Windows 10 (W10) users, in Europe and the United States, have been offered a one-year reprieve by Microsoft, manufacturer of the ten-year old operating system (OS), before product support was slated to cease on 14 October 2025.
Previously, anyone wishing to continue using W10 had been told they’d need to pay a subscription to do so. The move is good news for people running older devices, which may not have been able to support Microsoft’s successor OS, Windows 11 (W11).
But the twelve months of free support comes with a catch, W10 users must create a Microsoft account to receive the updates. I was a long time Windows user, until the winter of 2024, but flat refused to create a Microsoft account, each time I either bought a new computer, or moved to a new Windows OS.
The idea of having all manner of my data sitting on Microsoft servers did not appeal to me in the slightest, so I always opted for a local account. I have no such concerns with Linux Mint, my current OS, thankfully, as user accounts are all local.
The biggest catch though with W10’s one-year support extension, is that it only buys time. A little bit of breathing space. I doubt Microsoft will offer any further extensions, come October 2026. Unless a “lite” version of W11 is shipped (unlikely), owners of older computers will need to either buy a new device, or consider migrating to an OS that will work on their present computer.
The people at Kurzgesagt are pretty clued-up. They must learn a lot, about everything really, in their line of work. As a result of this ceaseless learning, they might have found a way, for whatever lifeforms are still present, to evade the eventual heat-death of the universe.
Although still conjecture, this is how the universe might “end”, in trillions of years hence. Long after the last star has stopped shining, long after the last black hole has finally disintegrated.
Under this scenario, the universe won’t, or isn’t expected to, collapse in on itself. Seemingly the cosmos will continue expanding forever, as a dark, cold, void.
This, however, appears to the ideal environment for eternal life. In short, a civilisation Kurzgesagt calls the Noxans, will harvest vast amounts of energy from their galaxy, or what’s left of it. This will be stored in a massive battery bank, which the Noxans will draw off for untold trillions of years.
Untold trillions of years, but not forever. This near eternal life, however, won’t be living as we know it.
The temperature in the universe at this stage will be barely an iota above zero degrees on the Kelvin (K) scale. For reference water freezes at about two-hundred-and-seventy degrees on the Kelvin scale. Zero degrees K, or absolute zero, will be pretty cold. Too cold to even play ice-hockey.
But the Noxans will not be particularly active. Their digital avatars, which is all that will remain of them, will spend their waking hours engaged only in thought.
They will need to slumber to conserve resources. But this off-time will aid in cooling them down further, in turn reducing their power needs, in turn extending the life of their batteries. Didn’t the Noxans do well, surviving trillions upon trillions of years after the universe’s heat-death?
Kurzgesagt calls their method a loophole, but it seems more like a noose to me.
I’m curious as to what sort of material the battery banks, and whatever structure the Noxans will “reside” in, are made of. How will these endure for eternity without repair or replacement?
But sitting around in an ice-box until the battery goes flat doesn’t seem like fun. There has to be a better way for a civilisation to live forever. And maybe there is.
The Noxans, it should be pointed out, are what’s called a Type III civilisation on the Kardashev scale. This means they’re able to harness all the energy within a galaxy.
In comparison, Type I civilisations control all the energy on their planet, Type II their solar system. Humanity might be considered a zero-point-seven civilisation. But when Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet astronomer, draw up his scale in 1964, he did not venture beyond Type III.
Other people though, including Hungarian academic Zoltan Galántai, speculate the existence of Type IIII, and even V civilisations, may be possible.
A Type IIII civilisation would have all the energy of the universe at its disposal. Type V entities meanwhile could probably create a whole new universe in which to live. This seems like a better plan for the Noxans. If they’ve made it as far up the scale as III, they could push on higher.
Reaching the ultimate top level, in this case V, would be a challenge, as I’m sure any gamer could tell you. But if the Noxans start now, with potentially many, many, trillions of years in front of them, I’m sure they could do it.
Eventually freezing to death in a glorified refrigerator seems like an absurd idea in comparison.
When I turned comments back on here a few months ago, after an absence of many years, I was amazed at how quickly spam comments began appearing. Good news travels fast it seems. A new outlet has appeared for us to post our drivel — quick — get over there. But because every comment made here is held back for approval, none of them ever see the light of day.
Of course I wasn’t really surprised at the speed at which the spam arrived. Nor the lack of genuine comments, though there have been a few. I re-enabled comments as a way to centralise my web presence back onto this website. I’m not the biggest fan of social media, centralised or decentralised, but not because I dislike it (well, not too much), rather social media is just too time consuming.
What did dumbfound me though was the empty-headed nature of the spam comments being left. Some were barely coherent, while others were literally single words made up of random letters. What blogger, in their right mind, is going to approve those sorts of comments? A time-poor blogger, or one not paying attention, I think might be the answer.
These senseless utterances aren’t offensive, so maybe they’ll, you know, just get approved. And with some websites allowing follow-up comments from the same person to be posted without moderation, the floodgates would be open. But I suspect few spam-commenters saw much of what they wrote ever approved. But now they have changed tactics, and are using AI to craft their foul fare.
A lot of the recent comment spam I’m seeing looks as if the writer has read the post they’re responding to, through the way a comment is worded. When I posted about Tim Berners-Lee a few days ago, a lot of comments similar to this began appearing:
Oh Timothy, your call to have AI development moved under the auspices of a global not-for-profit is just a little simplistic, don’t you think? Yes, you invented the internet and gave it to us for free, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But placing AI development in the hands of a non-commercial entity is asking an awful lot.redacted spammy link
At first pass, the comment seems genuine. I too thought Berners-Lee was being optimistic in the extreme by suggesting a global not-for-profit organisation oversee future development of AI, but I’d never call Berners-Lee naive. He knows what he’s saying, and the idea makes sense, though I can’t see it ever happening. But that’s another story.
A commenter though is entitled to their opinion. And it almost seemed like an actual point-of-view, but for the ridiculous inclusion of an embedded spam link. Without, notably, a space after the previous sentence. The writer seems switched-on, but their oddly deficient syntax betrays them. And then the question: why on earth embed a spam link within the comment?
Did they not see the field on the comment form that allows a URL to be included? It’s possible I might have missed the spam-link if they did that. Usually though, I look closely at the URL of a commenter’s website. But then going on to post numerous, slightly differently worded, variations of the same comment, from the same IP no less, somewhat gives the show away.
Even writing this article is helping train the AI spam-commenters though. What bloggers, who allow comments, are facing though are somewhat more sophisticated spammers, who are using AI to compose comment spam that look like the real deal.
And yes, I look forward to seeing the thoughts of the AI spam-commenters in response to this post.
