What will the modern part of "History of the Earth" look like 1k years from now?

Great Debates
1

Yes, there is a reason this is in GD. I don’t want an MPSIMS joke fest here.

Assuming for the moment humans still exist and are still recognizably modern humans and still have classes similar to 100-level college courses now, what would the 20th century portion of the “History of the Earth” class look like circa 3000? For example, at least a few people, myself included, think that the World Wars will be elided into a single ‘event’ much the same way the Hundred Years’ War was created out of many little conflicts. I think this will be concomitant with a general ‘evening’ of history, where Pearl Harbor and Gallipoli stand on even footing with the major events of the Chinese and Spanish and Russian Civil Wars: that is, largely forgotten except by historians and nerds.

In fact, I will go farther and say the military history of the 20th century will be largely dominated by one huge global uprising, the Hemoclysm (Greek: blood flood), that began in 1911 with the Chinese Civil War and ended and ended in the 1990s with the collapse of the majority of Soviet states and puppets, ending the largely forgotten proxy wars and the biggest single arbitrary division of humanity to that date. Most of the specific incidents within that period will be ignored by the majority of people and glossed over in any 100-level course, with only a few poking up as dramatic examples of how the Hemoclysm progressed at specific places and times.

What people will make the cut? Philo Farnsworth and Henry Ford were both more important than Hitler and Stalin, but all of them will get mentioned. In general, I think more scientists and inventors will get mentions than military/political thugs, because the technological aspects of the 20th century will have a longer reach than the political ones. People will know John Glenn and Neil Armstrong longer than they will know the people who sent them, just like the names Columbus and Drake and Cabot have outlived the names of the vast majority of the politicians from that era.

2

I know you asked about the twentieth century, but the past two centuries have seen the move from transportation powered by muscle to transportation powered by machinery (and, more broadly, the rise of the industrial age). That’s a fundamental change.

And the twentieth century was the first in which man flew in powered aircraft and then made it into space, albeit mostly by unmanned vehicles. Again, I believe this is a sea change.

3

I think it will be remembered as an age of particularism, ending in a social, and perhaps physical calamity of enormous scale. Help yourself and your particular interest group to as much guilt as you wish, we are all on the same slide, and most of us even know it.

A thousand years hence, our descendants will hold us in sorrowful contempt for our selfish and futile attempts to make ourselves each more important than the other. Our descendants will be the survivors, those who learned that all of us are always more important than any of us.

Tris

4

There’s an episode of Futurama in which there’s a TV AD for theme park called “Past-O-Rama”, in which Cowboys are hunting Wooly Mammoths with spears and Hammurabi and Einstein are disco dancing in a hot air balloon.

I believe that, 1000 years from now, people will honestly believe that a number of fictional characters were actually real people, the current crop of US presidents and British/Commonwealth Prime Ministers will be complete unknowns to most people outside academia or historia, The Internet in its current form will be regarded in much the same way we regard the idea of Messengers on Horseback, and computers will be so large and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own one. :wink:

Seriously though, I think answering this question is a bit like asking someone in 1007 A.D. what they thought life would be like 1000 years hence… I doubt they’d even be able to comprehend the sort of changes that would come to pass.

5

If technology moves at the same rate as it has in the last two hundred years then we will look very primitive to our descendants in 1000 years - probably much as we view the Stone Age now.

Our wars will look trivial, rather like the seige of Troy (which was pretty crude and small beer) and our technology will look grotesque.

With the trend for miniturization technology will be unrecognizable, we’ll have learnt how to trap ambient energy and we’ll probably ‘make’ and ‘unmake’ things as and when we need them - nano technology using ‘remembered plans’.

Our factories will seem unnecessary and crude, Henry Ford and Adam Smith’s pin factory will look like a bunch of savages making Easter Island statues.

I’m not sure what they’ll call us, but it will be pretty unflattering, something like the Pre-Endoform period - ‘endo’ as in within and form as in to shape or make.
eg: they’ll just tell things to make themselves and will regard tools as crude

Of course we might be extinct having modified a gene in a tomato that activates a gene in ourselves that totally turns off any reproductive instincts.

6

The details of the 20th century ( and the present ) may well be obscure, because we put so much of our knowledge and records on media that’s either highly perishable or rapidly obsolete and unreadable.

I expect it will be known by some name like “The Splurge” or “The Devastation”, a period of massive overuse and wastage of resources and destruction of the environment. I recall a sci fi short story where it was referred to as TTCB, meaning “Those Twentieth Century Bastards”; I expect that will be the attitude, if not the exact term used. I believe it, and the present, will be regarded as a time when people lived high and passed the cost off to their grandchildren.

7

I can see a future where the word “Westerner”, “Consumer” or possibly just “American” would become a pejorative in the same way we use Vandal (a defacer of property) or Philistine (unknowledgeable about culture) today, only it would mean “Ecologically wasteful, living beyond one’s reasonable footprint”.

8

A thousand years from now, World History 101 will probably still be allowed only one semester, so anything before the year 2250 (750 years prior) will be given very short shrift.

Just like now. How much do our history courses cover 1000-1100 AD? Life had changed so much since then, there’s hardly a basis for modern students to make a comparison. Einstein will rank right up there with the Venerable Bede, and that will be about it.

9

On the contrary, I think that people of the future will know far more about the 20th century than earlier centuries, because it is the first to be documented in moving pictures and sound. It may even hold a special fascination for them, being the earliest period that does have such a detailed record.

As for the problem of perishable data and obsolete media, it’s been done in other threads but I believe people overstate the problem. Archaeologists of the future won’t need to be able to read things like a 20th century company’s entire billing database. Just a tiny percentage of that kind of data would need to survive for them to have a very good idea of how such things worked. All they’ll need is the technical specs of, say, SCSI hard disks to construct what to them would be a trivial machine to read them. And a lot of data will just be continually copied to the next generation of storage device anyway. Maybe they’ll be carrying around “The Internet, as at 1/1/2000” on USB keys. Maybe one of them is reading this thread, in 3007 :eek:

10

Being human, they’ll likely view the modern times in overall context to the themes they consider important.

For example, if the human race expands into the stars, the 20th century will be told in terms of how it help/hindered the expansion into the stars. In this timeline, events like the world wars are diminished and events like the development of space flight will be highlighted as true “turning points”.

So… imagine what the world is going to be like in 1,000 years, and write your history so it “naturally” leads to that world. That’s largely what we do today. :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

However, if we become a dystopia ruled by One State, the 20th-century will be told as part of the evolution into the One, True State. In this timeline, the wars (and overall conflict) likely take on more important status while technical achievements like the moon landing are seen as sidelines.

11

Have no idea why my conclusion is in the middle of my post.

It’s the hamsters, I tells ya!!!

12

Given the population explosion of the late 20th Century & the unsustainability of present populations (when they say all the fish stocks are going to die out in 40 years, that’s an unsustainable customer base no matter how you slice it), I think there will be, in the next hundred years, two things that will make the Holocaust look quaint & those who see 20th Century slaughter as a great horror seem naive: “our naive medieval forebears”. First, there may have to be a level of “hemoclysm” so great that all the wars of the Twentieth Century are but prelude. Second, if humanity is going to avoid the constant horror of wars for competing resources, we’re going to have to lose our decadent form of 18th-Century humanism &, well, not be horrified by the sacrifice of individual lives to the greater good.

Long-term, certain political details just don’t matter to future humans, like whether 100,000 or 10,000,000 Chinese were killed in a given war. That doesn’t change the shape of their world. The environmental damage, the extinction of species, will matter more; but having no real sense of what a world with elephants, rhinoceros, large predators, or any of various insects should look like, many of them may no more think to mourn their loss than we think to mourn the dodo or the wolves of Europe; & those that do will often approach it romantically, with the ancient megafauna becoming like dragons & typhonic beasts in our memory.

So the 19th & 20th Centuries will be remembered for being an era of global culture, before the Really Nasty Stuff happened. For a few hundred years, there will be aficionados of whatever is remembered of our fashion & music, & perhaps even our dance. In time, though, our era’s cultural memory may bleed together, with bits being folded together (quick, name the main differences between 13th Century France & 14th Cent. England). A good deal of literature will survive for a while, & we may or may not be noted as publishing an enormous amount, but a very small proportion of it will survive 1,000 yrs.

Some will find it hard to believe that so much tech was developed in such a short period. Surely it would have taken longer! I don’t know how much tech will survive. There is some question as to how long some chemical & plastics technologies that rely on petroleum as a source will last, & how long the industrial base can go after the coming energy contraction. I just can’t say how much of a space program will exist, or how common television-type tech will be, not because it’ll be obsolete, but because it’ll be expensive. However bad things seem to us, we may be seen as living in a Golden Age, with cheap & varied clothes & food.

13

The willingness to sacrifice the individual to the “greater good” is what caused the blood-baths of the 20th century (quaint though they might have been). I therefore have a hard time seeing why you look to that attitude for your salvation.

14

Well, “caused” is too strong a word, but that attitude certainly facilitated massive slaughter.

15

I think we’ll be viewed as the culmination of a 600-year-long process that began with the Renaissance and will end with a grand collapse as modern technological society finally runs up against the hard resource limits of Earth itself. We’ll be the finally little orgy of out-of-control consumption and population growth … the last near-vertical spike before the big crash.

As a result the cultural artifacts of the 20th century will have an air of fin-de-siecle decadence about them. Rock and roll, action movies, haut couture, professional athletes … these will linger on for centuries as images of romantic excess. 1000 years from now we’ll have about the same reputation as the late Roman Empire – bread, circuses, and orgies while everything goes down in flames around us.

Drink up, everyone!

16

Barring the aforementioned total collapse of global society resulting in a new Dark Age, I think our descendants will potentially have an incredible record of our times. We are just now seeing data going online in a permanent, storage-medium-independent fashion. With hard disk capacity–and the amount of hard disk storage available via the Internet–ballooning, and services like GMail storing your e-mail online indefinitely nowadays, we could very well see all digital information being stored online from now until the end of human civilization. Why would we bother to clean out our mailboxes and hard drives when new storage is so cheap? Historians who are interested in what happened during a certain period will be able to just go online and look it up.

I think it’s likely that, within my lifetime, continuous access to a search engine will be the norm for most people in the Western world (just as continuous access to cell phones is now), and search and speech technology will improve to the point that we’ll just be able to say out loud, “Computer … who was President Bush’s first Attorney General?” And get the answer. It begs the question of how much memorization of facts anyone will feel compelled to do when such info. can always be looked up instantly. For example, I have memorized almost none of the phone numbers stored in my cell phone. Why bother? I can retrieve them in seconds with the push of a button.

But that’s all a side topic. Even with such access, I think you’ll have summaries of our history. I would expect, for one thing, the Physics revolution from Newton to Einstein to be lumped together into one lesson plan.

17

Tall order. None of the media you are describing last forever, and no one is getting paid to archive it all in a more permanent form.

18

What I’m afraid of is that our descendants a thousand years hence may be watching us, using a technology that can look into the past through wormholes or something. Watching, judging, laughing. I hate those bastards.

19

“American” may be a bit unfair. IMHO a big part of the American mindset is that when push comes to shove, only entrepreneurs, proprietors, and landlords deserve to come out on top, and those who are dependent on their good graces, ultimately, do not have “rights” in that context, if conditions become too constrained to allow such things as reasonable rents or good wages to persist. Given America’s tacit policy of population growth and importing poverty, I’m not all that optimistic about our long term future.

Given that, if Peak Oil or some other ecological catastrophe should bring about near universal poverty, it will be Europeans, not Americans, who are the last to live what we would consider a comfortably “Western” lifestyle, while American workers are already living in barracks converted from boxcars and scrabbling in the streets for water.

If Peak Oil or other ecological catastrophe should bring about near universal poverty, given the generally conservative political climate and the entrenched belief that, when push comes to shove, only entrepreneurs

20

But you miss the point. Online data is already being transfered to fresh media on a regular basis. This isn’t a matter of hooking up new hard drives/tapes/CDs to your PC when the old ones are full/defective. Computers routinely back up data to multiple drives, without much human intervention. Hard disk space is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. At home and on my Web server, I only delete things nowadays because I want them destroyed (for security reasons), never because I’m running out of space. I will never throw away another e-mail again, for the rest of my life. My friend uses GMail for all of his mail, and, thanks to Google, the case will be the same for him. In 50 years, he’ll be able to dig out e-mailed photos of the first day he moved into his new house, or whatever.

In 50 years, the cost of leapfrogging that online data from disk to disk (or disk to isolinear chip, or whatever) will be negligible. It’s almost negligible now. And as for no one wanting the task–I think you’ll find thousands of libraries and universities, dozens of companies and foundations (Google’s stated mission is to organize all of humanity’s information on-line … they think it will take 300 years), and millions of individuals who will want to participate. The burden on them will be quite small.