What person alive today, will be remembered 1000 years from now?

In My Humble Opinion
181

I thought I quoted it, but it hasn’tturned up. Anyway, someone a couple of pages back mentioned people who’d be in a school textbook, not just hidden away for historians. I think that’s a pretty good barometer, taking account which country those school textbooks are in (and which countries are likely to exist then). I’m talking later high school as well as earlier. So Edward the Confessor would work in England for 1000 years ago, since he comes up now and then.

If we go on who the average man in the street will know, the only possible answer is ‘nobody,’ which is boring.

I learnt it as a kid because I had a ‘ruler of rulers’ - a school ruler with all the monarchs listed in chronological order (they’re still on sale at many museums). But it is much easier than the Presidents will be after a similar amount of time because the kings and queens tend to reign for an awful lot longer, so there are fewer of them in the same timeframe, and you can group them more easily, either by houses or just by names.

QE2 will pretty much definitely be in school history textbooks. Her reign has been noteworthy - the end of the British Empire being one of the reasons, the technological revolution being another - she’s reigned for a very long time and she’s on all the money of dozens of countries. Just three reasons, but there are more.

A few fictional pieces might still be remembered in 1000 years, though their creators might not be. This is going to make me sound like a total fangirl considering I’ve been on two threads about Star Wars recently, but I reckon that series has a better chance than almost anything else. Harry Potter is the next up. The Simpsons maybe - it’s too current-affairs-based and relies too much on comedy, but who knows? Some of it might last. Given that drama seems to last longest, I suspect a couple of dramas should be on the ‘currently popular fictional works most likely to be remembered in 1000 years’ list, but I don’t know that genre well enough to say.

However, if they’re remembered at all, I doubt anyone will pay attention to the actors or creators - they’ll only remember the characters. Le Morte D’Arthur is still well-known centuries later, at least in adapted versions, but everyone remembers King Arthur not… who was it again? (Yes, I know it was Sir Thomas Mallory, but I bet lots of people have heard of King Arthur but not of him).

Harrison Ford might actually be in the running for ‘actor most likely to be remembered in 1000 years, at least in history textbooks’ simply because the films he’s been in have the most longevity and him having been in more than one of them makes him more memorable. It’s still highly unlikely though.

Stephen King is ahead of the field for the writer most likely to be remembered, though it’s still unlikely he actually will be. Horror stories have longevity and he wrote a lot of very popular ones.

Not many people are being sainted these days. Christianity will most likely still exist in something similar to its current form even if the proponents are fewer - religions that strong take a long time to really die out. So Mother Teresa might be known 1000 years from now. OK, she’s dead, but it was within my adult lifetime, and I’m only 35, ergo it counts as not that long ego.

I’m not sure Bill Gates will be remembered; he’s not like the early philanthropists, naming every other building he part-funds after himself. However, he might be remembered as a pioneer of the internet. The internet will likely be in textbooks as at least a transitional game-changing technology, and the kids of 1000 years ago will learn about it just like we learnt about the Spinning Jenny (dull, important, in a lot of high-school textbooks in the UK) and the telephone. So Tim Berners-Lee is actually in with a good chance despite not being very famous now.

The Dalai Lama might well still be in textbooks in at least some parts of the world and remembered by Buddhists or whatever Buddhism has become by then.

Of course, all of this assumes that man is still alive, if woman can survive, etc.

Horrible Histories - the best history TV show ever and one of the best comedies - do a nice song round-up too.

182

Really sorry I didn’t spot this wonderful thread earlier; fascinating stuff.

Historians have concluded, though, that a thousand years from now the two most relevant things in our Amercan history that will last are:

  1. Baseball
  2. Jazz Music

That being said, it seems Babe Ruth (although dead in the physical sense), and Louis Armstrong (ditto) will be remembered in 3011 and long afterwards. Other players have come and gone, but the Bambino lives on in the lore and fabric of American society today, and will continue to do so for many hundreds of years to come. This in spite of the many evolutions the national pastime will endure in the next thousand years, and surviving the era of Bud “look the other way” Selig and countless more like him to come. Jazz afficianados may argue Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillesppie, and/or Thelonious Monk are true fathers of jazz, and I would agree, but Satchmo is surely the name most will remember as the pure American art form develops and grows for many, many generations to come.

Rock, Pop, Country and Rap are destined for the dust heap of history; some sooner than others, guaranteed.

183

I like that list of comparisons. I don’t think Bin Laden will be remembered, but you never know.

Even in primary school we were taught that he was fighting against authority, which kinda pisses me off actually. He was fighting for a more extreme authority which would have been pretty shit for most British people. A few anarchists do celebrate him for wanting to blow up Parliament, but those who know their history remember that he wanted to install a new parliament with a stricter head of state based on religion, which is not exactly anarchist. But this could be a tangent worthy of a thread two months ahead of its time.

184

First I’d like to thank the OP for a very thought-provoking thread.

Second, my initial reaction to suggestions like sports/entertainment/political figures was mostly “Heck no!” but I kept turning this over in my mind.

I think it all boils down to information storage & retrieval. If people 1000 years ago could store information as we do today, my guess is many more people from that era would be remembered today.

While there’s been many notables that history will remember in the year 3011, I don’t think there’s anyone alive today that the average person will remember. There’s many candidates from our era that may be remembered, but none are alive now.

Bri2k

185

Not necessarily. If I fudge by a bit, I can come up with Omar Khayyam (b. 1048), who is well-known because a 19th-century English translator took an interest in his previously fairly-obscure poetry.

Hard to come up with named authors from 1011; if you push the dial into the 1200s you have Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, and I’m sure several others. Only one I have off the top of my head is Anna Comnena (author of The Alexiad).

Other than that, it doesn’t hurt to have a breed of dogs named after you; just ask St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).

Can’t think of anyone right now as a particular nominee. Among the recently deceased, Richard Nixon has his name on that plaque on the moon (along with the 3 astronauts), which will probably be preserved in a park somewhere once the place is settled.

186

Beatles? Yes, likely (though not guaranteed).

Rowling? King? Ha! I consider myself an educated, well-read, native-English-speaking person living right now, and I’ve never read a word either of of them has written. So I really doubt they’ll be remembered. (But maybe I’m just out to lunch.)

Webber? Huh??? Broadway-style musical theater is a tiny part of today’s global popular culture scene. Let’s say three things will be remembered from the entirety of today’s global popular culture scene. Would even the (arguably) most currently successful current composer of Broadway-style musical theater really be likely to be one of those three artists/creators? I really doubt it.

I get it that successful Broadway shows, for example some of Webber’s concoctions, can enjoy a life of quite large scope, spatially and temporally. So you have a point there. But, in the end, we’re talking about a “New York/London/maybe a few other places” phenomenon. And just a small subset of interested folks even in those places.

187

Do you mean the Dalai Lama as in the continually reincarnated 14th century holy man? or do you mean Temsin Gyatso, the man said to be his current incarnation who is a human rights activist?

I think the constantly reborn schick will make it hard for him not to be remembered in 1000 years.

188

No sports people will be remembered. Why? Because athletes get better and better over time. There wil be some impossible record, a record that is almost physically impossible to break, and athletes will get closer and closer to it untill someone breaks it and then more and more break it. There is probably a name for that effect (and Sheldrake is the only one I know who has an explanation for it).

But that is why I think all records by modern athletes will be dust in a few hundred years, let alone a thousand years. Only the names of athletes whose victories are part of a good, dramatic story will survive; not the names of athletes who broke records that will be broken better every century thereafter.

189

I mean the current one.

190

It’s also a question of significance–what people will care about.

Most of the suggestions in the thread suggest that we have a very inflated sense of our own time’s importance, or else an inadequate grasp of just how long a thousand years is.

When nominating cultural/creative figures, consider this: you are proposing that someone of our times will be two and a half times as enduring, to the people of the 31st century, as Shakespeare is to us.

191

But there has to be an upper limit. I mean, no one’s going to be running a 2-second mile.

192

I doubt he’ll be remembered.

The current one is known for his tireless political activism for the tibetan people, but now that the tibetan exiles started democratically appointing leaders, they’ll also get much of the limelight.

Besides, there is an up-and-coming superpower which has no problem with writing him out of history.

193

And that Western/Anglophone current affairs and culture will still be ascendant. Most likely we’ll all view things through the lens of Chinese or Indian culture (or whatever their 31st-century equivalents are) or something else entirely.

Shakespeare is well known today because English is our lingua franca (irony unintentional). Cicero is well known today because Latin was the lingua franca of Shakespeare’s day.

Will we speaking English in 1000 years? Maybe a variant, but I doubt it.

Yeah, but our history has unfolded so much more quickly than that of previous generations. Even our World Wars took less than a decade. We’ve been a lot busier and more productive than our forebears (there are, after all, a lot more of us).

Perhaps more importantly, this is the first period in human history when the recorded achievements of common people became more important (in the sense that more is written about them) than those of kings, princes and the nobility.

That means there are a lot more people to write about.

Look at it this way: other than the occasional monk, how many of the people we remember from the 11th century were not hereditary monarchs? How many of the people we’ll remember in 50 years are?

194

Unless that acceleration is reversed, that makes the next thousand years an even bigger gulf of history than the past thousand–all the more reason to suppose that almost everything familiar to us today will be somewhere between obscure and irrelevant a millennium hence.

195

Precisely my point. We know about Ramses II, thanks to his pyramids which have withstood the ravages of time, and have proved so interesting thousands of years later that they still give us insight into the ancient Egyptian way of life. The ancient Greeks will continue to be studied for many of their cultural advances, and we all still pass the names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great on to our successors. The Roman times had their Julius Caeser as a premier emporer, but more importantly, the Roman reign over the known world still will remain in history no matter who writes and rewrites it.

Now we are now well into the American era, having succeeded the European domination of the world from the ages of discovery and empire building. That is why I believe the peculiarly American inventions of Jazz Music and Baseball, as well as their legendary heros will be the two things surviving well past 3011, no matter how many changes in epoch masters occur. The closest mankind has come to perfection is 90 feet between the bases, and nearly every person who has heard jazz music for the first time recognizes its timeless attraction.

196

What if you rewrite it? Julius Caesar was never an emperor. :smiley:

Um… seriously? Nobody cares about baseball today. If it’s remembered in a hundred years, let alone a thousand, it will be solely because future generations wonder why the hell people thought it was a good idea to make 60 year old managers wear tight uniform pants.

Anyway, there’s nothing “peculiarly American” about baseball. It’s an evolution of an English girls’ game.

Jazz is okay, but is even less likely to be remembered. Ask 10 random people on the street to hum the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, and then ask them to hum any bars from any jazz standard.

197

Again, I must strongly disagree. If you go to any developing country and meet any aspiring musicians, European classical music is just noise to them. Other than Hotel California, they want to learn to play Take the A Train, In the Mood, Take Five, So What, Salt Peanuts, Moondance, One O’Clock Jump, St. Louis Blues, etc…

198

This wiki article on the year 1000 makes a good starting point for looking back a thousand years. (Or 1,010, to be precise.) It names a host of people who were prominent in the year 1000, and links to another page which names all of the significant rulers from that year.

The results makes sobering reading for anyone who thinks large numbers of people from any point in time will be remembered.

I recognized exactly two names on the list of rulers—the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer, and the English king Ethelred the Unready. I remembered them for the profound reason that both had colorful nicknames.

I recognized one name on the list of scientists, the Persian polymath Avicenna. His work was so wide-ranging and profound that one encounters him even in histories of other times and places, such as Europe in the Middle Ages.

And of course, I recognized Leif Ericsson. He is the only “household word” on the page.

So, why is Leif so famous? Not one European in a thousand knew of him while he was alive. But four hundred years after he died, Europeans began to sail the oceans, and the resulting expansion became one of the primary drivers of human history. And in particular, Europeans following Leif’s footsteps to America founded a wealthy and powerful nation. Centuries after the fact, Leif was recognized as a progenitor.

So if you want to be remembered in 3011, do one of three things:

  1. Get a colorful nickname.
  2. Be as talented as Avicenna. (Probably impossible today, because of the expansion of human knowledge.)
  3. Take the first step in something that will be important a thousand years from now.

Speculation: Over the next thousand years, human development will center around the separation of consciousness from a fallible body and the achievement of effective immortality. Take a baby step toward it today and you might be remembered.

199

If I could fudge a couple decades, I’d nominate Walt Disney, because he has a multi-billion dollar company named after him that 1) has it’s tentacles everywhere 2) makes a huge indelible impression on humanity and 3) has a corporate life beyond the death of the man, hence keeping his name alive.

People all over the world know of Disney, and people have a much closer emotional impact to Disney than to Bill Gates. The company impacts kids during their formative years, which causes nostalgia and a desire to re-experience all things Disney later in life, which further helps perpetuate the company and the name.

He’s made a big emotional impact on me, my kids, and I have little doubt my grandkids will be seeing original Disney movies, or whatever passes for movies in 50 years.

It’s a company that could survive another 50 to 100 years to 200 years, to create even more of an artistic legacy, and then your at least 10 to 20% on your way to the year 3011.

Any company that buys Disney would keep the Disney name because it has such good will. I can’t think of anybody else who’s name goes with a consumer company as large as Disney’s, and one thing that Disney does well is keep the Walt Disney legend and story alive which hekps keep the “tribal awareness” of Disney alive.

200

As an aside, I’m not too sure if looking at lists of people who were well-known in pre-industrial, pre-printing press eras are a good measure of “name longevity”. If we move the goal posts to 600 years, then a review of famous people alive in the 15th century (1401-1500) includes such names as

Joan of Arc
Henry V
Vlad the Impaler
Johann Gutenberg
Leonardo Da Vinci
Botticelli
Christopher Columbus

Assuming we don’t die off or submit ourselves to our AI overlords, most of the names above will likely be remembered (and even taught) 400 years from now. The fact is, there wasn’t a lot of world-changing going on in 1010CE, so there are very few people from that time who actually did something worthwhile for us to remember.