[jerf]

"I realize it will happen at some point. I don't pretend to know when."

Partial knowledge is possible. We can be quite comfortable ruling out "thousands" of years. It would require a total, utter rewrite of physics. While this can never be 100% ruled out, I do tend to think that when that's your last defense, you've gone too far. If people a thousand years from now look back and laugh at me for thinking that it's impossible to store multiple petabytes on a single hydrogen atom, I hope they'll at least have the courtesy to admit it was by far the most likely hypothesis given the quite substantial amount we know about particle physics right now.