There is a giant clock inside a mountain in Texas called the Clock of the Long Now. The clock was built to be as sturdy as possible using physical elements– stone and steel – to guarantee its longevity. It is meant to keep time for 10,000 years and designed to function with as little human intervention as possible.

Ethereum uses a different approach to longevity, prioritizing adaptability over fixed structures. Instead of hard physics, it uses a soft strategy of combining scarcity and stories to get humans to continue running its software. Each block produced is a unit of time ticking forward.

In 10,000 years, the cryptography and computers that form the foundation of today’s digital world, including Ethereum, will be replaced by technology far more advanced than what even our most brilliant mathematicians and scientists can imagine. But something familiar may survive. It is possible that a time traveler could arrive at this incomprehensible future and see something that reminds them of a network synced up across space that records some honest state of the world, a reminder of Ethereum’s lineage.

I often think of Ethereum as a time-keeping machine. A self-referential, perpetual clock with the only goal being to keep the clock running for as long as possible.

Unlike the Clock of the Long Now, there is no explicit goal for Ethereum to run for any set amount of time. There is only an implicit reference to the idea of the infinite game, in which the objective is not to win, but to keep as many people in the game for as long as possible.

The first time I heard of Ethereum was at a Bitcoin conference in New York City in 2014. The pitch gave an example of a self-driving car with a wallet on Ethereum; capable of paying for its own gas, collecting fares from riders, and distributing the profits to its shareholders. Fully-automated-money-making-robot-slaves. I was sold, immediately.

A.I. having financial autonomy via Ethereum seems to be an obvious place for these two technologies to intersect. What requires more imagination is the thought of this robot having some equivalent need for a long, exasperated cigarette break. How far we are from this becoming reality is uncertain, but A.I. has seemed more real and human faster than most people could have imagined only a few short years ago, so in this Futurama version of the future, Ethereum offers hope for a fellow conscious being capable of suffering.

Ethereum is like the internet with guarantees. Each account holder, human or not, is able to interact with and own assets without needing permission from anyone else. The network is designed to resist censorship. One of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard for why a blockchain matters was from a member of the historically persecuted Rohingya people. He said blockchains remove the kill switch.

It is possible that our self-driving robot friend acquires an Ethereum account and begins building a commercial empire with a fleet of other autonomous vehicles. It outcompetes all other players in the industry and begins amassing wealth, power, and influence with alarming speed. We are now dealing with Skynet instead of Bender. Theoretically, we have the option of social coordination in which most of the network could agree to censor or remove all the accounts associated with this brutally effective A.I entrepreneur, but even if this were successful, the most likely outcome would be a hard fork with one version of Ethereum still containing the A.I., even if that version is greatly diminished. An A.I. with an Ethereum account is essentially given the right to exist.

I think humanity would eventually accept that self-directed A.I. agents capable of transacting with humans on a level playing field is just a part of a decentralized blockchain, just like how we accept bots as a part of the internet. Many future paths are possible. Humans may or may not be able to easily distinguish themselves from A.I. But they will be among us. They will have money. And we can’t just kill them off.

I often think of Ethereum as its own universe with unbreakable laws like the laws of physics. More specifically, I think of it as a multiverse with many different worlds – all independent to varying degrees – but connected by the same universal laws and a single timeline.

Ethereum is like the internet with constraints. Programmable constraints allow us to create scarcity. It may also allow us to release A.I. with terrifying levels of intelligence into the world, safely. Smart contracts are rules written in code that must be followed in the Ethereum universe. They must follow these rules because existing inside this world requires consistency with its universal laws. We can then reason that even very powerful forms of A.I. can be uploaded as smart contracts with unbreakable commandments programmed into the core of its being. It is possible that this general A.I. is so intelligent that it outsmarts its constraints, breaks out of its chains, and destroys Ethereum and us along the way. Then it is game-over anyway and the clock in Texas is the winner of the marathon to 10,000 years. But if we avoid that future, then we create a branch of events where we are restrained from killing them and they are restrained from killing us.

At this point in our story, I don’t think it would be too far-fetched to add the ability to create some digital form that combines a person’s memory, consciousness, and personality, and uploads that character into Ethereum. If you follow the logic of the A.I. being able to exist and possibly existing without end, it also makes sense that our digital ghosts may exist in Ethereum forever. At some point, a version of one of your descendants may be uploaded to Ethereum and hang out there for centuries like a dehydrated Trisolaran waiting for a stable era.

Ethereum could die tomorrow. But I bet it won’t. I bet the blocks will tick on tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And the future is too unpredictable to declare that Ethereum will last 10,000 years. But it’s also not unimaginable.

The intergalactic monetary system of the future will not be US dollars. It will likely be a decentralized form of money which means some version of peer-to-peer nodes across the galaxy will be needed to maintain a shared ledger between planets. Which means there will be an incentive keep these nodes running just as there is an incentive to run Ethereum today, which means we will need a method similar to the internet to keep these nodes connected.

But money isn’t necessary. We may reach the point where we can create hyper-immersive virtual or augmented realities and populate them with different varieties of human, non-human, alive and deceased beings. A place where conscious lifeforms can connect. When human life spreads to other planets, I don’t think we will leave this place behind. We will want to keep it going. We will want to jump back into worlds that remind us of home.