Here is how The Beatles will be remembered in the future.
Will any modern religions survive the next 2000 years? Will they be recognizable if they do?
The Taoic East Asian religions, syncretic as they are, seem likely to shuffle around with everything else on the plate and create something interesting indeed. (Not that Abrahamic faiths are completely immune to outside influences, but the most religious of the Abrahamic followers seem to see syncretism as a sign of heresy.)
Judaism has already survived longer, but I wonder how at home a Jew from Roman Judea would feel at a modern Orthodox synagogue in Tel Aviv, let alone among the Hasidim in New York City or Chicago.
Christianity is about that old now, of course, kind of, but, again, a Jewish Christian from 50 CE Jerusalem would feel desperately out-of-place in a modern Southern Baptist church in Georgia, or a reasonably liberal Catholic parish in Boston, or a large Russian Orthodox parish in Moscow, and so on, and so forth…
Then, of course, there’s Islam, which is less than 2000 years old, and the major divisions within it are of course even younger than that. Given how closely it’s tied to some of the most politically active regions in the world, it could undergo significant changes within the lifetimes of people posting here now. (In fact, some of the people posting here are older than the existence of modern Islamism as a distinct political and religious force.) Or not.
Finally, the new religions. It’s easy to make jokes about Latter-Day Heinleinism (Reformed) or Church of the Living Dead, but it would be interesting to me if modern religious studies gave us any predictive abilities at all regarding the likely genesis and trajectory of novel faith groups. Probably not, at least until St. Seldon comes and enlightens his elect…
Hari Seldon, Hari Seldon,
Seldon Seldon, Hari Hari…
:twitches: What? :eek:
The degree to which misremembered history collapses should increase with the remove in time. So in CE 2200, the 20th Century will tend to blend together pretty thoroughly, but still be distinct from the 17th. By CE 4010, who knows?
As illustrated (about the past) here:
“Oh, yes, for quite a long time, there, we didn’t live in caves.”
But which standard Australia, Saudi Arabia and Canada, amongst many others, are also more notable than the Roman Empire. The USSR and China are both more notable than the US.
So the US is once again lost in a crowd, and not even the forerunner in that crowd.
So in 1840, the US was more powerful than the entire British Empire? :dubious:
And which nation had the largest economy in, say, 1347?
Don’t know? Can’t even find out using Google? That should tell you something about the historical relevance of such a factoid.
So the US is once again lost in a crowd, and not even the forerunner in that crowd.
As I said, the US has been significant for such a short period of time, and pre-eminent for just a few decades. A mere footnote to history.
Oops, that should’ve read John Glenn :smack:. It was in 2nd or 3rd grade. She also taught use that in the distant past Mars had Earthlike conditions (including higher gravity) and some sort of civilization developed on it, but left only ruins and a large monument that resembled a human face. I really wish I was making this up. 
Radical historians will hold Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gargarin personally responsible for the rape, enslavement and annihilation of the once-thriving Lunar civilization.
The only surviving music will be Weird Al and Rhino Records CDs. Thomas Kinkade will be credited with inventing paintings.
In 2000 years humans will know the results of the train wreck between the rise in world population to ~9 billion and the decrease in resources caused by the onset of the present altithermal. Under similar conditions (smaller population) 4000 years ago the Nile stopped flowing for 200 years. That brought the age of the Pharaohs to an end and changed the world view of the residents. The same is likely to happen again. Our world view is in for a major adjustment.
The future focus of civilization will be access to fresh water. For the last 10,000 years we have been living off of water from the melting ice caps of the previous glaciation. Those ice caps are about gone. With them goes fresh water, hydro power, navigable rivers and our benign climate. Combine all that with uncontrolled population rise and you set the stage for political and economic chaos.
Humans are extremely adaptable so we will survive, but I can’t imagine what life will be like. I do not think our descendants will follow our life style. Intellectual refugia will retain some knowledge of our history, but it will not be of interest to the general population.
In 2000 years the earth will be sliding onto the down side of the altithermal and entering a period of glaciation. Having experienced the altithermal, there will be no argument about climate change. The calendar will be based on Malankovich and solar activity cycles rather than religious or political trivia. Religions will have adjusted to the new reality. Folks won’t care much about us.
Crane
Well, one of the things that we have to consider in turn is that we are still quite too close to the “fall” of the British Empire to say that past 500 years it will be remembered on the same scale as Rome. All things considered, Britain as recognized preeminent imperial world power lasted, what? French and Indian War to WW2? And that overlaps with American hegemony.
So it’s entirely plausible that the American World Power be remembered in the same breath as Britain, and both seen as in a different league than Rome. They may even become seen as two phases of one same Anglophone Hegemon, whose center of power was in Britain from rise to early peak and in America from late peak to decline. The Anglophone Hegemon would then have a historic perception more akin, perhaps, to the Mongols, or to Alexander – a meteoric rise to unsisputed Superpowerdom, taking over and using the knowledge of preexisting civilizations, then fragmentation and a displacement of centers of power so although it helped spread cultural influences over a wide swath of the world, after a century or two what you have are very different states having only a nominal relationship of succession to the original.
Add that it is entirely uncertain if the dominant cultural/civilizational background of the 4100AD/3500AH society is a linear successor of “Western” civilization. If it’s not, then maybe not just the UK/US but Rome itself may be be as unfamiliar to the average person of the time as some major Indian and Chinese dynasties are to a 20th Century westerner, I would imagine.
It’s not the length of time an empire lasts, it’s the impact it has on the world. How long do you guys think the Mongol Empire lasted? Have we forgotten all about it? They were the largest empire on earth, yet there were a lot of nations and peoples who never every heard of it at the time it was a going concern (about a hundred years…well, a touch less). I don’t think that there are many nations on earth who never heard about the British when they were on top, and there are exactly zero who have not heard of America today.
And that’s just the US. I have no doubt that most of the large nations of today will still be remembered 2000 years ago. We don’t just know about Rome or Egypt, but we know about a LOT of other empires and nations, some of which were very minor players.
Even assuming that the US is poised to go down for the count some time soon (which, pardon my frankness, is total horseshit), the only way people 2000 years from now wouldn’t have heard of it or know something of it is if the entire world goes completely tits up and we enter an even darker age than the dark ages following the fall of Rome. Even then, depending on how the world goes down and what Americas place is in it at that time, there are myths, legends and stories that will be propagated…not just about America, but about the nations of the golden age before the fall.
But to me that’s all post-apocalypse nuttery. There is no real reason why our civilization has to completely fall apart in 2000 years.
-XT
[QUOTE=Blake]
But which standard Australia, Saudi Arabia and Canada, amongst many others, are also more notable than the Roman Empire. The USSR and China are both more notable than the US.
[/QUOTE]
And interestingly enough, we actually know about other empires than just the Romans. Why? How? And more importantly, why would this change in the future? Why would our future decedents know less about us in the future than we know about our ancestors in the past?
Except for all the other stuff that we are also on the list for. Military, cultural, economic…you know, all that stuff. All that stuff that we know about multiple countries, nations, empires, etc and where they rate from 2000 years ago. And even 3000 years ago. And a 1000 years ago. And to an extent even 4000 years ago. And in a few rare cases even 5000 years ago.
We were dominant on the North American continent at that time. More powerful? No…we weren’t more powerful than the British Empire in 1840…but we were a rising power at that time, and were already having an impact on teh worlds stage. Of course, the British wasn’t the ‘most powerful’ nation on earth in 1640 (just to use an arbitrary number 200 years from 1840), and they were simply one of several powerful nations in 1740 (the French alone were arguably as powerful, depending on how you define that term). Yet we still know about the British Empire even when they weren’t the ‘most powerful’.
During the Black Death? Well, my guess would be China or one of the Indian empires (the Rajputs or perhaps the Delhi Sultanate, if my History Channel view of history is working). You are picking a time period where it’s unclear who had the largest economy, however…at other time periods, when there WAS a nation with the largest economy, history has a pretty clear idea of who it was…or if it was multiple competing nations, that is known as well.
I knew because I’ve seen History Channel shows recently on the Black Death, so I knew the date you picked…and can even puzzle out why you picked it. Seeing a show recently (on the History Channel) about the Mughal I knew about the Delhi Sultanate and the Rajput’s, and knew how wealthy they were. China is a total guess, since I’m not sure, without looking it up, how economically powerful they were at that time…just making an assumption that at that time they were in the top 10. Could be one of the Meso-American empires, or even one of the Muslim ones. The point, of course, is that we know about all of those places, there are popular cable shows on them, magazine articles on them, and huge amounts of data on the internet on them. Why do you suppose that will change, or that people 700 years from now will know less about our world than we knew about the world 700 years ago, even though something like half the population of Europe alone were busily dying during that period??
Only if the people who come after us know a hell of a lot less than we do about what happened 2000 years ago. Again, I have to ask, what makes you think that humans will be stupider and know less 2000 years from now than they do today? What makes you think they will be less curious?
And yet, we know about other countries that were much less well known, much less dominant, and were ‘pre-eminent’ for ‘just a few decades’. Even if your assumptions about the fall of the US are true (and I think they are BS, but that’s another debate), the US has had a disproportionate impact on the world of our time, and that is very unlikely to be forgotten. Any even semi-competent historian is going to look at the mountain of data pointing to the US being a focal point for the world during our period and be able to deduce that SOMETHING was going on at this time. The fact that English has become so wide spread alone, let alone all of the US oriented culture and products around the world, is going to indicate that the US was more than a ‘footnote’. The fact that at the same time US culture and language were spreading out goods from all of the world were flooding in is going to be a further indication to any by the blind that something was happening. Hell, the way we crumble, assuming we crumble, is probably going to say something about our relative importance on the world stage.
-XT
And not to harp on the “they’ll know more because of the paper records” idea either, but most written materials published now are on cheap-ass woodpulp, designed to last for about 10 to 20 years.
I don’t know about you, but I get donations every day of old encyclopedias and yearbooks and National Geographics (God, please don’t donate NatGeos to your library) and they are nearly all unusable due to 1) Outdated and incorrect information, 2) mold or foxing (acid damage) which is contagious and must be quarantined or destroyed to protect other paper records, or 3) unnecessarily detailed info that the area doesn’t support.
There’s a reason that crafting stores are chock full of acid-free papers and preserving materials for home record and scrapbook keepers.
Nearly ALL of our regular every-day paper records will be browned out and unreadable from foxing, decayed, molded, or entirely crumbled away by 2100, let alone 2000 years from now.
[QUOTE=Lasciel]
And not to harp on the “they’ll know more because of the paper records” idea either, but most written materials published now are on cheap-ass woodpulp, designed to last for about 10 to 20 years.
[/QUOTE]
And when the books deteriorate, what happens? Do we lose that information for ever? Why isn’t it gone? We’ve been printing books like that for quite a long time now.
Of course, the answer is that not ALL books are printed on cheap paper. And, of course, the other answer is…we keep printing books. In ancient times (and even in more modern times) ‘printing a book’ was a huge deal involving specialized craftsmen and costing a lot of money. Today, however, you have even schlock fiction that get’s printed in the 100’s of thousands. And the good stuff gets printed in the millions…and then reprinted. And then reprinted again. And then reprinted again…
I read remember reading an article once on how some guys went back into an old land fill and were digging around in it and found a news paper from the 60’s (this was in the early 2000’s) that was still in pristine condition despite being buried in a land fill for over 40 years. Even if only a 10th of a percent of all of the cheap books survive…or even a 100th, or a 1000th you are still talking about more books than all of the books ever created in the ancient world. And this, again, assumes that we stop printing and reprinting (and digitizing and preserving) books in the next 2000 years.
The other day on Pawn Stars a guy brought in a bunch of Sports Illustrated to pawn back through the very first edition…and they were in pristine condition. I have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica from the 50’s that are in pristine condition. I also have some books, printed recently, on acid free paper with hand stitched bindings. In fact, there used to be a book club you could join where you could get all top quality books made this way with paper and bindings designed to last…well, for as long as you took care of them.
And reasons that not all books are printed on cheap paper that, especially if you don’t take care of it, will deteriorate. I don’t think people really realize the sheer quantity of materials out there. It’s mind boggling. In the ancient times books and reading materials weren’t made for or even available too the common people…they were only for a small percentage of the people. Today, a huge percentage of humanity has access to things like books.
I disagree, but even if that were true, the millions upon millions of records and materials that aren’t put on ‘every-day paper’ will still be there. And unless civilization collapses we’ll still be printing books, and we’ll still have the digital records as well.
-XT
I call BS on this.
Cite your sources, Crane.
OK, but I need some clarification of your term ‘BS’.
-
You do not believe there was an altithermal
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You do not believe there was an ice age
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You do not believe there was an Old Kingdom in Egypt that ended with drought
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You do not believe population will reach 9 billion
There is plenty of support information. Where do we start?
Crane
He probably doesn’t believed the Nile stopped flowing for 200 years. One of the causes of the collapse of the Old Kingdom was a drought that led to low Nile flooding for a number of years, but that didn’t last 200 years, and the Nile itself never stopped flowing. The floods were just largely non-existent.
Captain,
I would agree there, an overstatement on my part. However, the sand layers found in lake cores indicate a prolonged period of disruption:
http://www.rivers2006.org/html/hassan.htm
The point here is that the next 2000 years will bridge a similar event with a far greater world population. The rise of world agriculture depended on a stable climate and fresh water from the melting glaciers.
Crane
OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The Pharoahs were *kicked *out of power, by the Romans.
And the Nile never went dry.
As for the world view of the non-royals…how the Hell would you know? No written records about commoners opinions from that era exist. And perhaps never did in the first place.
World view change came with Christianity, then Islam.