name, which is the only name it
+/// has.
+#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, PartialEq, Eq, Hash)]
+pub enum EventId {
+    // The Planck era, one Planck time long: the unit the calendar counts in.
+    PlanckEpochEnds,
+
+    // The Grand Unification era: three forces as one, gravity already apart.
+    GrandUnificationEpoch,
+
+    // The electroweak era: inflation's end, and the Higgs field coming on.
+    InflationEnds,
+    ElectroweakEpoch,
+
+    // The quark era: the plasma, before confinement had anything to confine.
+    QuarkEpoch,
+
+    // The hadron era: the quarks bound, the antimatter gone, the neutrinos
+    // loose.
+    HadronEpoch,
+    NeutrinoDecoupling,
+
+    // Nucleosynthesis: the universe as a fusion reactor, for a quarter of an
+    // hour.
+    NucleosynthesisBegins,
+    NucleosynthesisEnds,
+
+    // The photon era: cooling past the Sun's core, equality, and the first
+    // light let go.
+    CoolerThanTheSunsCore,
+    MatterRadiationEquality,
+    Recombination,
+
+    // The dark ages: neutral hydrogen, and nothing shining.
+    DarkAgesBegin,
+
+    // Cosmic dawn: the first stars, and the first things worth calling
+    // galaxies.
+    FirstStarsIgnite,
+    FirstGalaxiesForm,
+
+    // The stelliferous era: the age of stars, of the Sun, and of everything
+    // that has so far lived on the third rock — the calendar's own era, for
+    // now.
+    ReionizationComplete,
+    CosmicNoon,
+    ExpansionAccelerates,
+    SolarSystemForms,
+    EarthForms,
+    MoonForms,
+    FirstLife,
+    GreatOxidation,
+    FirstEukaryotes,
+    SnowballEarth,
+    CambrianExplosion,
+    PermianExtinction,
+    DinosaurExtinction,
+
+    // Human history: from Jebel Irhoud to the year 2038, the last two percent
+    // of the species' time and the whole of its record, this calendar's
+    // epoch included.
+    HomoSapiens,
+    FirstFarmers,
+    FirstWriting,
+    JulianCalendar,
+    LeibnizBinary,
+    PlanckUnits,
+    FirstComputer,
+    FirstTransistor,
+    ArpanetWhisper,
+    UnixEpoch,
+    FirstEmail,
+    FirstLeapSecond,
+    FirstWebsite,
+    FirstSmartphone,
+    FirstBitcoinBlock,
+    UnixTimeOverflows,
+
+    // The far future: everything scheduled, from Voyager's fly-by to the
+    // last star.
+    VoyagerPassesGliese445,
+    PangaeaProxima,
+    OceansEvaporate,
+    AndromedaArrives,
+    SunRedGiant,
+    LocalGroupAlone,
+    LastStarsDie,
+
+    // The degenerate era: the remnants, cooling, and the galaxies coming
+    // apart.
+    DegenerateEra,
+    GalaxiesDisperse,
+
+    // The black hole era, if the protons decay; and the rocks, if they do
+    // not.
+    ProtonDecayComplete,
+    BlackHoleEraBegins,
+    RocksBecomeSpheres,
+
+    // The dark era: the holes and the dwarfs leak away, and the bits run out.
+    StellarBlackHolesEvaporate,
+    WhiteDwarfsErode,
+    SagittariusAEvaporates,
+    SupermassiveBlackHolesEvaporate,
+}
+
+/// What the overlay shows when a caret on the timeline is clicked: a title,
+/// centred in amber at card scale, and a passage of three paragraphs, white,
+/// word-wrapped to the window's width by the Observatory and separated by
+/// the blank lines the text itself carries. Both are `&'static str`
+/// compiled into the binary; the calendar does not fetch its history from
+/// anywhere it could be edited without a rebuild.
+pub struct EventPassage {
+    /// The event's title, as the overlay prints it above the passage. Not
+    /// the same string as the marker's name on the timeline, which is
+    /// shorter and shares a line with a dash; this one has the width of
+    /// the window and uses it.
+    pub title: &'static str,
+    /// The passage: a meditation in three paragraphs on the event, its
+    /// evidence, and its bearing on a calendar that measures from a crash.
+    /// Where a number is argued the passage says so; where it is settled it
+    /// says that; and where the calendar itself takes a position the
+    /// passage says whose position it is.
+    pub passage: &'static str,
+}
+
+/// Furnish the passage for an event: the oracle through which the
+/// Observatory conjures textual enlightenment regarding the milestones
+/// scattered across its timeline, consulted once per click on a caret and
+/// answering, always, because the match below is exhaustive over `EventId`
+/// and the compiler will not have it otherwise. Each passage has been
+/// crafted with the care and verbosity befitting events of such magnitude,
+/// and checked with the suspicion befitting a document that counts Planck
+/// times; the titles and the texts are content, not commentary, and are the
+/// one thing in this crate its comments are forbidden to improve.
+///
+/// The function returns by value and allocates nothing: an `EventPassage`
+/// is two static references, thirty-two bytes on this platform, and the
+/// strings they point at were laid down when the binary was.
+#[allow(
+    clippy::too_many_lines,
+    reason = "sixty passages behind one match: the match is a book's index, and an index bound in five volumes serves worse than one"
+)]
+pub fn get_passage(id: EventId) -> EventPassage {
+    match id {
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE PLANCK ERA: the first 10^-43 seconds, and the boundary of physics itself
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::PlanckEpochEnds => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Planck Epoch Concludes",
+            passage: r"For one Planck time—the smallest meaningful interval that physics deigns to acknowledge—the universe existed in a state of primordial unity. Gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces were not merely friends; they were indistinguishable, a single superforce presiding over a cosmos smaller than anything you have ever conceived of being small.
+
+At 5.39 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds, this unity shattered. Gravity, that most antisocial of forces, separated from its siblings and began its long, slow work of pulling things together. The universe was now approximately 10⁻³⁵ meters across—still inconceivably small, but infinitely larger than it had been one Planck time prior.
+
+This moment marks the boundary of physics itself. Before this, our equations dissolve into quantum foam. After this, we can pretend to understand things.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE GRAND UNIFICATION ERA: 10^-43 to 10^-36 seconds, a unity never since repeated
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::GrandUnificationEpoch => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Grand Unification Epoch",
+            passage: r"With gravity now sulking in its own corner of reality, the remaining three forces—electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear—maintained their alliance for a cosmological instant. The temperature exceeded 10²⁷ Kelvin, a number so absurd that comparison fails; the core of the sun, at a mere 15 million Kelvin, is effectively absolute zero by comparison.
+
+During this epoch, the distinction between quarks and leptons was meaningless. Particles transmuted freely between forms, a democracy of matter that would soon give way to the rigid class structures of conventional physics.
+
+The Grand Unified Force, as theorists have named this ephemeral unity, remains hypothetical—we have never achieved the energies required to reunite these forces in a laboratory. The early universe performed this experiment exactly once, then moved on.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE ELECTROWEAK ERA: 10^-36 to 10^-12 seconds, inflation and the acquisition of mass
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::InflationEnds => EventPassage {
+            title: "Cosmic Inflation Concludes",
+            passage: r"For a flickering moment—between 10⁻³⁶ and 10⁻³² seconds after the Beginning—the universe indulged in exponential expansion so violent that it would make any self-respecting economist weep with envy. Space itself stretched faster than light, a feat permitted because nothing was actually moving through space; space itself was simply becoming more of itself.
+
+The observable universe, currently 93 billion light-years across, was during this period smaller than a proton. Quantum fluctuations, those tiny statistical hiccups in the fabric of reality, were stretched to cosmic proportions. These wrinkles would eventually become galaxy clusters, voids, and the large-scale structure we observe today.
+
+Inflation solved several embarrassing problems in cosmology—the horizon problem, the flatness problem—by the simple expedient of making the universe unimaginably larger than it has any reasonable right to be.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::ElectroweakEpoch => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Electroweak Epoch",
+            passage: r"At 10⁻¹² seconds—a picosecond, in the parlance of those who traffic in such infinitesimals—the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces finally acknowledged their differences and went their separate ways. This divorce, known as electroweak symmetry breaking, gave mass to the W and Z bosons while leaving photons forever massless and fleet.
+
+The Higgs field, that all-pervading molasses of the quantum realm, switched on. Particles that had been traveling at the speed of light suddenly found themselves wading through cosmic treacle, acquiring the property we call mass. Without this moment, atoms could not form, chemistry would be impossible, and you would not exist to contemplate your own impossibility.
+
+The universe was now one trillionth of a second old. The patch of it that would one day become everything you can see was roughly 10¹² metres across—about the size of Saturn's orbit—and still hotter than anything that would exist for the next 13.8 billion years.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE QUARK ERA: 10^-12 to 10^-5 seconds, ten microseconds of unconfined broth
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::QuarkEpoch => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Quark Epoch",
+            passage: r"The universe had now cooled sufficiently—to a mere 10¹² Kelvin—that the fundamental forces operated as we know them today. Quarks and gluons swam in a plasma of such density and temperature that they could not bind together into hadrons. This was the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter so exotic that we have only recently recreated it in particle accelerators.
+
+For approximately ten microseconds, the cosmos was a seething broth of free quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, engaged in constant annihilation and pair-production. The slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter—one extra quark per billion annihilations—would prove consequential. Those leftover quarks would eventually become everything that exists.
+
+Color confinement, the principle that quarks cannot exist in isolation, was temporarily suspended. It would not remain so for long.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE HADRON ERA: 10^-5 seconds to one second, confinement, and one survivor in a billion
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::HadronEpoch => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Hadron Epoch",
+            passage: r"As the universe cooled below 10¹² Kelvin, quarks found themselves suddenly and irrevocably confined. They bound together in trios to form baryons—protons and neutrons, the building blocks of all ordinary matter—and in pairs to form mesons. The quark-gluon plasma had curdled into hadrons.
+
+Protons and antiprotons, neutrons and antineutrons, annihilated each other in cataclysmic finality. When the fire cooled, only the slight excess of matter over antimatter remained—one survivor per billion annihilations. This is why there is something rather than nothing, a fact whose explanation remains one of physics' most profound mysteries.
+
+The universe was now a ten-thousandth of a second old. In human terms, this is nothing. In terms of cosmic history, entire eras had already passed.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::NeutrinoDecoupling => EventPassage {
+            title: "Neutrino Decoupling",
+            passage: r"One second after the Beginning—an eternity by the standards of the preceding epochs—the universe had cooled to approximately 10¹⁰ Kelvin. At this temperature, neutrinos, those ghostly particles that barely interact with anything, finally decoupled from the cosmic plasma and began their eternal, nearly unimpeded journey through the universe.
+
+These primordial neutrinos still exist, filling every cubic centimeter of space with approximately 336 of their number, traveling at nearly the speed of light with energies so low they are essentially undetectable. The Cosmic Neutrino Background, as it is called, predates the Cosmic Microwave Background by 380,000 years.
+
+Neutrino decoupling marked the moment when the universe became transparent to neutrinos but remained opaque to photons. Light would have to wait considerably longer for its freedom.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // NUCLEOSYNTHESIS: one second to twenty minutes, three parts hydrogen to one of helium
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::NucleosynthesisBegins => EventPassage {
+            title: "Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Begins",
+            passage: r"Ten seconds into existence, the universe had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together in principle. In practice every deuterium nucleus they made was promptly blown apart again by the sea of photons around it, and it took three more minutes of cooling—the deuterium bottleneck—before the products could survive their birth. Then nuclear fusion, the same process that powers stars, commenced on a cosmic scale. For about a quarter of an hour, the entire universe functioned as a fusion reactor.
+
+Hydrogen nuclei (single protons) fused into deuterium, which fused into helium-3, which fused into helium-4. Small amounts of lithium-7 and beryllium-7 formed. And then, due to the absence of stable nuclei with masses 5 and 8, the fusion chain stopped.
+
+This bottleneck would have profound consequences. Nearly all elements heavier than lithium had to wait for stars to form, hundreds of millions of years later. The early universe, for all its fury, could only cook the lightest ingredients.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::NucleosynthesisEnds => EventPassage {
+            title: "Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Concludes",
+            passage: r"Twenty minutes after the Beginning, the universe had cooled below the threshold for nuclear fusion. The cosmic reactor shut down, leaving behind a precise mixture: roughly 75% hydrogen, 25% helium by mass, and trace amounts of deuterium, helium-3, and lithium.
+
+This ratio, predicted by theory and confirmed by observation, stands as one of the great triumphs of modern cosmology. The abundance of light elements matches theoretical predictions to remarkable precision, providing strong evidence that we understand the first twenty minutes of cosmic history.
+
+The universe would now spend the next 380,000 years as an opaque plasma, too hot for atoms to form, too thick with free electrons for light to travel far. It would be a long, quiet wait before the next significant event.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE PHOTON ERA: twenty minutes to 380,000 years, the long opaque wait for atoms
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::CoolerThanTheSunsCore => EventPassage {
+            title: "Cooler Than the Sun's Core",
+            passage: r"A week or so after the Beginning, the temperature of the entire universe fell below fifteen million kelvin—the temperature at the centre of the Sun today. Everything that exists had, for its first eight days, been hotter than the inside of a star; from here on the cosmos as a whole would be cooler than the furnaces it would later build.
+
+The cooling followed one rule the whole way down: in this era the temperature fell as the inverse square root of the age. Ten thousand times older, one hundred times cooler. By its first birthday—an anniversary nobody kept, there being no years yet, or calendars, or anybody—the universe was a fog of hydrogen and helium nuclei, electrons and light at some two million kelvin, opaque, featureless, and with nothing scheduled for the next forty-seven thousand years.
+
+The Sun's core keeps its fifteen million kelvin by burning hydrogen. The universe had no such source. It was simply spending the heat it was born with, and has been spending it ever since.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::MatterRadiationEquality => EventPassage {
+            title: "Matter-Radiation Equality",
+            passage: r"For the first 47,000 years, radiation dominated the universe. Photons, neutrinos, and other relativistic particles contained more energy than all the matter combined. Under such conditions, the growth of structure was suppressed; density fluctuations could not amplify because radiation pressure smoothed them away.
+
+At 47,000 years, the universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently that matter and radiation achieved equal energy density. This moment, unremarkable in the cosmic plasma, marked a fundamental shift in power. Henceforth, matter would dominate, gravity would strengthen its grip, and structure formation could begin in earnest.
+
+The seeds of galaxies, planted by inflation billions of times smaller than a proton, began to grow.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::Recombination => EventPassage {
+            title: "Recombination: The Cosmic Dawn of Transparency",
+            passage: r"At 380,000 years, the universe had cooled to approximately 3,000 Kelvin—still hot enough to boil most metals, but cool enough for electrons to bind to nuclei. Atoms formed for the first time. Hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium condensed out of the primordial plasma.
+
+With electrons no longer free to scatter photons, light could finally travel unimpeded. The universe became transparent. The photons released at this moment have been traveling ever since, their wavelengths stretched by cosmic expansion from visible light to microwaves. We call them the Cosmic Microwave Background.
+
+This is the oldest light in the universe, the first photograph of creation, carrying in its subtle temperature variations the fingerprints of quantum fluctuations from the inflationary epoch.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE DARK AGES: 380,000 to some 200 million years, the afterglow and nothing else
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::DarkAgesBegin => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Cosmic Dark Ages",
+            passage: r"Following recombination, the universe entered a period of profound darkness. The Cosmic Microwave Background photons had been released, but no new light sources existed. The cosmos was filled with neutral hydrogen gas, slowly cooling, slowly coalescing under gravity's patient pull.
+
+For a couple of hundred million years, nothing shone. The universe was a vast, dark, slowly-evolving cloud of gas, gathering into the earliest dark matter halos. No stars. No galaxies. No light except the fading afterglow of the Big Bang itself.
+
+This era, the Dark Ages, is the longest stretch of cosmic history for which we have no direct observations. It ended only when the first stars ignited and lit the universe once more.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // COSMIC DAWN: some 200 to 500 million years, Population III and the first galaxies
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::FirstStarsIgnite => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Stars Ignite",
+            passage: r"Approximately 200 million years after the Beginning, in the hearts of dark matter halos where primordial gas had collected and compressed, the first stars ignited. These Population III stars, as astronomers classify them, were unlike any stars that exist today: massive, luminous, and composed entirely of hydrogen and helium.
+
+Without heavy elements to cool their formation clouds, these first stars grew to enormous sizes—hundreds of solar masses, burning with blue-white fury, living fast and dying spectacularly. Their lifespans measured in millions of years, not billions. Their deaths seeded the universe with the first heavy elements: carbon, oxygen, iron, forged in their cores and scattered by their supernovae.
+
+The Dark Ages ended. The universe, after 200 million years of silence, was alight once more.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstGalaxiesForm => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Galaxies Coalesce",
+            passage: r"As the first generation of stars lived and died, their remnants—black holes, neutron stars, and scattered heavy elements—collected in the gravitational wells of dark matter halos. Small proto-galaxies merged and grew. By 300 million years after the Beginning, the first recognizable galaxies had formed.
+
+These early galaxies were small, irregular, and violent—nothing like the stately spirals and ellipticals of the present day. They churned with star formation, their gas enriched by the deaths of Population III stars, their cores often hosting the seeds of the supermassive black holes that would grow over billions of years.
+
+The James Webb Space Telescope has caught them in the act: JADES-GS-z14-0, the most distant galaxy yet confirmed by its spectrum, shines from 290 million years after the Beginning, already holding hundreds of millions of suns—brighter, larger, and earlier than the models expected. The universe, it seems, was in a hurry to build.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE STELLIFEROUS ERA: the age of stars, from reionization to the dinosaurs' last day
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::ReionizationComplete => EventPassage {
+            title: "Reionization: The Universe Becomes Transparent Once More",
+            passage: r"The first stars and galaxies did more than provide light; they transformed the universe itself. Ultraviolet radiation from early stellar populations ionized the neutral hydrogen that had filled the cosmos since recombination. Over hundreds of millions of years, the universe transitioned from neutral to ionized once more.
+
+By approximately one billion years after the Beginning, reionization was complete. The intergalactic medium became transparent to ultraviolet light. Photons from distant sources could travel unimpeded across cosmic distances—a prerequisite for observational astronomy.
+
+This second great phase transition, from neutral to ionized, marked the end of the cosmic Dark Ages and the beginning of the Stelliferous Era—the age of stars, the epoch we still inhabit today.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::CosmicNoon => EventPassage {
+            title: "Cosmic Noon",
+            passage: r"Three and a half billion years after the Beginning, at a redshift of about two, the universe was forming stars faster than it ever had or ever would again. Astronomers call it cosmic noon. The rate has fallen by roughly a factor of ten since; about a quarter of all the stars that exist today were already made before the peak, and the universe has been coasting on the momentum of that afternoon ever since.
+
+The Milky Way was there for it, a smaller and messier galaxy than the one that hosts you, building its stars in bursts. The Sun was not; it would not form for nearly six billion years more, from gas already enriched by the generations that noon produced.
+
+An observer who could see the whole sky at once would have watched galaxies glow with young blue stars from horizon to horizon. Nobody was there. The light from that noon arrives here now, ten billion years late, redshifted into the infrared, in the long exposures of telescopes that were pointed at nothing in particular.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::ExpansionAccelerates => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Expansion Begins to Accelerate",
+            passage: r"For its first seven or eight billion years the universe expanded the way a thrown stone rises: coasting, and slowing, as the gravity of everything in it pulled on everything else. Then, somewhere around six billion years ago, the slowing stopped and the expansion began to speed up. Matter had thinned out enough that something else—constant per unit of space and indifferent to dilution—took over the accounts. It is called dark energy because it has to be called something.
+
+The transition is not sharp and its date is not settled; analyses put it between five and seven billion years ago, depending on the data and the assumptions. The sign change is not in doubt. Two teams measured it in 1998 with distant supernovae that were fainter than a decelerating universe allowed, and were given a Nobel prize for the inconvenience.
+
+Nothing here noticed. The Sun did not yet exist; the cloud it would condense from was still being seeded by supernovae, and the most sophisticated life anywhere nearby, if there was any, was a cell without a nucleus.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::SolarSystemForms => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Solar System Coalesces",
+            passage: r"Nine billion years after the Beginning, in an unremarkable arm of an unremarkable spiral galaxy, a cloud of gas and dust began to collapse. The trigger may have been a nearby supernova, its shockwave compressing the cloud past the threshold of gravitational instability. Whatever the cause, the result was the birth of a star.
+
+The Sun ignited 4.6 billion years ago, consuming 99.86% of the available mass. The remaining 0.14%—a cosmic rounding error—flattened into a protoplanetary disk. Within this disk, dust grains collided and stuck, growing into planetesimals, then planets. The Solar System took shape over tens of millions of years.
+
+Four rocky planets formed in the inner system, where heat drove away light gases. Two gas giants and two ice giants formed in the outer system, where temperatures allowed hydrogen, helium and ices to accumulate. And on the third rock from the Sun, something remarkable was about to begin.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::EarthForms => EventPassage {
+            title: "Earth Forms from Cosmic Debris",
+            passage: r"The Earth accreted from the protoplanetary disk approximately 4.54 billion years ago, a molten ball of rock and metal bombarded by planetesimals. The energy of impacts kept the planet hot; iron sank to the core while silicates floated to form a magma ocean.
+
+A world without oceans, without atmosphere, without any feature recognizable as Earthly. A hellscape of perpetual bombardment and volcanic fury. This was the Hadean Eon, named for Hades, and the name was apt.
+
+Yet this violent world would, against all reasonable expectation, become a cradle for life. The very impacts that scarred its surface delivered water and organic molecules. The iron core that segregated early would generate a magnetic field to shield future life from solar radiation. Every catastrophe was also a gift.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::MoonForms => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Moon-Forming Impact",
+            passage: r"Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, when Earth was merely 50 million years old, a Mars-sized body named Theia collided with our nascent planet—at a glancing angle, in the standard telling; head-on and hotter, in some newer ones. The impact was cataclysmic beyond description: both worlds were largely vaporized, their material mixing in an orbiting cloud of molten rock.
+
+From this debris disk, the Moon coalesced—a body proportionally larger relative to its planet than any other moon in the inner Solar System. The impact may have tilted Earth's axis, giving us seasons, and probably stripped away much of the early atmosphere. Whether it helped start the planet's magnetic field is argued.
+
+The Moon stabilizes Earth's axial tilt, damping the chaotic wandering that models say the axis would otherwise undergo; whether complex life needed that favour is a conjecture, not a finding. Tides driven by lunar gravity may have played a role in life's emergence from the seas. Our satellite is not merely a companion. It may be an enabler of our existence, and it is certainly a witness to it.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstLife => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Emergence of Life",
+            passage: r"Sometime between 4.2 and 3.8 billion years ago—the evidence remains frustratingly uncertain—life emerged on Earth. The transition from chemistry to biology, from organic molecules to self-replicating systems, remains one of science's most profound unsolved problems.
+
+The earliest definitive evidence of life dates to approximately 3.5 billion years ago: stromatolites, layered structures built by microbial communities, preserved in Australian rock. But life may have existed long before, perhaps as early as the heavy bombardment allowed the oceans to remain liquid.
+
+How non-life became life we do not know. Whether it happened once or many times, whether it was inevitable or improbable, whether it has happened elsewhere—these questions haunt the margins of our understanding. What we know is that it happened here, and everything that followed was consequence.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::GreatOxidation => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Great Oxidation Event",
+            passage: r"Around 2.4 billion years ago the atmosphere of the Earth acquired free oxygen, and kept it. Cyanobacteria had been splitting water for a long while by then, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, but everything they released had been swallowed—by iron dissolved in the oceans, by volcanic gases, by rock. Somewhere between 2.5 and 2.4 billion years ago the sinks filled, and the gas began to accumulate in the air.
+
+The evidence is written in sulphur: before the event, sulphur isotopes in sediments carry a signature that forms only in an atmosphere without an ozone layer; after it, the signature vanishes, worldwide, and does not return. Rust follows—red beds, and the last of the banded iron formations, the iron of the oceans falling out of solution in layers now mined for steel.
+
+For most of the life then living, oxygen was poison. What followed was, by biomass, one of the great extinctions, and, it is thought, one of the great glaciations: the greenhouse gas methane collapsed and the planet froze, perhaps to the equator. Everything that breathes descends from the survivors.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstEukaryotes => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Eukaryotes",
+            passage: r"The oldest fossils that are unmistakably eukaryotes—cells with a nucleus, the kind you are made of—are about 1.65 billion years old: ornamented, spiny microfossils from what is now China, too elaborate to be bacteria. Molecular clocks argue the lineage is older, perhaps by hundreds of millions of years, and the rocks have not yet been persuaded to agree.
+
+The eukaryotic cell was not invented so much as assembled. At its heart is a merger: one cell took up residence inside another and stayed, becoming the mitochondrion, the power supply of every animal, plant and fungus since. The host is thought to have been an archaeon, the guest a bacterium; the arrangement has held for well over a billion years, which is longer than most.
+
+Within a few tens of millions of years some of these cells were living in filaments, and within a hundred million in sheets the size of a hand and larger. Multicellularity, it turns out, is easy; life has arrived at it dozens of times. It is the nucleus that took two billion years.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::SnowballEarth => EventPassage {
+            title: "Snowball Earth",
+            passage: r"Seven hundred and seventeen million years ago the ice came down from the poles and did not stop. The Sturtian glaciation, the first of the Cryogenian's two, buried the planet for some fifty-seven million years—nearly the whole distance from the dinosaurs to you—and the glacial deposits it left are found on every continent, including ones that were then at the equator.
+
+Whether the oceans froze over completely, or a band of open water survived at the equator, is argued; that the Earth was white from space, reflecting the sunlight it could no longer absorb, is not. What ended it was volcanoes: with no rain to weather rock and no weathering to draw down carbon dioxide, the gas accumulated over the ice for tens of millions of years until the greenhouse it built melted everything at once. The cap carbonates deposited in that thaw sit on top of the glacial debris worldwide, like a signature.
+
+The animals appear in the rocks a little after the second glaciation ended. It is hard not to draw a line between the two, and hard to prove one.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::CambrianExplosion => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Cambrian Explosion",
+            passage: r"For three billion years, life was, with rare and modest exceptions, microscopic and, to human eyes, boring; the Ediacaran experiments in soft-bodied multicellular life came late and left few descendants. Then, approximately 539 million years ago, something changed. In a geological instant—perhaps 20 million years—nearly all major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record. Bodies. Eyes. Shells. Predators and prey. Complexity exploded.
+
+The Cambrian Explosion, as this event is known, transformed Earth's biosphere from a thin veneer of microbial films to a churning ecosystem of multicellular creatures. Trilobites armored themselves against predators. Anomalocaris became the first apex predator we know of. Hallucigenia was reconstructed upside down and back to front before anyone worked out which end was the head.
+
+What triggered this explosion remains debated: rising oxygen levels, the evolution of vision, an arms race between predators and prey, or all of the above. What is certain is that the world was forever changed.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::PermianExtinction => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Great Dying",
+            passage: r"Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago the Siberian Traps—a volcanic province that would cover most of Western Europe—erupted through coal and carbonate, and the atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide and worse. The oceans acidified, warmed, and lost their oxygen. In about sixty thousand years—a geological instant, dated to that precision by uranium in volcanic ash beds at Meishan, China—the great majority of marine species, estimates run from eighty to ninety-six percent, and most life on land were gone.
+
+It is the worst extinction in the record of the planet, worse than the one that took the dinosaurs, and it took so long to recover from that the Triassic began with a world of few species, most of them small. The lystrosaurs, pig-sized and unglamorous, inherited the continents for a while, and were at one point perhaps the majority of all land vertebrates.
+
+The dinosaurs came out of the recovery. So, some distance behind them, did you.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::DinosaurExtinction => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction",
+            passage: r"Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid approximately 10 kilometers in diameter struck the Yucatan Peninsula at a velocity of 20 kilometers per second. The impact released energy equivalent to 100 million megatons of TNT—billions of times more than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
+
+The immediate effects were apocalyptic: a fireball that incinerated everything within a thousand kilometers, earthquakes of magnitude 10 or greater, tsunamis that scoured coastlines worldwide. The long-term effects were worse: dust and soot blocked sunlight for years, collapsing food chains, acidifying oceans, extinguishing three-quarters of all species.
+
+The non-avian dinosaurs, lords of the Earth for 165 million years, perished entirely. And in the ecological vacuum left behind, small, furry, insignificant creatures called mammals began their ascent.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // HUMAN HISTORY: from Jebel Irhoud to the year 2038, the calendar's own epoch among them
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::HomoSapiens => EventPassage {
+            title: "Homo sapiens",
+            passage: r"The oldest fossils that are placed in your own species come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and are about three hundred thousand years old: faces that would pass in a crowd, above braincases that would not, quite. The species did not arise on a date or in a place; it assembled itself across Africa over a long time from populations that met, separated and met again. Three hundred thousand years is where the record currently draws the line, and the line has moved before.
+
+Everything that follows on this timeline—writing, computing, the network, this calendar—fits into the last two percent of that span. For ninety-eight percent of the time there have been Homo sapiens, there has been nothing you would recognise as history: stone, fire, ochre, the sea crossed a few times, an ice age or two endured.
+
+It is the only species known to have measured the age of the universe, or to have wanted to.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstFarmers => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Farmers",
+            passage: r"About eleven and a half thousand years ago, in the hills of the Fertile Crescent, people who had gathered wild wheat and barley for millennia began to plant it. Not everywhere at once, and not on purpose in the sense of a decision: the plants that were harvested and resown became, over centuries, plants that could no longer scatter their own seed, and the people became people who could no longer leave.
+
+Within a few thousand years the same thing happened independently in China, in Mesoamerica, in the Andes, in New Guinea, with rice and maize and potatoes and taro. It is one of the strongest arguments that the thing was going to happen: the climate had settled, the ice had gone, and a species that had watched plants closely for a hundred thousand years was going to notice.
+
+Farming made villages, villages made surplus, surplus made accountants, and accountants, some six thousand years later, made writing. Every calendar descends from the need to know when to plant. This one, with no months, no seasons and no years, is the first that does not.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstWriting => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Invention of Writing",
+            passage: r"Approximately 5,400 years ago, in the cities of ancient Sumer, humans began pressing wedge-shaped reeds into clay tablets. The purpose was mundane: accounting, inventory, taxation. The consequence was revolutionary: the externalization of memory, the defeat of forgetting, the birth of history itself.
+
+Writing transformed human civilization. Information could now persist beyond living memory, accumulate across generations, spread across distances. Law, literature, mathematics, science—all became possible when knowledge could be recorded and transmitted.
+
+The Loic Calendar measures time in Planck intervals, but this moment—the invention of writing—marks the beginning of recorded human history. Everything before is prehistory, reconstructed from artifacts and inference. Everything after is, in principle, knowable.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::JulianCalendar => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Julian Calendar",
+            passage: r"On the first of January, 45 BC, Rome switched to a calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year. To get there, the previous year had to be 445 days long; the Romans called it the last year of confusion, and it was. The astronomer who designed it, Sosigenes of Alexandria, took the year to be 365 and a quarter days, which is eleven minutes too long; by the sixteenth century the error had piled up to ten days and the calendar had to be cut open and stitched.
+
+The Loic Calendar keeps one thing from Julius Caesar: the Julian year of 31,557,600 seconds, exactly 365.25 days, which astronomers still use as their unit of long duration because it is a definition and not a measurement. The calendar's age of the universe is stated in those years. It has no other use for years, or for months, or for days, and the leap day—that quadrennial confession that the Earth and the Sun do not care about integers—it declines entirely.
+
+The priests in charge of the new calendar promptly misread the rule and added a leap day every three years. It took Augustus, and a dozen years without any leap days at all, to undo it. Time-keeping has been like that ever since.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::LeibnizBinary => EventPassage {
+            title: "Leibniz Explains Binary Arithmetic",
+            passage: r"In 1703 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published, in the Mémoires of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, an explanation of arithmetic using only the characters 0 and 1. He had been playing with it for over twenty years. Addition was a matter of carrying, multiplication needed no tables, and every number was a string of the two simplest marks there are; he thought it a fine image of creation out of nothing, and said so. He also thought it had been discovered four thousand years earlier in China, having been sent a diagram of the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching by a Jesuit missionary, and said that too.
+
+Nobody used it for more than two hundred years. Binary was a curiosity of philosophers until relays and then vacuum tubes turned out to have exactly two states worth trusting, at which point it became the only arithmetic there is.
+
+Every quantity in this calendar—every Planck count, every mask, every one of the 512 bits of an instant—is written in the notation of that paper. The seven cosmic primes are even named after operations on it that nobody had yet given names.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::PlanckUnits => EventPassage {
+            title: "Planck Proposes Natural Units",
+            passage: r"In May 1899 Max Planck told the Prussian Academy of Sciences that three constants of nature—the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and a new one of his own, needed to make the theory of heat radiation come out right—could be combined into a unit of length, a unit of mass and a unit of time that would, in his words, retain their meaning for all times and for all civilisations, including extraterrestrial and non-human ones. He gave their values. The unit of time came out at about 10⁻⁴³ seconds. He did not yet know what his new constant meant; the quantum was a year away.
+
+He was right about the units and did not live to see anyone use them. It took half a century for physicists to realise that the Planck length and the Planck time are where gravity and quantum mechanics must both be taken seriously at once, and that no theory yet manages it.
+
+This calendar counts Planck times because Planck said, in 1899, that they would mean the same thing to anyone. It is the one claim in the whole edifice that has an author, a date, and a room.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstComputer => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Birth of Electronic Computing",
+            passage: r"The exact moment when electronic computing began is debatable—Colossus, ENIAC, the Z3 all have claims—but by the mid-1940s, machines existed that could perform calculations faster than any human mind. ENIAC ran its first problem, for the hydrogen bomb, in December 1945, and was unveiled the following February. It filled a room, consumed kilowatts, and performed what a modern smartphone accomplishes in microseconds.
+
+These early computers were tools for specific problems: codebreaking, ballistics, nuclear physics. Their creators did not fully envision what they were building: the foundation of a new kind of civilization, one where information processing would eventually exceed in economic importance the manipulation of physical matter.
+
+The Loic Calendar exists because of these machines. It requires 512-bit integers, calculations at Planck precision, computations that no human could perform by hand. The calendar is, in a sense, a monument to the computers that make its absurdity possible.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstTransistor => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Invention of the Transistor",
+            passage: r"On December 16, 1947, at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first practical transistor. This small device—capable of amplifying electrical signals without vacuum tubes—would prove more consequential than nuclear weapons, more transformative than the moon landing.
+
+Vacuum tubes were large, hot, fragile, and power-hungry. Transistors were small, cool, durable, and efficient. More importantly, transistors could be miniaturized, printed in silicon, manufactured by the billion. Moore's Law—the exponential increase in computing power—was made possible by this humble semiconductor device.
+
+The computer on which the Loic Observatory runs contains billions of transistors, each smaller than a virus. Without Bardeen and Brattain's invention, without the exponential scaling it enabled, precise temporal measurement at the Planck scale would remain a mathematical abstraction.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::ArpanetWhisper => EventPassage {
+            title: "The ARPANET Whisper: Loic Epoch Zero",
+            passage: r#"At 22:30 Pacific time on October 29, 1969—06:30 UTC on the 30th, this calendar's zero—a student at UCLA began typing the word "LOGIN" to a computer at Stanford Research Institute. The "l" arrived. The "o" arrived. On the "g", the far end crashed. "LO" became the first message transmitted across the ARPANET, the ancestor of the modern Internet.
+
+This moment—the Whisper—is the epoch of the Loic Calendar. All Loic timestamps are measured from this instant, when machines first spoke to each other across the void. The choice is deliberate: not the birth of a king, not the founding of a city, but the birth of networked computation.
+
+From this origin point, time flows backward to the Big Bang (13.8 billion years prior) and forward to Annihilation, the calendar's terminal coordinate, which its 512 bits place some 10¹⁰³ years hence. All of cosmic history, measured from the moment humanity taught machines to whisper across distance."#,
+        },
+
+        EventId::UnixEpoch => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Unix Epoch",
+            passage: r"Sixty-two days, seventeen hours, twenty-nine minutes and nineteen seconds after the Whisper, the other epoch begins: midnight, the first of January 1970, Coordinated Universal Time, the zero from which nearly every computer alive counts its seconds. It was not chosen for anything that happened. Unix's early designers moved the zero around several times as their counters overflowed, and settled on the start of 1970 because it was a round date close at hand.
+
+This calendar's zero is defined by its distance from that one: 5,419,722 seconds on the atomic clock scale, a number chosen, out of the sixty seconds the historical record allows, because it factors into 2 × 3 × 7 × 11 × 11,731 and no other candidate did. The two epochs are tied by a squarefree integer and disagree about everything else, including whether a second is always a second.
+
+Most of the world is on Unix time without knowing it. Nobody is on Loic time without knowing it.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstEmail => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Email",
+            passage: r#"In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two computers on the ARPANET. The content of the message has been lost to history—Tomlinson himself couldn't remember it, suggesting it was something like "QWERTYUIOP"—but its significance transcends its content.
+
+The @ symbol, chosen by Tomlinson to separate user from machine, became the defining glyph of the digital age. Email would become the backbone of digital communication, the address of identity, the replacement for postal mail in billions of daily transactions.
+
+Two years after the Whisper, humans had already invented a new form of correspondence. The network was no longer merely a connection; it was becoming a medium for human expression."#,
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstLeapSecond => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Leap Second",
+            passage: r"At the end of June 1972, for the first time, a minute was given sixty-one seconds. Coordinated Universal Time had been redefined on the first of January that year to tick in atomic seconds, exactly ten of them behind International Atomic Time, and to be held within nine-tenths of a second of the Earth's rotation by inserting a leap second whenever the planet fell behind. The planet, which is slowing down, falls behind. The first insertion was 23:59:60 on 30 June 1972, and there have been twenty-six more, the last at the end of 2016.
+
+The difference is now thirty-seven seconds. This calendar reads the atomic scale and regards the civil one with the contempt documented in the workspace README, section 1.2, while owing its own epoch to exactly those thirty-seven seconds; the irony is disclosed there too. The Observatory will not open on a machine whose kernel has not been told the number.
+
+In 2022 the world's metrologists voted to stop inserting leap seconds by 2035. The Earth, which has lately been speeding up, may yet require the first negative one before then. Nothing in this calendar would notice.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstWebsite => EventPassage {
+            title: "The First Website",
+            passage: r"On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project to a Usenet newsgroup and opened the first website—running at CERN since December, describing the project itself, a recursive documentation of its own existence—to the world. The address was info.cern.ch; it still exists today.
+
+The Web was not the Internet—the network was already two decades old—but it was the interface that made the Internet accessible to ordinary people. Hypertext, links, browsers: these concepts, obvious in retrospect, transformed the network from a tool for specialists into a medium for humanity.
+
+Twenty-two years after the Whisper, the network had evolved from a military experiment to a publishing platform for the world. The rate of change was accelerating.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstSmartphone => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Smartphone Revolution",
+            passage: r"On June 29, 2007, Apple released the iPhone. It was not the first smartphone—that distinction belongs to various devices from the 1990s and early 2000s—but it was the device that defined what a smartphone would become: a pocket-sized window to the totality of human knowledge and communication.
+
+Within a decade, smartphones became ubiquitous. More than half of humanity now carries one. The device that once required a room of vacuum tubes, then a desktop of silicon, now fits in every pocket, runs on battery power, and connects to a network spanning the globe.
+
+The Loic Observatory could run on such a device. Planck-precision timestamps in your pocket. The absurdity is complete.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::FirstBitcoinBlock => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Genesis Block",
+            passage: r#"On January 3, 2009, at 18:15:05 UTC, the Bitcoin genesis block was mined by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Embedded in its coinbase parameter was a message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."
+
+Bitcoin itself is not the point; the point is the proof that trustless, decentralized consensus is possible. That strangers across the world can agree on the state of a shared ledger without any central authority. That cryptographic protocols can replace institutional trust.
+
+The Loic Calendar does not use blockchain, but it shares a philosophy: precision through mathematics, not authority. The genesis block was a declaration that some things need not be decreed; they can simply be computed."#,
+        },
+
+        EventId::UnixTimeOverflows => EventPassage {
+            title: "Thirty-Two Bits Run Out",
+            passage: r"At 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038, the number of seconds since the Unix epoch reaches 2,147,483,648, which is one more than a signed 32-bit integer can hold. Systems that still keep time in one will roll over to the 13th of December 1901 and, in their confusion, may do anything at all. Most have been fixed. The rest are inside things that were not expected to last, which is exactly the kind of thing that lasts.
+
+This calendar keeps its instants in 512 bits, and the count of Planck times since the Whisper will not exhaust them for about 10¹⁰³ years, at which point the universe is expected to have larger problems. The overflow of 2038 is what happens when time is stored in a quantity chosen for convenience. It is listed here as a cautionary tale, and as the only future event on this timeline that is scheduled to the second.
+
+Its predecessor was the year 2000, which was survived by preparation and then remembered as a hoax. 2038 will be survived the same way, by people who fixed it in advance and were thanked by nobody.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE FAR FUTURE: from Voyager's fly-by to the death of the last red dwarf
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::VoyagerPassesGliese445 => EventPassage {
+            title: "Voyager 1 Passes Gliese 445",
+            passage: r"About forty thousand years from now, Voyager 1—launched in 1977, the farthest thing humans have thrown—will pass within 1.6 light-years of Gliese 445, a red dwarf in Camelopardalis that is currently seventeen light-years away and closing. The star will do most of the travelling; by then it will be among the Sun's nearest neighbours. Voyager will not stop. Its speed, and the feeble gravity of a small star, will carry it straight through and on.
+
+It will not be transmitting. Its plutonium will have gone cold by the 2030s, and it will be an inert object of 722 kilograms carrying a gold-plated copper record of greetings in fifty-five languages, whale song, and a diagram of where it came from, drawn relative to fourteen pulsars whose periods will have drifted by then.
+
+Forty thousand years is, on this timeline, seven times the length of recorded history, and less than a rounding error in the age of anything else listed here.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::PangaeaProxima => EventPassage {
+            title: "Pangaea Proxima",
+            passage: r"In two hundred and fifty million years the continents, which move at about the speed your fingernails grow, will have reassembled into a single mass. The models disagree on the shape: the Atlantic closes and the Americas return to Africa in one, the Pacific closes and Asia takes the Americas in another, and the naming—Pangaea Proxima, Novopangaea, Aurica, Amasia—is a matter of which reconstruction you back. That there will be a supercontinent is not much in doubt; there have been several, on a cycle of some four or five hundred million years, and the last one broke up only two hundred million years ago.
+
+One 2023 simulation followed the climate through: a hotter Sun, volcanic carbon dioxide from all that reassembly, and a continental interior far from any ocean, with the result that most of the land would be too hot for mammals. Mammals have been around for two hundred million years or so. Whatever is alive then may be reading this timeline from a different branch.
+
+The marker sits at 250 million years because that is the round number the models share, not because anyone knows.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::OceansEvaporate => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Oceans Leave",
+            passage: r"The Sun brightens by about ten percent every billion years, and has done since it lit. In a billion years or so—the models disagree by a factor of two—the extra light will drive Earth's climate past a threshold called the moist greenhouse: the stratosphere fills with water vapour, ultraviolet splits it, the hydrogen escapes to space, and the oceans, molecule by molecule, leave the planet through the top of the sky. Long before the last of them go, the surface is uninhabitable for anything complex.
+
+Some accounts give the biosphere less time still: the carbon dioxide that plants need is drawn down faster as the rocks weather in the heat, and in those models photosynthesis fails first, in six hundred million years or so. Either way, Earth has spent roughly four-fifths of its habitable lifetime.
+
+It is a strange thing to know about one's own planet, and stranger that the number is not larger. The Earth will still exist. It will look, from a distance, like Venus, and for the same reasons.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::AndromedaArrives => EventPassage {
+            title: "Andromeda Arrives",
+            passage: r"The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away and has been known for a century to be approaching, at about 110 kilometres per second. For decades the story was settled: the two largest galaxies of the Local Group would collide in about four and a half billion years, pass through each other, fall back, and merge into one elliptical galaxy that was named, in advance, Milkomeda. The Sun would most likely be flung into a wider orbit and survive; the night sky, for anyone left to see it, would be spectacular.
+
+In 2025 a study that followed the whole Local Group—Andromeda, the Milky Way, the Triangulum galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud, with the uncertainties in all their motions and masses run through a hundred thousand simulations—found the merger to be a coin toss: about even odds that it does not happen within the next ten billion years. The Magellanic Cloud's orbit pulls the Milky Way sideways, and Andromeda's own sideways motion is still too poorly measured to settle it.
+
+The marker is left at four and a half billion years, which is where the collision is if it comes. It is the only entry on this timeline with a fifty percent chance of not being an event.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::SunRedGiant => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Sun Becomes a Red Giant",
+            passage: r"In about five billion years, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen in its core and leave the main sequence. Fusion will migrate to a shell surrounding the now-helium core, and over the following two and a half billion years the outer layers will swell. At the tip of the red giant branch, 7.6 billion years from now, the Sun will be 256 times its present radius and some 2,700 times its present luminosity, having shed a third of its mass into space along the way.
+
+Mercury will be engulfed. Venus will be engulfed. Earth's orbit will have widened as the Sun lightens, but not enough: in the models that follow the mass loss in detail, the photosphere reaches it just before the tip. Its surface will have been sterile for six billion years by then; the oceans go long before the Sun does.
+
+This is not a disaster; it is simply stellar evolution. Stars live, stars die. The Sun will eventually shed its outer layers as a planetary nebula, leaving behind a white dwarf that will cool for trillions of years.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::LocalGroupAlone => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Local Group Alone",
+            passage: r"Within about a hundred billion years the accelerating expansion carries every galaxy not already bound to ours beyond the horizon: not merely out of sight but out of causal reach, their light stretched and dimmed below anything that could be detected, and then not arriving at all. What remains within reach is the Local Group, by then merged into a single old galaxy, in a sky that is otherwise empty.
+
+Astronomers of that time—should there be any—will be unable to discover that the universe is expanding. There will be no distant galaxies to measure the expansion with; the cosmic microwave background will have been redshifted to wavelengths longer than the galaxy is wide, and absorbed by its gas; the light elements, the last fingerprint of the first twenty minutes, will have been reprocessed by stars. Every pillar of the Big Bang will have quietly left the building. Their best theory, from their best evidence, would be a single island of stars in a static void—the universe as it was believed to be in 1900, arrived at correctly and wrongly at once.
+
+The information is not destroyed. It is only that nobody can get to it. This calendar will still say what time it is.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::LastStarsDie => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Last Stars Die",
+            passage: r"In approximately 100 trillion years, the last red dwarf will exhaust its hydrogen and fade to darkness. These smallest of stars, burning with miserly efficiency, are the longest-lived. When they are gone, no new stars will form; the universe will have consumed the gas required for stellar nucleosynthesis.
+
+The Stelliferous Era—the age of stars, the age in which we live—will be over. It will have lasted approximately 10¹⁴ years, a mere flicker in the full span of cosmic time that the Loic Calendar attempts to encompass.
+
+What follows is darkness: the slow decay of stellar remnants, the evaporation of black holes, the eventual heat death when thermodynamic equilibrium is achieved and change becomes impossible.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE DEGENERATE ERA: white dwarfs cooling, planets stripped, galaxies unbound
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::DegenerateEra => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Degenerate Era",
+            passage: r"After the last stars die, the universe enters the Degenerate Era. White dwarfs cool toward absolute zero. Neutron stars spin down and fade. Brown dwarfs, never massive enough to sustain fusion, drift cold and dark through the void, and around 10¹⁵ years the last planets are stripped from their dead stars by the remnants that pass too close.
+
+This era will last until around 10³⁷ to 10³⁹ years—the figure depends on how long protons last, which nobody knows—which is far longer than the Stelliferous Era, yet still a brief prelude to what follows. During this time, the dominant sources of energy will be rare collisions between stellar remnants and, if protons decay, the slow decay of nuclear matter itself.
+
+The Degenerate Era is named for the quantum phenomenon of electron degeneracy pressure, which supports white dwarfs against gravitational collapse. It is an era of endings slowly arriving, of entropy patiently accumulating.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::GalaxiesDisperse => EventPassage {
+            title: "Galaxies Disperse",
+            passage: r"Approximately 10¹⁹ to 10²⁰ years from now, gravitational dynamics will unbind galaxies. Stars, ejected by close encounters over quadrillions of years, will escape into intergalactic space. Those that remain will spiral inward, feeding the central black hole.
+
+The familiar structures of the universe—spiral arms, galactic disks, star clusters—will dissolve. What remains will be lonely objects adrift in an expanding void: white dwarfs, neutron stars, brown dwarfs, black holes, and the occasional planet that somehow survived the death of its star.
+
+Long before this, dark energy will have pushed every other galaxy group beyond the horizon, so each of these dissolutions happens alone, in an observable universe containing nothing else.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE BLACK HOLE ERA: proton decay, if any; the holes, if so; the spheres, if not
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::ProtonDecayComplete => EventPassage {
+            title: "Proton Decay, If Any, Completes",
+            passage: r"Nobody has ever seen a proton decay. Super-Kamiokande—fifty thousand tonnes of ultrapure water under a mountain in Japan, watched by eleven thousand photomultipliers since 1996—has waited through 450 kilotonne-years of exposure for one to turn into a positron and a pion, and has seen none. The proton's lifetime in that mode, if it decays at all, exceeds 2.4 × 10³⁴ years: some 10²⁴ times the present age of the universe.
+
+Grand Unified Theories say it must decay, eventually. The simplest of them predicted lifetimes that Super-Kamiokande has already ruled out; their successors predict 10³⁴ to 10³⁶ years, just past the edge of what has been searched. If they are right, then by 10⁴⁰ years essentially every proton and neutron in the universe has gone—the last atoms, the last white dwarfs, the last rocks, dissolved into positrons, pions and light—and what follows is the Black Hole Era. If they are wrong, matter persists, and the far future takes the shape of the entries marked as alternatives further along this timeline.
+
+This calendar takes no position. It marks the decade in which the question is settled either way, and notes that the twenty orders of magnitude before it, from 10²⁰ to 10⁴⁰ years, are the longest stretch on this timeline in which nothing whatsoever is scheduled to happen.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::BlackHoleEraBegins => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Black Hole Era",
+            passage: r"After approximately 10⁴⁰ years—if grand unified theories are correct and protons decay—matter as we know it will be gone. The only macroscopic objects remaining will be black holes, slowly evaporating via Hawking radiation.
+
+The Black Hole Era will last until approximately 10¹⁰⁰ years—a duration so vast that all preceding eras combined are less than a rounding error by comparison. During this time, black holes will be the only significant concentrations of mass-energy in the universe.
+
+Hawking radiation is thermal, random, structureless, or nearly so. Whether the glow secretly carries out what fell in—stars, planets, civilizations—in correlations that would take the age of the hole to read is the information paradox, argued for fifty years; the current answer, on paper, is that it does, and that nobody will ever be in a position to check. The Black Hole Era is an era of forgetting on a cosmic scale, whatever the paper says.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::RocksBecomeSpheres => EventPassage {
+            title: "Every Rock Becomes a Sphere",
+            passage: r"On a timescale of 10⁶⁵ years, Freeman Dyson calculated in 1979, solid matter is not solid. Atoms tunnel. Any lump of rock, given that long, flows like a liquid—its atoms wandering through it the way molecules wander in a drop of water—and settles under its own gravity into the shape water takes: a sphere. Every asteroid, every dead planet, every remnant that has escaped the fate of falling into something is, by 10⁶⁵ years, round.
+
+This assumes the protons last, which is the assumption the previous entries on this timeline do not make. If they decay, there are no rocks by then, and this entry is a footnote to an alternative. If they do not, it is the beginning of the strangest chapter of all: on longer timescales still, Dyson found, the same tunnelling lets nuclei fuse and fission toward iron, until after 10¹⁵⁰⁰ years every sphere is a sphere of iron—a figure this calendar cannot represent, its 512 bits running out a little past 10¹⁰³ years, and which is therefore left in the text where it belongs.
+
+The rounding of the rocks is the first thing in this calendar that does not end anything. It only tidies.",
+        },
+
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        // THE DARK ERA: the holes evaporate, the dwarfs erode, the last coordinate arrives
+        // ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
+        EventId::StellarBlackHolesEvaporate => EventPassage {
+            title: "Stellar Black Holes Evaporate",
+            passage: r"A black hole with the mass of the Sun will evaporate via Hawking radiation in approximately 10⁶⁷ years. Its temperature is sixty billionths of a kelvin—far colder than today's cosmic microwave background, so that for now it absorbs more than it emits. Only once the expansion has chilled the background below that, early in its long life, does the hole become a net radiator, and begin, imperceptibly, to lose weight.
+
+As the black hole shrinks, its temperature rises. In its final moments, it will glow with increasing intensity, finally releasing its last energy in a burst of gamma rays. Then nothing will remain—not even a remnant. The black hole will be gone entirely.
+
+Stellar-mass black holes, formed from the deaths of massive stars, will be the first of the black holes we know exist to evaporate. Supermassive black holes, containing millions to billions of solar masses, will persist longer—but not forever.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::WhiteDwarfsErode => EventPassage {
+            title: "The White Dwarfs Erode Away",
+            passage: r"White dwarfs were supposed to be the last things standing: the cooled cores of stars like the Sun, degenerate matter with nothing left to do, expected to persist until proton decay dissolved them or, if protons are stable, for some 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. In 2025 three physicists at Radboud University argued otherwise. The pair production that Hawking found at the horizon of a black hole, they showed, needs no horizon—only the curvature of spacetime—so any dense object slowly radiates its own mass away. For a white dwarf the timescale comes out at about 10⁷⁸ years; neutron stars go sooner.
+
+The workspace README, section 4.7, takes the result seriously, and draws the conclusion: the rocks do not outlive the black holes. The black holes outlive the rocks, by twenty-two orders of magnitude.
+
+The Sun will be one of them. Its white dwarf, cooled by then to a temperature the word does not cover, ends here—not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a slow leak.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::SagittariusAEvaporates => EventPassage {
+            title: "Sagittarius A* Evaporates",
+            passage: r"The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, a horizon that would fit comfortably inside the orbit of Mercury, and a temperature, by Hawking's formula, of about fourteen quadrillionths of a kelvin. It radiates, in principle, and loses mass, in principle, at a rate that would take some 10⁸⁷ years to finish—if it stopped growing now, which it will not; every star and gas cloud it swallows, and the black hole of Andromeda if that merger comes, adds to the mass and lengthens the wait.
+
+Evaporation is not steady. For nearly the whole of that span the hole shrinks imperceptibly, its temperature rising as its mass falls, until in the last second it is a subatomic fireball releasing millions of megatons of gamma rays, and then it is gone. What comes out over the whole 10⁸⁷ years is exactly the mass that went in, as thermal radiation—including, in some form, every star of the galaxy it anchored.
+
+It is the point at which this timeline's own galaxy stops existing in any form. The calendar, which is measured from a moment in that galaxy, does not stop.",
+        },
+
+        EventId::SupermassiveBlackHolesEvaporate => EventPassage {
+            title: "The Last Black Holes Evaporate",
+            passage: r"The largest supermassive black holes, containing 10¹¹ solar masses, will evaporate in approximately 10¹⁰⁰ years—a googol years, a number whose very name suggests whimsy but whose magnitude defies comprehension. When they are gone, the Black Hole Era ends.
+
+The universe that remains will be a dilute sea of particles: photons, neutrinos, and perhaps exotic dark matter—all at temperatures indistinguishable from absolute zero. Nothing will remain to generate energy, to create structure, to enable change. This is the Dark Era, and by every account it has no end.
+
+The Loic Calendar does not follow it there. Its 512 bits run out at Annihilation, a little past 10¹⁰³ years, and the workspace README, section 4.7, explains why the calendar treats the last observation, rather than the last process, as the end worth marking. Beyond that coordinate there is nothing to observe, and the calendar, which is an observer, declines to pretend otherwise.",
+        },
+    }
+}