explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2567: Language Development

2023-07-23T18:59:19Z

Yellow Candy 8432: I changed the baby's transcript so that it's actually saying *Melg- *Pl(e)hk- like in the comment. They're not separated by a vertical line.

{{comic
| number = 2567
| date = January 12, 2022
| title = Language Development
| image = language_development.png
| titletext = The worst is the Terrible Twos, when they're always throwing things and shrieking, "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!"
}}

==Explanation==
[[Megan]] and [[Cueball]] are having what could appear to be a typical conversation about her child's ability to learn languages really fast. But the comic mixes up the concept of learning a language and the development of languages over time. The joke comes from a conflation of two different things.

The conventional meaning of {{w|language development}} is the process by which infants begin to talk, that is to understand and produce intelligible speech. The field of {{w|language acquisition}} (sometimes called... language development) seeks to understand how baby humans are able to rapidly comprehend, internalize, and begin producing a new language.

Instead of starting with {{w|babbling}}, the first stage of normal language development, this baby's form of "language development" seems to be the linguistic form: going through all of the theoretical stages of the evolution of the English language, from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English.

In {{w|comparative linguistics}} and {{w|historical linguistics}}, {{w|Proto-Indo-European_language|Proto-Indo-European}} is a theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. {{w|Proto-Germanic_language|Proto-Germanic}} is a reconstructed language formerly spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. It developed out of Proto-Indo-European and is the proposed common ancestor for all {{w|Germanic languages}}. {{w|Old English}} would have developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French (which comes from a different branch of the Indo-European language family). This parody of language development parallels the discredited {{w|theory of recapitulation}} in embryo development, sometimes expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", in which a developing animal embryo (ontogeny) was once thought to go through stages resembling successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny).

In linguistics, reconstructed words from proto-languages are commonly marked with an asterisk (*) to show that the word forms are not attested by any historical sources but created as a proposed ancestor word. The baby says the Proto-Indo-European roots that the words "milk" and "please" are derived from. Obviously, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European did not speak in roots, but used words made from the roots, so the way the baby talks does not reflect any stage of development of the proto-language.

Some sounds babies make are hard to interpret.{{citation needed}} However, humans have a tendency to recognize known things and patterns. They see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Thus, a parent familiar with Proto-Indo-European may falsely hear their baby speak Proto-Indo-European by misinterpreting unintelligible sounds.

Perhaps this is an alternate universe where every baby has to gradually develop their language skills along a historical path rather than a child-developmental one, until they reach the ultimately developed modern language of their parents (in this case Modern English).

There have been alleged {{w|language deprivation experiments}} where newborn infants were not exposed to any spoken language in order to find the "natural human language", in the days before ethics review boards would have forbidden such cruel treatments. Such experiments are known today to be a source for psychological problems at least. Alleged outcomes in the apocryphal sources range from the deprived children imitating other sounds in their environment, to them dying.

In the title text, Randall describes a 2-year-old child as speaking in {{w|iambic pentameter}} and in Elizabethan English, a meter and dialect of modern English used by {{w|Shakespeare}} more than 400 years ago. The [https://www.verywellfamily.com/terrible-twos-and-your-toddler-2634394 Terrible Twos] are a colloquialism referring to the developmental tendency of two-year-olds to have more temperamental behavior, as the child's developing assertion of autonomy and self-identity clash with other expectations of behaviour, before hopefully acceptably balancing their assertiveness with social normatism. The toddler's quote of "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!" would roughly be equivalent to "Indeed, you shall not take me to bed, you dog!" in less archaic English.

==Transcript==
:[Megan and Cueball are looking to the left at a baby with dark hair. The baby sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.]
:Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European.
:Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off.
:Baby: *Melg- *Pl(e)hk-
:Cueball: They progress so fast!

==Trivia==
*This was the second comic to come out after the [[Countdown in header text]] started.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics with babies]]

Talk:2567: Language Development

2023-07-23T18:57:32Z

Yellow Candy 8432:

Has a small, child-size, stick figure been used before? I did not find a category on explainxkcd. This might be an interesting trivia to add. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.129|198.41.242.129]] 18:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
: There have definitely been kids on xkcd before. For example: [[1145: Sky Color]] (but I'm sure there are others). --[[User:NeatNit|NeatNit]] ([[User talk:NeatNit|talk]]) 20:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:::That is not a baby. There have been several comics talking about or depicting babies, and lots with kids. The kid you showed there has her own category [[Science Girl]] and has thus been used alot. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:: Other examples are [[674: Natural Parenting]], [[441: Babies]] and [[1650: Baby]] [[User:Kvarts314|Kvarts314]] ([[User talk:Kvarts314|talk]])
:::Yes nothing odd there, but we could of make a category for comics with babies or mentioning babies, but not like a character page... Could that be relevant? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:::: I think it would be relevant. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.133|172.68.110.133]] 12:36, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:::::Created: [[:Category:Comics featuring babies]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually words linguists use when they try to talk in very old languages sometimes sound like the things my little son might say between his first perfectly pronounced single words.--[[User:Gunterkoenigsmann|Gunterkoenigsmann]] ([[User talk:Gunterkoenigsmann|talk]]) 18:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Someone needs to say “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.151|172.70.206.151]] 18:56, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Looking at Wiktionary, I believe the child is saying "[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milk#Etymology_1 Milk] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/please#Etymology_1 Please]" See also [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82mel%C7%B5- Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂melǵ-] [[User:Bpendragon|Bpendragon]] ([[User talk:Bpendragon|talk]]) 18:57, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps "milk [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plek place]"?

Hopefully he won't say the proto-Indo-European word for "bear". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.26|162.158.74.26]] 19:09, 12 January 2022 (UTC)Pat
:You mean *hrktos? 20:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:: Oops. I think a brown one ate my IP address.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.187.92|162.158.187.92]] 20:49, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:::I think you mean [[2381: The True Name of the Bear|Arth?]] ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The pace of early stage development isn't necessarily an indicator for continued development pacing. I didn't start Proto-Indo-European until I was almost 2, but had completed full vowel shift before second grade. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.73|108.162.237.73]] 21:20, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:I corroborate this. I hadn't made many full sentences in Proto-Indo-European until around 4, but by 3rd grade I had fully changed to modern english. --[[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.215|172.70.126.215]] 23:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Though the explanation eventually touches on this (perhaps multiple editors got in there and shuffled this nearer the end) I believe it should really have ''started'' with smth about how Language Development (in a child) is being confused/conflated with Language Development (in human (pre)history). It would get straight to the point, I believe. It could then continue to go the further mile in getting into the deconstruction of it all. I'm leaving it unedited by mieself, for now, bc it deserves a lot more text-shuffling and refining than I can promise to do mieself wwwright now, but putting this idea out there to pique the interest of other possible editors. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.79|172.70.85.79]] 21:29, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:I have done this now. Originally I and someone else both submitted a really long description at the same time and my "merge" in my limited time was just to put my text after his. Now that I have more time, I've gone through and tried to weave the two in a more logical way, and have it starting with the basic explanation of the joke. I'm new to contributing at this level so if someone wants to check it over to make sure it looks good, feel free. [[User:Levininja|Levininja]] ([[User talk:Levininja|talk]]) 00:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

"Old English developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French..."<br>According to John McWhorter, English is the product of Germanic tongues (spoken by Angles or Saxons?) creolized with the local Celtic languages such as the ancestors of Welsh and Cereal plantish. That involved a blending of grammar and some vocabulary. Later came pidginizing with Norse speech of the Vikings, where details like case inflections were blurred or lost. Romance borrowings came yet a bit later, with 1066 and all that Norman Conquest business.<br>
McWhorter's ''Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English'' is perhaps worth a read; hope I haven't mutilated the gist of it too much. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.110.245|172.70.110.245]] 01:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I second a mention/explanation of the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" idea mentioned above. In biological evolution that turned out to be an error, and it's obviously an error here, too. [[User:Mschmidt62|Mschmidt62]] ([[User talk:Mschmidt62|talk]]) 02:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

If the baby is speaking Proto-Indo-European (with some emerging Germanic) at age 1, and Elizabethan English by age 2, is anyone able to work out by what age they would be speaking our present form of English? --[[User:Enchantedsleeper|enchantedsleeper]] ([[User talk:Enchantedsleeper|talk]]) 10:23, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:Elizabethan English is very close to Modern English on the timeline so by a few months they'll speak our English. They would have already started forming their own vowel shifts and other unknown English innovations by the age of 3, possibly predicting the future of English.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.218.75|172.70.218.75]] 11:55, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

The awesome subtext of this comic--and I'm not sure if it was intentional--is that English-speaking children really do learn proto-Indo-European words first, then proto-Germanic, then Middle English, then Norman French, and so on. Our simplest words are our oldest words, and Pa/Ma are relatively unchanged from a possible pre-PIE language (bc similar sounds appear in Semitic languages). Our most basic words are usually our oldest words. Our pronouns and articles are proto-Germanic, and the next level of complexity are Anglo-Saxon in origin--mostly animal names and common items and actions. Only when we get into complexity do we encounter the French influences, and then newer words or compounds. The reason for this goes back to how languages change. As a new language "takes over" the first words they replace are legal (bc who's running the courts), and high-end goods. Then commercial language shifts, and if there's a religious aspect or educational siestems set up you'll see that come over as well. The hardest things to penetrate are the furthest from the invading speakers' influence: farm animals (why we use Anglo-Saxon "cow" for the animal but French "beef" for the meat from it, etc.) and finally the house. And yes, when you have a couple of parents interested in linguistics, they really do point out to each other the origin of their children's speech. Uh...should I be admitting this? [[User:MGoSeth|MGoSeth]] ([[User talk:MGoSeth|talk]]) 15:00, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
:Well, as far as cow/beef (and sheep/mutton, etc) that was 'distance from influence' in that the (old-style) francophones of the new ruling-classes rarely concerned themselves with the husbandry side and just used their native term for the eventual food-word whilst the long-standing native anglo(saxo)phone farmers got on with the rearing of the livestock with the animal-word. It wasn't a problem to 'penetrate' the usage but likely more a disinclination to even try, leaving a division of language by context.
:In other bits of English, both anglic and francish roots begot 'equal' terms (though at times class-divided as snobbery ''or'' inverse-snobbery drove particular speakers to decide to favour particular groups of synonyms) and thus expanded the language with near-duplicates.
:While dialects all over retained words even more niche than the farm/food distinction. Many NE-English terms, both basic and more complex, hold over from the era of Viking incursions and rule before even the francofied Nor(th)mans of Normandy as well as prior Celtic terms that survived the germanic and pre-germanic cultural influxes.
:More obvious in rural situations (at least for presumably archaic pronunciation, e.g. a ewe being a 'yeow') bc industrialisation and driven population accumulation in the 'new' cities rather mashed valley-by-valley/dale-by-dale differences together into Mancunian/Bradfordian/etc superdialects (with still a few locality-based specificities, like the Thee-Thar/Dee-Dar divide over a few miles of industrial South Yorkshire or the "We was/I were" verb-(dis)agreement up in parts of the North Riding cities.
:It's been a while since I studied this, so forgive me if I'm out of date with the latest conclusions, but it was alwaies so interesting how they came to conclusions of what artefacts were what particular age of linguistic 'fossil'. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.126|172.70.91.126]] 17:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
When you think about it, the baby is saying the words for "milk" and "please" in succession, which means it's saying "milk, please" in Proto-Indo-European. The baby is asking for milk.--[[User:Yellow Candy 8432|Yellow Candy 8432]] ([[User talk:Yellow Candy 8432|talk]]) 18:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2567: Language Development

2023-07-23T18:56:50Z

Yellow Candy 8432: I added a comment.

Has a small, child-size, stick figure been used before? I did not find a category on explainxkcd. This might be an interesting trivia to add. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.129|198.41.242.129]] 18:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
: There have definitely been kids on xkcd before. For example: [[1145: Sky Color]] (but I'm sure there are others). --[[User:NeatNit|NeatNit]] ([[User talk:NeatNit|talk]]) 20:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:::That is not a baby. There have been several comics talking about or depicting babies, and lots with kids. The kid you showed there has her own category [[Science Girl]] and has thus been used alot. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:: Other examples are [[674: Natural Parenting]], [[441: Babies]] and [[1650: Baby]] [[User:Kvarts314|Kvarts314]] ([[User talk:Kvarts314|talk]])
:::Yes nothing odd there, but we could of make a category for comics with babies or mentioning babies, but not like a character page... Could that be relevant? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:::: I think it would be relevant. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.133|172.68.110.133]] 12:36, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:::::Created: [[:Category:Comics featuring babies]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually words linguists use when they try to talk in very old languages sometimes sound like the things my little son might say between his first perfectly pronounced single words.--[[User:Gunterkoenigsmann|Gunterkoenigsmann]] ([[User talk:Gunterkoenigsmann|talk]]) 18:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Someone needs to say “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.151|172.70.206.151]] 18:56, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Looking at Wiktionary, I believe the child is saying "[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milk#Etymology_1 Milk] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/please#Etymology_1 Please]" See also [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82mel%C7%B5- Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂melǵ-] [[User:Bpendragon|Bpendragon]] ([[User talk:Bpendragon|talk]]) 18:57, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps "milk [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plek place]"?

Hopefully he won't say the proto-Indo-European word for "bear". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.26|162.158.74.26]] 19:09, 12 January 2022 (UTC)Pat
:You mean *hrktos? 20:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:: Oops. I think a brown one ate my IP address.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.187.92|162.158.187.92]] 20:49, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:::I think you mean [[2381: The True Name of the Bear|Arth?]] ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The pace of early stage development isn't necessarily an indicator for continued development pacing. I didn't start Proto-Indo-European until I was almost 2, but had completed full vowel shift before second grade. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.73|108.162.237.73]] 21:20, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:I corroborate this. I hadn't made many full sentences in Proto-Indo-European until around 4, but by 3rd grade I had fully changed to modern english. --[[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.215|172.70.126.215]] 23:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Though the explanation eventually touches on this (perhaps multiple editors got in there and shuffled this nearer the end) I believe it should really have ''started'' with smth about how Language Development (in a child) is being confused/conflated with Language Development (in human (pre)history). It would get straight to the point, I believe. It could then continue to go the further mile in getting into the deconstruction of it all. I'm leaving it unedited by mieself, for now, bc it deserves a lot more text-shuffling and refining than I can promise to do mieself wright now, but putting this idea out there to pique the interest of other possible editors. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.79|172.70.85.79]] 21:29, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
:I have done this now. Originally I and someone else both submitted a really long description at the same time and my "merge" in my limited time was just to put my text after his. Now that I have more time, I've gone through and tried to weave the two in a more logical way, and have it starting with the basic explanation of the joke. I'm new to contributing at this level so if someone wants to check it over to make sure it looks good, feel free. [[User:Levininja|Levininja]] ([[User talk:Levininja|talk]]) 00:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

"Old English developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French..."<br>According to John McWhorter, English is the product of Germanic tongues (spoken by Angles or Saxons?) creolized with the local Celtic languages such as the ancestors of Welsh and Cereal plantish. That involved a blending of grammar and some vocabulary. Later came pidginizing with Norse speech of the Vikings, where details like case inflections were blurred or lost. Romance borrowings came yet a bit later, with 1066 and all that Norman Conquest business.<br>
McWhorter's ''Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English'' is perhaps worth a read; hope I haven't mutilated the gist of it too much. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.110.245|172.70.110.245]] 01:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I second a mention/explanation of the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" idea mentioned above. In biological evolution that turned out to be an error, and it's obviously an error here, too. [[User:Mschmidt62|Mschmidt62]] ([[User talk:Mschmidt62|talk]]) 02:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

If the baby is speaking Proto-Indo-European (with some emerging Germanic) at age 1, and Elizabethan English by age 2, is anyone able to work out by what age they would be speaking our present form of English? --[[User:Enchantedsleeper|enchantedsleeper]] ([[User talk:Enchantedsleeper|talk]]) 10:23, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
:Elizabethan English is very close to Modern English on the timeline so by a few months they'll speak our English. They would have already started forming their own vowel shifts and other unknown English innovations by the age of 3, possibly predicting the future of English.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.218.75|172.70.218.75]] 11:55, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

The awesome subtext of this comic--and I'm not sure if it was intentional--is that English-speaking children really do learn proto-Indo-European words first, then proto-Germanic, then Middle English, then Norman French, and so on. Our simplest words are our oldest words, and Pa/Ma are relatively unchanged from a possible pre-PIE language (bc similar sounds appear in Semitic languages). Our most basic words are usually our oldest words. Our pronouns and articles are proto-Germanic, and the next level of complexity are Anglo-Saxon in origin--mostly animal names and common items and actions. Only when we get into complexity do we encounter the French influences, and then newer words or compounds. The reason for this goes back to how languages change. As a new language "takes over" the first words they replace are legal (bc who's running the courts), and high-end goods. Then commercial language shifts, and if there's a religious aspect or educational siestems set up you'll see that come over as well. The hardest things to penetrate are the furthest from the invading speakers' influence: farm animals (why we use Anglo-Saxon "cow" for the animal but French "beef" for the meat from it, etc.) and finally the house. And yes, when you have a couple of parents interested in linguistics, they really do point out to each other the origin of their children's speech. Uh...should I be admitting this? [[User:MGoSeth|MGoSeth]] ([[User talk:MGoSeth|talk]]) 15:00, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
:Well, as far as cow/beef (and sheep/mutton, etc) that was 'distance from influence' in that the (old-style) francophones of the new ruling-classes rarely concerned themselves with the husbandry side and just used their native term for the eventual food-word whilst the long-standing native anglo(saxo)phone farmers got on with the rearing of the livestock with the animal-word. It wasn't a problem to 'penetrate' the usage but likely more a disinclination to even try, leaving a division of language by context.
:In other bits of English, both anglic and francish roots begot 'equal' terms (though at times class-divided as snobbery ''or'' inverse-snobbery drove particular speakers to decide to favour particular groups of synonyms) and thus expanded the language with near-duplicates.
:While dialects all over retained words even more niche than the farm/food distinction. Many NE-English terms, both basic and more complex, hold over from the era of Viking incursions and rule before even the francofied Nor(th)mans of Normandy as well as prior Celtic terms that survived the germanic and pre-germanic cultural influxes.
:More obvious in rural situations (at least for presumably archaic pronunciation, e.g. a ewe being a 'yeow') bc industrialisation and driven population accumulation in the 'new' cities rather mashed valley-by-valley/dale-by-dale differences together into Mancunian/Bradfordian/etc superdialects (with still a few locality-based specificities, like the Thee-Thar/Dee-Dar divide over a few miles of industrial South Yorkshire or the "We was/I were" verb-(dis)agreement up in parts of the North Riding cities.
:It's been a while since I studied this, so forgive me if I'm out of date with the latest conclusions, but it was alwaies so interesting how they came to conclusions of what artefacts were what particular age of linguistic 'fossil'. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.126|172.70.91.126]] 17:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
:When you think about it, the baby is saying the words for "milk" and "please" in succession, which means it's saying "milk, please" in Proto-Indo-European. The baby is asking for milk.--[[User:Yellow Candy 8432|Yellow Candy 8432]] ([[User talk:Yellow Candy 8432|talk]]) 18:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

1606: Five-Day Forecast

2023-07-07T20:34:39Z

Yellow Candy 8432: I fixed a small grammar mistake

{{comic
| number = 1606
| date = November 20, 2015
| title = Five-Day Forecast
| image = five_day_forecast.png
| titletext = You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years.
}}
A different user-made version for the picture using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit can be found here: [[:File:five_day_forecast_Celsius.png|Five day forecast in Celsius]].

==Explanation==
{{w|Weather forecasting}} is an extremely difficult task, even if it is only for five days. In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity. So most {{w|Meteorology#Meteorologists|meteorologists}} only provide us with a five-day forecast.

In this comic [[Randall]] takes this to the extreme by first showing a '''Five-Day Forecast''' and then progressing to five-month, year, million, billion and finally trillion-year forecast, {{tvtropes|WeirdWeather|leading to weather patterns that we don't usually see on a regular basis.}}

Since the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we must assume this indicates the weather today (and not tomorrow or in a trillion years). It is first in the second panel that we have made the first jump according to the label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ..., four trillion years from today.

When moving past the five days, the forecast is just a qualified guess based on the time of year. In a month it is Christmas as shown in the second panel of the second row. And then it is winter with January and February so snow is likely, but certainly not something that happens on all days of a winter month.

Looking at the five-year forecast, guesses are made as to what the weather will be like at the same time of year. For these first three predictions the weather symbols are all of the same three types. Sun, clouds and some kind of {{w|precipitation}}, rain or snow. And the temperature range from 21 to 44 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C), winter temperature.

Then we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. However, in 3 million years time aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from something looking like {{w|flying saucers}}. They are gone a million years later. The temperature range is still the same (except that it rises to 52 °F or 11.1 °C, a possible reference to global warming) in one panel. But then while the attack is going on the temperature rises to 275 °F (135 °C).

Once we get to the billion-year mark it actually becomes more meaningful to try to predict the "weather". Because now we reach the times when the {{w|Sun}} begins to change. Although the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years yet (while in its {{w|Sun#Main sequence|main sequence|}}), it will still grow in diameter as it begins to exhaust its supply of fuel. The core will contract to increase the temperature, and the outer layer will then compensate by expanding slightly. This is what is indicated in panels two and three where the color of the Sun changes towards red as the surface becomes less hot as it expands away from the center of the Sun. The temperature will rise on Earth as indicated in the panels (105 °F = 40.5 °C and 371 °F = 188 °C). So in two billion years the temperature is hot enough that all the earth's oceans will have boiled away… Actually this will happen already in about [http://phys.org/news/2015-02-sun-wont-die-billion-years.html a billion years].

Then once there is {{w|Sun#After core hydrogen exhaustion|no longer enough hydrogen}} the Sun will truly expand into a {{w|red giant}}. This should not happen until five billion years from now,{{Citation needed}} but in the forecast it is indicated to happen already in three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a five-billion-years forecast. Alternatively it is just indicating how uncertain these kinds of forecasts are, or a statement that we may not know for certain that it will take five not three billion years.
Disregarding this, the fourth panel shows the temperature at Earth's position inside the red giant Sun. The color of the panel indicates that we are inside the Sun. The temperature is 71,488,106 degrees Fahrenheit (39,715,597 degrees Celsius). The current temperature of the center of the Sun is "only" 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). And although that may rise by a factor of ten during {{w|Stellar nucleosynthesis|helium fusion}} then that will only be at the very core and not out in the solar atmosphere reaching out to Earth Here the temperature would only be of the order of thousands of Fahrenheit, since the Sun's outer temperature decreases as it increases its diameter. So this panel's temperature also makes little sense. It may involve some ambiguities regarding what the forecast means; the edge of the red giant Sun is predicted to be somewhere near the current orbit of Earth, but the position of the Earth could change. The most likely prediction at the moment is for Earth to move outward, but if the planet is engulfed by the Sun, it would spiral inward, and at some point fall apart. So in some sense "here" for the forecast could become a position deep inside the Sun, where core temperatures could reach 100 million Kelvin.

The red giant phase only lasts half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will for sure have disappeared leaving only a {{w|white dwarf}} to cool down. Given Randall's version of this time schedule, then it will have had about a billion years to cool down, but would still likely be the brightest object in the sky as seen from where the Earth once was. It is not indicated in the last panel, where we just see other stars of the Galaxy. The temperature is down to that of the {{w|Cosmic microwave background|background radiation}}. Today this radiation has a temperature of 2.72548 kelvin = -270.4245 °C = -454.7641 °F. So this is a few degree F colder than what is shown in the comic which states the temperature is -452 °F = 4.26 kelvin. This higher temperature may have been chosen to reflect that even the star light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.

In the last panel with trillion years, we jump right past the Sun's Red Giant phase, to a panel looking much like the one after five billion years with only other stars. Over the next three trillion years the stars become fewer and fewer and dimmer and dimmer as they run out of fuel and fewer new stars form. After four trillion years the background temperature even decreases one degree to -453 °F as the universe keeps expanding and the wavelength of the radiation does the same, thus decreasing its temperature.

The title text is a play on comments referring to fast-changing weather on a more ordinary human timescale, such as Mark Twain's quip "If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes."

A ten days forecast was used in [[1245: 10-Day Forecast]]. In [[1379: 4.5 Degrees]] Randall looked at the weather over long periods of time as well.

==Transcript==
:[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]

:'''Your 5-day forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A grey cloud.]
:41°F
:[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]
:36°F
:[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]
:40°F
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:44°F

:'''Your 5-month forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.]
:29°F
:[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]
:21°F
:[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]
:24°F
:[A grey cloud.]
:35°F

:'''Your 5-year forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A grey cloud.]
:25°F
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:36°F
:[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]
:37°F
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:41°F

:'''Your 5-million-year forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:52°F
:[A grey cloud.]
:40°F
:[Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.]
:275°F
:[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]
:40°F

:'''Your 5-billion-year forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A larger orange sun.]
:105°F
:[A very large red sun.]
:371°F
:[A pale yellow panel with no drawing.]
:71,488,106°F
:[A night sky with many bright stars.]
:-452°F

:'''Your 5-trillion-year forecast'''
:[A bright yellow sun.]
:38°F
:[A night sky with many bright stars.]
:-452°F
:[A night sky with many stars.]
:-452°F
:[A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.]
:-452°F
:[A night sky with few dim stars.]
:-453°F

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Space]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Weather]]
[[Category:Aliens]]