The Total Solar Eclipse of 2238 and GPT-5.2 Pro

In which I find out the answer to a question I've had for two years

2026 marks exactly 1 millennium since the last total solar eclipse visible from Table Mountain. The now famous (among people who sit behind me at work) eclipse of 1026 would’ve been visible to anyone at the top of Lion’s Head or Table Mountain and basically everywhere else in Cape Town. Including De Waal Park, where I’m currently writing this. I’ve hiked up Lion’s Head a lot and still find the view pretty damn awe inspiring. To have seen a total solar eclipse up there must have been absurdly damn awe inspiring. Maybe also terrifying if you didn’t know what was happening. But either way, I’m jealous of anyone that got to experience it. If you continued flipping through the exciting but predictable Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses: -1999 to +3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE) by Jean Meeus and Fred Espenak, you’d notice something weird and annoying - you have to flip all the way to the year 2238 for the next total solar eclipse to hit Table Mountain.

Tim Urban has this idea of converting all of human history into a 1000 page book. He says that basically up until page 950 there’s just nothing going on.

“But if you look at Page 1,000—which, in this metaphor, Page 1,000 is the page that ends with today, so that goes from the early 1770s to today—that is nothing like any other page. It is completely an anomaly in the book. If you’re reading, if you’re this alien, this suddenly got incredibly interesting in the last 10 pages, but especially on this page. The alien is thinking, “OK, shit is going down.”

The gap between eclipses on Table Mountain is the real life version of this book. Imagine If aliens had put a secret camera where the cable car is, and it only popped up during a total solar eclipse, they’d see something like the island from Lost, then wait a hundred or thousand years then see the exact same thing but maybe it’s raining.

And they’d see this 4 more times.

Then they go to open the image from 2238 and suddenly.:

There’s a soccer stadium and also is that a city???

Just knowing the date of these eclipses has made the past and future feel much more real to me.

I saw the total solar eclipse of 2024 in the middle of an absolutely packed Klyde Warren Park in Dallas.

When totality started, there were barely any cars on the highway and the cars you could see suddenly had their headlights on. The office tower behind me was filled with people on every floor staring outside, all backlit by the lights which had suddenly turned on.

We talk about how the animals start going crazy because they think it’s night as though this doesn’t include us but actually we are so included here and go even crazier than any birds doing morning chirps. The extent to which the city of Dallas was turned upside down by this event is hard to believe. And it wasn’t just a physical transformation. The entire energy of the city felt different, not just compared to the day before but compared to any other city I’ve been in. I have never felt so connected to everyone around me and so optimistic and elated at the same time all while knowing everyone else feels the exact same way.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be a person in Cape Town in the year 1026. The image in my head feels murky and I guess pastoral. But imagining what it was like during a total solar eclipse in the year 1026, is much easier. I can picture myself on top of Lion’s Head or Table Mountain or on the beach in 1026. I can picture the people around me seeing it and wondering what’s going on. I can picture myself wondering what’s going on. Because even when you know what’s going on you’re still wondering what’s going on.

When I think about the eclipse of 2238 it’s even easier to connect with those people in that Cape Town. If the people of that time have anything like newspapers or radio or the internet or TikTok, I can imagine the literal hype and electricity in the air over the months and days and hours leading up to the eclipse. It’s also weird to briefly think about how everything I’m using now and consuming now is going to be considered ancient history by the lovely people that get to experience seeing an eclipse in 2238 at the top of Lion’s Head. My macbook which feels so fast and which I love so dearly - junk. TikTok would be like a wax cylinder record, and they’d wonder how people managed to code with an AI as silly as Opus-4.5 or worse by hand somehow. Every movie from 2026 would be older to them than the movie of the train going into the station, is to us. I don’t know how they are going to build software in the year 2238. I barely know how I built the website I used to find this stuff out. I’ve wanted to know when the next and previous eclipse are going to happen on Lion’s Head, since i got back from the eclipse in 2024.

I started by searching on google for something to find eclipses by location and not time. We have Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses but this is still in order of time. The answer to my question felt like something we could easily work out with existing data and a for loop in whichever your favorite programming language is. NASA hosts a csv file with the aforementioned five millennia of past and future eclipses. So we just have to parse this csv and figure out what each of the 16 columns represented and then figure out how to do a for loop over the paths of the eclipses and find an intersection with the coordinates of Lion’s Head.

Luckily the year was 2024 or 5 A.G.T (Anno GPT3) - So I asked what would have probably been GPT-4 if it could search for the date of the next and previous eclipses, it used the search tool it had at the time, but it could not find anything. I tried this a few more times, usually whenever I finished a hike and a new model had been recently released. It’s never worked though. That is, until a week ago. This January I paid $200 for GPT 5.2 Pro after reading some, okay, a single, extremely positive review about it.. To be honest my review is: It kind of sucks, but still happy I paid the $200. This is because towards the end of the month I set 5.2 Pro to extended thinking then typed this prompt:

“How could I make an app that lets you pick a place on earth and then finds the last time or next time there was or will be a full solar eclipse there, what data sources would I use what algorithms and how accurate could I be.”

It thought for 17m and 6 seconds then replied with a whole bunch of words I didn’t understand. So I replied:

“Can you write a prototype in python?”

It thought for another 20m then replied with this script.

I pasted it into a file then ran it with the coordinates of Lion’s Head and saw the answer to my question: 1026. That was the last time a total solar eclipse was visible from Lion’s Head.

Since it was a script I could also use any coordinates on Earth and find the same answer for that place (as long it was in the five millennia catalogue)

I popped the python script in to Claude code with Opus set to 4.5, it did some verbing and then I got this website out a few hours later: https://findmyeclipse.com

In 2238 I somehow doubt the vast majority of people will ever think about code when creating things, in the same way I don’t think about binary or transistors when programming. What does a world where software can be written without any special knowledge look like, and then what does it look like after 100 years of that? I don’t have any answers but I do know one thing: The people of Cape Town in 2238 will know that this eclipse is not just a rare eclipse, but a rare eclipse among rare eclipses . They will look forward to it. They will write about the best places to see it from. I can imagine being a person in 2238 thinking, boy this eclipse would look sick from Lion’s Head. Thinking, I wonder if it’s going to be too busy up there. Maybe consider going up and camping on Table Mountain the night before. And I can imagine being in any one of these places or just in a packed De Waal Park preparing for totality and when I imagine myself there with everyone around me, it’s hard not to be optimistic.