No Michael Jackson mention? Besides being an international star I bet he’ll be remembered just for moonwalking and his weird vocalisms.
Michael Jordan might be a good outside guess too. It will depend on how basketball does in the future but he’s pretty well known worldwide and people like to use him as a mark of excellence, e.g. “He’s no Michael Jordan!” I can see someone 1000 years from now saying that, stopping, and wondering who the hell Michael Jordan is. But then he’ll remember he’s no Einstein either.
I can’t see Dylan being remembered 100 years from now. The Beatles are, however, a very good choice.
I really hope so.
Of all the living US presidents I’d bet my money on GWB. The wars in the ME will have a greater impact on the world that whatever version of SS is passed in the US.
Obama’s blackness will be the footnote of a footnote in a hyper-sprecialsed text.
The problem for average people “remembering” entertainment and sports figures from our era is that the era of recorded music and movies is only 100 years old. And the amount recorded in the early period was very small. So, if all our movies and TV and music survives to 3011, there will be at minumum 10 times as much in library as there is today. And since most of the world is so poor right now that they don’t produce a significant amount of popular culture, we’re likely to see a lot more than 10 times what we have now. When China and India and South America and Africa are on par with Europe, Japan, and North America, we’ll see about four times our current annual production of popular culture, and this is assuming we really do top out at 9 billion.
So…all of recorded popular culture we have, as of August 15, 2011, will be somewhere about 1/40th of the recorded popular culture in August 15, 3011.
We can’t in our current day keep track of Japanese or Indian popular culture, quick who’s the biggest star in Bollywood? Who’s the biggest name in Japanese pop music? Artists and scientists from the Greek and Roman era can be remembered because there just weren’t that many works that survived to the present day. We can remember Aristotle and a couple dozen Athenian poets and philosophers because there are only a couple dozen to remember.
For the modern era there would be literally thousands. How can an average person of 3011 remember the thousands and thousands of influential figures alive in 2011? Especially when they’re also expected to remember 2111, 2211, 2311, 2311, 2511, 2611, 2711, 2811, and 2911.
Still a thousand years isn’t that long. All these people mentioned will be in the history books, but the amount of recorded history produced between 2011 and 3011 will be immensely greater than the amount of history produced between 1011 and 2011.
Sorry, he ain’t alive. Also, I doubt if any authors or anyone in the arts today will be remembered in a 1000 years. Can you name anyone from those fields from a thousand years ago? It has to be someone who has made some major breakthrough for mankind or otherwise impacted the world. The two no-brainers are Neil Armstrong and James Watson (his partner Crick is dead). If string theory turns out to be right, maybe Edward Witten makes the cut. I’m kind of dubious though. Maybe Andrew Wiles will be remembered for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem since that was such a difficult nut to crack, having confounded centuries of the best mathematicians. Wiles will certainly be remembered by mathematicians.
what human survival issue or issues political and cultural will be critical 1,000 years from now and what present technology will help ameliorate them? according to aldus huxley’s brave new world, it was mass production by henry ford. herbert’s dune said space travel/exploration. for asimov, artifical intelligence. for kurt vonnegut, darwin’s galapagos island.
i frankly can’t see neil armstrong’s significance. a (major) milestone in the space race?
I’m dubious as to whether even mathematicians in the year 3000 will remember Wiles. How important was Fermat’s Last Theorem, anyway? Seems the absence of a proof wasn’t exactly an impediment to the development of modern mathematics during the centuries between Fermat’s death and Wiles’ proof. I don’t remember seeing footnotes to important results reading “conditional on the truth of Fermat’s Last Theorem” the way some results note that they depend on, say, the Axiom of Choice.
FLT was very difficult to prove, but 1000 years from now, that will be a curiosity more than anything else.
Also, I’m going to go with a longshot, but not an impossibility:
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
Prime minister of the UAE, and creator of the Dubai known today. Depending on how it expands and where it goes from here, this monumental project could be something that’s remembered 1000 years from now.
Are you kidding? Obama is shaping up to be a minor president. He won’t be remembered 100 years from now, let alone 1000.
Bill Gates, possibly, because he’s such an influential computer pioneer.
Bin Laden, doubt it. 100 years from now, he’ll be a footnote in a history program. 1000 years from now, only the most deducated historian will have heard about him.
Tome Cruise, Madonna, etc.? Only a tiny fraction of actors are remembers even a couple of generations later. A millenium later, I don’t see how any actor could possibly still be famous.
I image some reative typs will still be remembered. We still read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart.
I’d go with The Beatles, J K Rowling and Stephen King. And I doubt that there will ever be a time when an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical isn’t playing somewhere.
I think fame over a millennium can come in these ways:
Great Scientist/Explorer
Neil Armstrong has a chance, but he’s likely to be eclipsed in the future.
Whoever comes up with a cure for cancer or other dread disease
Literature/Arts
Writers or other artists whose work will stand the test of time and be read for eternity.
No qualifiers at present, T.S. Eliot may have been the most recent. Dylan comes closest in my estimation.
Politics/Royalty
Nelson Mandela is my best bet, along with Tutu
Fidel Castro for longevity as a dictator
Queen Elizabeth and Prince William. Elizabeth has already had a very long and well respected reign and William has a chance to be equally beloved if not as long reigning.
Barack Obama for breaking the color barrier in the White House
Hillary Clinton, if she is elected
The first woman president, if alive today
Infamy
Nobody alive today can measure up to Hitler. bin Laden may be part of 31st century history courses.
Hard to see this being important over the long haul. Apartheid was the last gasp of transplanted Europeans ruling in Africa, but the big changes in the continent with respect to colonialism had mostly happened decades earlier.
Hell, he’s a footnote even now.
Only if the British monarchy is still in existence in 1000 years. It’s very expensive for something that’s purely symbolic; it’s hard to see its lasting.
People 1000 years from now will have forgotten that that stuff ever mattered to us.
I disagree - it’s hard for me to see him being anything but down in the white noise of history, 1000 years from now.
I have the same thoughts about Armstrong.
As for the cancer curer, is it really going to be one superstar scientist? No, it’ll probably be a team, I know they still award Nobel Medicine prizes to individuals, so there’s still a chance.
There were many post white leaders before him.
Queen Elizabeth would be in the history books, but she won’t be well known.
Prince William might be, if he ends up the last King of the Commonwealth realms.
Definately, physological gender is way more absolute then “race”
If a leader ends up glassing Taiwan or Pakistan, then many people will speak his or her name in the same breath as Hitler. Shesh, their infamy might last several thousand years if you believe the fringe theories about nuclear war in ancient indian writings.
Well, maybe if the world ends up united under a Totalitarian strain of Islam, Bin Laden will be remembered for humbling the last great infidel empire. If secularism or another value-system dominates then, maybe he’ll be remembered, but no more than John Wilkes Booth.
Actually his name has a chance of outlasting a millenium, but only in a greatly distorted form. There are lots of parellels between the ideology of ObL and Guy Fawkes.
They wanted to establish a fundementalist religious state
They used terrorism against a superpower who was oppressing their co-religionists.
They had no respect for democracy.
They were finally killed by agents of the superpower.
Fawkes is now remembered as a freedom loving free spirit.
