While there is a factual answer to this, it probably won’t be known for another few thousand years, so I’ve put this here.
Anyway, I’ve been reading about Ancient Rome, etc. and started thinking about how we’d be viewed 2000+ years from now. Hardly a novel concept, but I just wonder what we’d be called, as we’d certainly be old enough to be considered “ancient,” but what would that make societies who are currently considered “ancient.” “Super-ancient?”
Well, if civilization falls then many records will be lost, language will likely change and we’ll be just as much dim history as Rome is to us. Also, we put the great majority of our records in very perishable and doomed to be obsolete forms. I recall a science fiction novel where we were called “the Near Ancients” and less was known about us than about ancient Rome because our records were almost all just gone.
If civilization doesn’t fall on the other hand, we will almost certainly engineer ourselves into or be supplanted by something superhuman. We won’t be looked on like ancient Rome, but more like Neanderthals or dinosaurs, as interesting but lower life forms.
It would depend on how history plays out. If there is some Sort of catastrophe or dark age it would be different than if things continue as they are. Unless what ever happened was truly horrible though I imagine that we’d leave substantially more behind than the Romans did, so our theoretical ancestors would know a lot more about us than we know about Rome.
As to how they would view the Romans I’d say it would be similar to how we view ancient Egypt! Though if there was no fall in civilization they might know more then about Rome than we know today (thousands of years more of excavation might turn up some truly remarkable finds).
-XT
Except we actually were sapient and had a civilization.
This will be their understanding.
Assuming that is possible, which it might not be.
It would be quite bizarre if it isn’t though. The idea that we are the most sophisticated possible being reeks of human egotism.
[Mandatory HHGTTG Quote] Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. [/Mandatory HHGTTG Quote]
When I was younger I wondered how the ancient Greeks had attained such a sophisticated culture, then let it slip away. I no longer wonder. I believe that future historians will consider us to be the end of what may have become a great civilization, if we had only survived long enough to correct our faults.
This will happen much sooner than 2000 years.
You’re assuming that a post-human species would define either of those terms in ways we would recognize.
Even today we recognize different levels of ancient-ness. The stone age. The bronze age. The classical (ie, iron, ie greco-roman) age. The middle ages. The renaissance. The industrial age.
Exactly how we fit into the classification schemes of some hypothetical future civilization depends on their technology and social organization. We tend to fix the end of the classical era and the start of the middle ages at the fall of Rome in 476. That’s a convenient break point, but it ignores the continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire. And by that time the periphery of the western empire had already been occupied by non-Romans. So to people living through it, that date wouldn’t have seemed so significant.
If the technology of the future age is really far out super-future technology, we could be considered part of the late Rennaissance. Or if they’re pretty much like us, just with jumpsuits and better computers, our era will be considered the start of the modern era. Or, if they’ve lost their technology, we’ll be considered mysterious powerful godlike people, kind of like how the Romans were during the Middle Ages.
The scary thing is that we do not think anymore that digital watches are a pretty neat idea. (After getting a cell phone and/or hand computer, using a watch has become superfluous)
You mean by the year 2525? If man is still alive? 
See Bruce Sterling’s short story, “Our Neural Chernobyl.” A genetically-engineered virus makes it possible to enrich dendritic connections in mammalian brains, increasing intelligence, but every human who takes it beyond a certain level goes insane and dies. It is speculated that the design of the human brain includes an ineluctable “primate stupidity barrier.” It may be so, who knows? And all other key features of the Singularity – nanotechnology, fine genetic engineering, strong AI, strong VR, strong neural-electronic interface – might or might not ever be possible.
Oh, I’ve heard of ideas like that before. But I tend to regard them as largely a narrative device to explain why the future humans in question are still human. Or in the case of non-augmentative technology like nanotechnology or robotics, why the future looks just like the present with fancier weapons.
BrainGlutton mentioned the Singularity. Suppose two thousand years from now, technology we can’t imagine has changed humanity beyond our recognition. Our distant descendants may have different definitions of what it means to be a human. Maybe they’ll be self-aware programs or collective minds or something we haven’t even thought of. From their perspective, there’d be no fundamental difference between 1st century Romans and 21st century Americans - we’d both seem equally primitive.
Wrong thread.
They will think we did pretty darn well with only the genes that nature gave us and no ability to link our brains directly to computers.
Fermi’s Paradox, in enhanced form, also suggests itself: It reeks of human egotism to assume we are the only sentient species in the Universe; likewise, to assume we are the oldest sentient species in the Universe. So, if it is possible for us to transcend humanity, then where are all the other godlike superbeings who made the transition before us? They should be far more spectacular in their lives and works, therefore easier to detect, than ordinary carbon-based sentients with unmodified natural gene-codes.
And some non-zero percent of them will probably wonder how we built some of the stuff we built, and speculate that it MUST have been aliens, since we couldn’t have done such things on our own without genetic modifications or direct neural implants…
-XT
They went off to some god-like realm. It’s spectacular but we lack the ability to detect it.
An ancient Roman, even a quite intelligent one, wouldn’t be able to look at a computer and know how much was going inside the box.
