What's the furthest into the future a sci-fi setting has ever gone? Mostly I see steampunk, cyberpunk, star-trek sort of shit everywhere, but nothing insane like billions of years into the future.
What about any settings where humans are so advanced that they can't even be called humans anymore and would look like literal Gods to us?
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It happens, but that sort of high concept stuff is hard to keep grounded enough that it doesn't turn completely into fantasy. And if you make them too advanced, it gets hard both to convey what is going on to the render and relate to the characters. If every 'human' is actually billions of tiny universes linked together to form a gestalt intelligence capable of reshaping its own structure at will, and with a mind vast enough to process several lifetimes worth of thought every second... I can't imagine any problem they would have that is going to be something I can relate to, or even understand.
I'm writing a setting 102,000+ years in the future. have one book written so far and plans for 25 more.
Doctor Who has gone to the time around the heat death of the universe a few times.
My campaign is on a old dyson sphere orbiting a star.
However, my galaxy operates on crunch theory so infinite.
Savage worlds lowlife expansion is set "gazillions" of years in the future, but that is likely not what you are after. You can play as evolved, humanoid cockroaches and snack cakes, for example.
God I remember him BSing about how humans evolved into gas, software and other such things before looping into classic human for... reasons.
Well there's Numenera, that setting is approximately 1 billion years into the future. Maybe not what you're looking for though since it focuses on roughly medieval humans living among the ancient yet unspeakably advanced relics of previous civilizations.
Farthest I can remember that remained comprehensive was All Tomorrows
Numenera is probably the closest thing to what you discribed.
Hyperion was garbage
are there any settings based on the end of the universe like the inevitable heat death?
this gave me strange feels
Try reading The Ninefox Gambit. it's a military sci fi book that takes the whole 'sufficiently advanced technology' thing and runs with it.
It's really hard to explain, so i'm just going to steal a reveiwer's explanation of the tech/magic/whatever:
>In The Ninefox Gambit, Lee is playing with the idea of consensus reality — of a techno-political system that relies on rigid belief in order to function. Which, more specifically, requires near-religious (actually super-religious) adherence to a calendar: A numerical system which can be manipulated to alter reality.
>Here's the plot, presented as simply as I can make it: In the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a "calendrical rot" has begun altering the fabric of reality. It is the result of heretical forces working against this world's rulers, and someone is going to have to go in there and purge the non-conformist thought from the system. Two someones, actually. A living soldier named Cheris with an unlikely facility for mathematics, and Jedao, the centuries-old ghost of a brilliant general and known mass-murderer who lives in her shadow and in her head.
The whole concept of pseudo-magic existing/working due to a society-wide mental mathematical consensual reality engine is so different and refreshing. It's a fucking weird book, but I loved it. Fair warning though, it does drop you right into everything Malazan style, and it can take quite a while to get a handle on what's going on.
It is a little known fact, but the setting of Care Bears actually takes place quadrillions years after present day, after the universe has collapsed and was born again.
It was pretty hard to read through and the only reason I read it was how it influenced CB's Infinity.
Though the stuff with Sol Weintraub got to me pretty good.
The Dying Earth sequence is set with the Sun near the end of its lifespan.
Numenera immediately comes to mind for me, at a billion years out.
Similarly, have you been catching the Night Land threads we've had recently? William Hope Hodgson? Written in 1912, so the cosmology doesn't line up with modern astrophysics, but the idea's that it's so far in the future the stars have burnt out, and the Earth is on borrowed time.
I made a setting with a multyverse, where everyplayer is kind of a God fighting to become the highest being of the multyverse. The Multyverse links by the way all timelines and possible points in time. This brings the problem, that every character whould be one of invinite versions of themselfs. I fixed this by making every God the addition of every possible being of its kind, so they aren´t part of the normal multyverse anymore, but can travel trough it... So this setting goes nearly invinite in the future^^
>consensual reality engine is so different and refreshing
Nah, Mage the Ascension did that 25 years ago. Matrix did it again (for mathematical engine, see AIs).
Holy shit I never knew this. Sounds awesome, I have to check it out.
Genius: The Transgression has the Cold Ones at The End of Time:
>Endless Darkness. The last stars went out so long ago no one remembers what they were like. Protons have dissolved. Black holes have disappeared in bursts of gamma radiation. Here dwell the Cold Ones: the last intelligent beings in the universe, whose thoughts are measured by the stray background fluctuation of quantum nothingness. Each thought takes an hour, or an eon, but they persist nonetheless―and all they can do is persist, thinking of themselves and their eternal lives. These wretched gods are all that live. But they are not helpless: over the eons, they have learned of beings foolish enough to travel to the End of Time, and they wait patiently, weaving webs of stray photons and pseudomatter, waiting to trap an unwary traveler, to feast on her warmth and ordered state, or even―if the Cold Ones dream, this is their dream―to return to a universe of light and warmth, free from the killing clutches of entropy.
All Tomorrow's, or Orion's Arm, though the latter isn't too far into the future, things are just weird as shit.
AT-43.
This was a pretty funny little look into the far future.