To try to seriously answer the question:
Essentially nothing about 2002 culture will survive until 2502 except in history books. How much of 1502 culture survives today? 99.999% of it is gone. About the same percentage of what we create will be forgotten by 2502. One or two authors may survive, maybe some works of art.
Yeah, we record stuff now. Most recordings will be lost or destroyed by 2502, I would guess, or will be forgotten in dusty archives.
lel will finally reach 1,000 posts. 
According to an old Jetsons episode, people will still be watching The Flintstones.
lel will finally reach 1,000 posts.
According to an old Jetsons episode, people will still be watching The Flintstones.
or that we haven’t blasted ourselves back to the Stone Age…
Hydrogen power, Tesla technology & the like will provide cheap clean energy.
Greater research into electromagnetics will verify the existence the psychic realm, including some form of Afterlife, & may even enable enhancement of psychic abilities.
Necessities of life will be guaranteed everyone, but luxuries will require extra effort. (Necessities being food, clothing, basic education, temperature-controlled shelter, transport to work & needed errands, postal & phone communications.)
Every planet in the solar system will be explored via robots & when possible, manned missions. Lunar, Martian & Space Station colonies established. A robot probe will make it & transmit data from the nearest star systems (is it still the consensus that Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us?)
Samples of extinct animals will be restored via cloning
Embryonic cryogenics & transplanting will make abortion obsolete & it will be made mostly illegal.
All major religions will still exist but extremist violent elements will be so marginalized that it will be easy to put down any terrorist movements among them. Ethical Monotheism will prevail among all faiths & turn former hostilities among them into “friendly” rivalries.
An all-out war in the late 20th Century will either call Jews to abandon Israel & resettle in a special state in a Western nation OR more likely establish Israel as a permanent nation which all Arab & Muslim countries have to live with.
Neurosurgery & neurotropic medications will be used to restore dangerous/habitual criminals to society- probably as pacified forced laborers.
Society may allow pedophiles & bestialists to indulge via robotics & virtual reality. If not, such tendencies will also be forcibly eliminated by brain surgery & medication.
Polyamourous, homo- & bi-sexual relationships will be tolerated & will develop societal structures (a form of civil commitment). However, centuries of research will show the ideal environment for child-rearing to be two-parent (male & female) families within extended families.
“Tesla technology”?
BWA-HA-HA-HA! :wally
AI will still be only 50 years away.
Easy enough to figure out. Just look BACK 500 years, see what bits of culture from then survived, and extraoplate from that.
Oh dear god.
eh hem…back to the OP…
Of all of the artists working in 1500, how many do we still study in school? Marlowe, Petrarch, Michealangelo, Sidney, Spenser…call it ten total. Can you pick ten artists whose work will endure that long? And I don’t think it’s a matter of superior technology to record the information. It’s a matter of whose works touch a deep enough chord that they can exist independant of a long-disappeared cultural context. My office-mate and I have spent the last half hour or so tossing names around and we really aren’t prepared to hazard a guess. The best that we can come up with is Langston Hughes, the sculptor Alexander Calder, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez–and that’s from the whole 20th Century, not just artists working today.
I would say that the most likely objects of study from this period will be movies because they represent the first hundred years of a brand new artform that will no doubt still be in existence in five hundred years. Even if we still don’t have movies per sae, there will still be an artform based on moving images. So kids in school will have to endure Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, and The 400 Blows. So which movies from 2002 will still be around in 500 years? For the sake of our reputations, let’s hope none of them.
[Quickly thumping his throat to reproduce the old school projector]
In the Future we will all be driving our flying cars to work where we will use fantastic computers designed to do the common work we used to do manually. Genetically engineered Robot Monkey Butlers will service our every needs.
DDT will be an everyday houshold item to protect us from teh Giant Ants, Spiders and praying Mantaces which threaten our cities.
One day man may even walk on the moon. Our Astro Men will ensure America rules the universe and protects it from the ever present threat of the Space Communist menace.
Yes the fantastic future will be a wonderful place. Remember Future events such as these will bee seen in the future [/Films jams and the reel melts under the lightbulb]
:eek: Did I miss something in the last few years?
Our descendents will number in the trillions, and fill the solar system. All but a tiny fraction will be unrecognizable as humans, though - they will be adapted to live unprotected or nearly unprotected in interplanetary space or on planet, moons, and planetoids.
Computers will be able to simulate reality perfectly, and many (if not most) humans will exist primarily in digital form. Those that have transferred their consciousness completely from it’s original biological form will be separated from those who still retain a biological brain, as computers will be so fast they will experience thousands of years of existence in a very short time - they will rapidly evolve into something completely inhuman.
We may or may not have colonized other solar systems, but space exploration will not be a major focus of human society as we will be able to observe other star systems very closely with the future equivalent of telescopes, which will probably be arrays of sensors arranged in space in a network thousands or millions of miles across, correlating their data to get a detailed picture of planets thousands of light years away.
I don’t think we will have encountered any intelligent life, though I bet we find life on other planets through our remote observation. We will have long since catalogued and mapped every planet in our galaxy and probably some of our closer neighbors.
We won’t have FTL travel, but people will be able to experience virtually anyplace we have observed in extrapolated simulations.
If we still exist as a species and a culture, the body as a vessel for the mind will become less important, as we’ll be able to move our consciousness, or a facsimile of it, into states independent of the body. We will exist as long as we wish to, but again, as non-tangible consciousness.
We won’t be any closer to determining what we really are, and from where consciousness springs. But many will still make claims as to having the truth in that regard.
We still will be unable to travel through time.
Some Grandkids, of some current SDMB members will still be alive then.
You will probably be able to download and create VR ; Matrix style, I think our time will be the furthest back that can be authentically re-created (the beggining of the digital age) and therefore will be a popular VR destination. Someone probably a subculture, will be WAY into our time, use our slang loving Elvis, the Simpsons and Brittany, tho it will all have to be filtered and translated into the Spanish/English mesh they speak then, no sweat.
or OTOH our AI-Robot overlords may restrict TV veiwing to Lost in Space episodes digitally remastered to make Robot the boss…
There are a couple of messages that echo this theme, but I think it might be wrong. There are many differences between the way 2502 will perceive us than how we perceive 1502. The main thing is that our culture will survive, relatively intact, in archival form. And not just in the odd manuscript, but in exacting details of our everyday lives, and complete, perfect recordings of all of our art, good and bad. We are passing a fully formed culture into the future.
I think this might be a significant difference. Go back to 1950, and ask people what kind of cars we would be driving in the year 2000. You’d get all kinds of space-age answers - flying cars, hovertrains, whatever. But how many would have predicted that the big craze was to buy vehicles that looked like 1950’s era cars?
I wonder if the invention of recordable media didn’t create a new phenomenon - a racial ‘memory’. Up until the 1800’s, cultures were created anew out of whole cloth. Pilgrims, western settlers, cultural exchange in Europe, etc. Cultures were created, mutated and lost, other than what was recorded in books - the first primitive ‘racial memory’. We still remake Shakespeare over and over again, and modern music owes a lot to very traditional forms.
That’s what got me thinking about 2502 - not how different it might be, but how similar as well. Will the be a new ‘ultra classic’ '56 T-Bird, except with a fusion power plant? Will there be MAS*H revivals? What about a fad in which computer animation and AI allows new episodes of 300 year-old TV shows to be created, complete with the original actors.
And how weird would it be to have a video catalog of all your ancestors? To be able to sit down and watch some video of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather as a baby splashing in a pool? How would that change your perception of your life, the world, and your place in it? I would think that people then will have a much more basic understanding that time moves forward, and they will begin to take a long-term stewardship attitude towards other things, and just in general plan their lives differently.
Interesting…but it will take 500 years to realize that the traditional family is the best environment to raise children, or it will just take that long for people to admit that?
Also…no one mentioned race…will the world see such clear boundaries or will more assimilation take place?
Interesting…but it will take 500 years to realize that the traditional family is the best environment to raise children, or it will just take that long for people to admit that?
Also…no one mentioned race…will the world see such clear boundaries or will more assimilation take place?