Yeah, if they’re so high and mighty why don’t they do something about our incessant whining about them! Come on, you cowardly future people! Show us your all-powerful past-alte
Something like this? (from The Perry Bible Fellowship)
Just as the history of a thousand years ago looks to us, but slightly better documented - for those who care to inquire. Some big events - the World Wars, Kitty Hawk, the Moon landings, pandemics like the 1918 flu and AIDS - and some big names - FDR, Churchill, MLK, Mandela, Gorbachev - may be remembered by the average man, woman or neuter, but probably not much more.
It was the last in my list, though.
Still, America is the most consumerist country in the world, IMO. 25% of the resources for 5% of the total population is the kind of figure that future generations are going to take note of. Also, the obsession with the automobile and car-designed cities will be a future negative.
I predict people of the future will have the same smug, condescending and inaccurate views of us that we have for people of the past, and that people of the farther future will have for them. As has been pointed out, though, they’ll have less of an excuse since they’ll have access to huge amounts of information, rather than the fragmentary information current historians have about, say, ancient Egypt. Anyone venturing an opinion about 20th-21st-century life will be instantly countered by somebody future-Googling some contradictory example. It will be so easy, in fact, that I’m not sure anyone will bother writing books about this era beyond narrowly-focused biographies of individuals (who I hope will remain more important than masses for eternity, but no matter).
Oh, & I think Derleth is right that WWI/WWII will be mashed together; that’s already happening. Of course, WWII & the Age of Colonization be understood as early groans of populations dealing with overrunning their own carrying capacity, before every country in the world would have to choose between Rwanda-style ethnic slaughters & China-style enforced birth control. (And I think, for various reasons, ethnic cleansing tends to win if both are seen as serious options in the same place.)
We are the prelude to something big we don’t see yet. We’ll be looked on romantically by many, while others see us as fools on the brink of destruction.
Also, I expect Superman to become a full-fledged mythological character after he hits the public domain; whether he’ll actually ever have a religion as such, I dunno.