I have a master’s degree in engineering and figured I’d put that to use to (roughly) determine how long each skip of the cursed Button really was.
VERDICT: hoo boy. the skips get really, really long. Skip (lmao) to the bottom for results, or read on for how I did it.
I had to use context clues from dialogue to make some sort of data set to graph. Here’s that:
You can see the Skip # (first skip, second, etc.), the time in hours that elapsed after that skip, and the dialogue that gave a clue about how long it had been.
The red values are uncertain, but I made an assumption. Skip 1 = a few minutes = 5 minutes. After the second skip, the Narrator didn’t have much to say about them getting longer, so he must not have noticed a big difference from the last = 10 minutes. Anytime two values were mentioned, I averaged them. After Skip 6, I just went with a year, though it very well could have been longer.
The TOTAL TIME column is how much time has elapsed from the first skip, while the HOURS column is just the time between skips. This got important later.
As you know, O Fellow TSPUD Fan, there are more than 6 skips. There are 18. I needed a way to forecast how much time might have elapsed between each skip, or at least, when the heat death of everything on Earth happened.
So I decided to run two separate regressions - one, projecting the time between the unknown skips, and one, projecting the total time after each unknown skip. After quickly realizing I’d need a logarithmic (read: for really huge values) scale on the time axis, I landed on an iffy but fine-for-this-project exponential regression line for both datasets.
YIKES!
Both of those get real big, real fast. Let’s look at some actual values.
These blue ones (below) come from the equation of the second chart, which is meant to predict the time between each skip. Not super usable numbers, but we’ll get there. Hold onto your pants.
Next up, I added all of these so that we could tell the total elapsed time using the individual skip equation. I also used the other equation, based on the total time values, to project the increases in total time elapsed, rather than just the increases of the skips. You can see they’re pretty different, but the next Thing will give you a better idea.
RESULTS!!! (for those of you skipping)
Using these two methods, we get some wild answers for how long stuff took.
For example, when we come back and the Narrator is talking to himself for the first time (...but the game was never meant to be funny!) it’s been somewhere between 380 - 440 years. Centuries, stuck on a bad review. Poor guy.
But it gets worse!
His “the end is never the end is...” rambling starts after 40,000 - 50,000 years. You know. Ten times longer than human civilization as we know it has existed.
After that? I’m no scientist, Jim, I’m an engineer. If someone wants to tell me about when stuff will start to decay and cave in, be my guest, but I will say that this room seems extremely durable. I do know that in about 7 - 8 billion years, Earth will probs get eaten by the sun, and we get close to that in the first skip after the plants die (5 - 7 billion years).
The screaming (of aliens? the Narrator? no thanks) takes place after 50 billion years.
The final desert happens after 500 - 800 billion years. At that point, who’s counting a few billion, right?
Please feel free to correct stuff as you see it. It’s been a while since I just did some quick & dirty number crunching.
Anyway, the end is never and all that. Math rocks.
