“Later in the night–which lasted for several days of real time–more astronomical details let readers pin down the date more precisely.”Įven now, some mysteries remain. “When the Sun sets in the night sequence, one of the first things you see is the gap where Antares should be, which was the first clue that this is taking place in the far future,” said Munroe. He also consulted with astronomer and science blogger Phil Plait and learned that while most visible stars would still be around 11,000 years in the future, the red supergiant star Antares could go supernova and vanish from the starfield. "The Earth's axis wobbles over the millennia, and some individual stars move visibly, so I used a few different pieces of astronomy software–with a lot of hand correction and tweaking–to render the future night sky," said Munroe.
Astronomically-savvy readers finally got a chance to nail down the time period of the comic during a striking sequence later in the series where the night sky slowly rotated over the characters, revealing a distinctly different configuration of stars than our present sky. More clues lay not only within the world, but above it. Image: Panel 2,400 of "Time" by Randall Munroe Soon, "Time" had developed a fanatical following that pored over every update pixel by pixel and gathered online to trade theories, decipher clues, and even write songs. Who were these characters? Where were they? What did the story mean? Munroe offered no direct answers, instead seeding the panels with esoteric clues from botany, astronomy and geology. Readers set out on a similar journey, although their path led not to the wild unknown, but rather back to the same URL where the mystery continued to unfold hour by hour. And they continued to change every half-hour for the next week–and every hour for months after that–slowly coalescing into a story as the two characters discovered disturbing changes in the landscape around them, and set out on an epic, time-lapsed journey to discover the truth about what was happening to their world. 30 minutes later, the image changed the figures shifted slightly.
There was no story, no punchline, no words.
When xkcd creator Randall Munroe first posted a new installment of his webcomic titled " Time" on March 25, it looked deceptively simple: a picture of two black and white stick figures, a man and a woman, sitting wordlessly on the ground.
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