High school flies by, important to enjoy little things, live in the moment

Get this: 2008 was ten years ago. I know—it shocks me too. In 2008 I was both a kindergartener and a first grader who barely lost her first tooth and was taught bits of that year’s presidential election from whatever news I cared to watch. I remember being so excited that Barack Obama was going to become president because we’ve never had a black president before. I don’t believe I was particularly liked by a lot of my peers, but I didn’t have a care in the world. Life was much simpler back in 2008.
2008 was also the year that the U.S. economy started to collapse, the Bejing Summer Olympics occurred, and the countries Cyprus and Malta adopt the Euro currency. It’s funny how things are so much different now than they were ten years ago. It makes me wonder what the world would be like ten years from today. Will we have flying cars in 2028? Will technology advance beyond our wildest dreams? Will there be a wall? What would be the latest iPhone that all the “cool” kids carry around? This made me want to research what people are predicting about the years to come.
So of course, I go to my absolute favorite reliable website—Wikipedia… obviously—and look up the year 2019 (Man, I can’t imagine writing 2019 on the tops of my subpar themes). Then, out of curiosity, I went on and clicked on the link for the year 2020. There, I found a link to the 2020s and OF COURSE clicked on it. This is where I started to get carried away. Although I went on the computer hoping to write a column about the joys of 2008, I ended up learning about all the international deals that are about to expire, and a flame in some country that would finally be extinguished in 2252 after 250 years of burning.
It was at this moment when I learned how fascinating these predictions can be. The contributors of these Wikipedia pages had every solar eclipse, transit, and comet interaction all mapped out up until literally the 100th century (years 9,001-10,000)! After about 50 links later, I was redirected to a link about the ‘far future’. This was when nothing was able to be accurately predicted because it was so far into the future. There wasn’t much information on that page, but it did talk about the future of the universe in general; to be more specific, it talked about the universe’s inevitable heat death.
There was about five to seven minutes left of the class when I got to a diagram explaining the biological timeline of the universe. The period today when humans exist was probably only a pixel thick compared to the rest of the timeline. Here’s how this heat death is supposed to play out—according to a theory by Lord Kelvin in 1852: billions and billions of years from now, there will be a super massive black hole, then all the protons in the universe will eventually die out and the universe will mainly be made of a dark, dilute gas. Soon, everything will be gone.
The point is: it is crazy how everything can be different within a span of as little as 10 years. Within 100 years, the world as we know it will be completely transformed. While I’m sure, based off my extensive Wikipedia research, the universe won’t go through its heat death soon, it is important to remember life as we know it right now. Everything around us is constantly evolving in ways we can’t imagine. Make sure—my fellow readers—to live life in the present, because what the world looks like now may be long gone in the blink of an eye.