What Will Kill You in 2040

What Will Kill You in 2040 infographic takes the top 20 reasons for death in 2016 and compares them to the predicted top 20 reasons for death in 2040. The top 3 aren't predicted to change, however the rest are all over the board!

The infographic was created by Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. Their source of information came from an article published in The Lancet (a peer-reviewed general medical journal) called Forecasting life expectancy, years of life lost, and all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 250 causes of death: reference and alternative scenarios for 2016-40 for 195 countries and territories. That's a mouth-full for a title!

The orthogonal lines are hard to follow. Straight lines would have turned this into a slope graph, and made it easier to see which causes of death were increasing or decreasing. Categorizing the causes of death into 3 different categories and color coding them really helps break up the text and makes it a little easier to follow the arrows.

Found on Radio Free Europe

Timeline of the Far Future

What’s the future of the human race and our beloved planet Earth?  The Timeline of the Far Future from the BBC plots out predicted events for the next 1,000, 1,000,000 and up to 100 Quintillion years into the future!

As it is the beginning of the year we at BBC Future think it’s the perfect time to look ahead.

First, we brought you a prediction of the forthcoming year. Then we brought you a timeline of the near future, revealing what could happen up to around 100 years time. But here’s our most ambitious set of 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). As the song says, there may be trouble ahead…

They had to use an exponential scale, so each inflection point represents a jump in the timeline scale by a factor of 10.  The icons are small, and some are hard to figure out.  They had enough space they could have made those larger.  The circles are also sized by the magnitude of each event, but these seem to be arbitrary.

It’s worth noting one of the sources in the footer lists Out of Thin Air as a source.  This not a claim that they made up the information.  It’s actually a book titled Out of Thin Air that some of the information was pulled from.  I had to look it up, but it’s a valid reference.

Nice to know that MacBook will still be around for 100,000 years!  Definitely looks like we’re in for a rocky ride though…

Thanks to Digital Information World post on Google+