I'd argue that the best chance for anyone reading this to be remembered in 1000 years is to be the first person to do X on Mars, where X is probably "set foot".
That'd get you in the history books for anything related to space travel for generations to come.
Maybe not, if humans have set foot on a bunch of other celestial bodies in 1000 years. In that case, perhaps only Armstrong would be in history books as the first human to set foot on a body other than Earth.
No guarantee that the definition of "planet" stays the same for 1000 years. Hell, it's already changed once in my lifetime.
If we end up colonizing other worlds, it's likely that future space colonists will regard a "planet" as any habitable world, whether it's actually a planet, planetesimal, moon, or asteroid. Armstrong's accomplishment would stand in the record books in that case.
There's a funny bit in the Norm MacDonald special on Netflix about that exact thing... He challenges the audience to name the 3rd guy who went to the moon.
In many cases, their names are attached to something that sticks around: locations, laws (of nature or in legal sense), inventions.
Musicians, actors, sports people need not apply. What writers wanted to say will not make sense in a thousand years, with some minor exceptions. Painters may be remembered by experts and some art lovers, which is not a lot.
Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.
> Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.
People have been saying that for thousands of years. Hasn't happened yet, and isn't going to later.
That's essentially what the story of Hanukkah is all about. The Assyrian Greeks wanted the Jewish culture, but not the religion. Instead they got a religion that persisted despite pretty much the worst humanity has to offer - and has flourished despite it all.
If they couldn't do it, no one in the future can either (and science was just as important to them as it is to us, so don't try to use that as a "this time it's different").
It's also really not a nice sentiment. Virtually every single thing you consider a positive can be traced to ideas that came from religion. (Charity, helping your neighbor, community, law, proportional punishment (i.e. [the value of an] eye for an eye, instead of life for an eye), praising being a good person instead of a powerful person, the desire to give life meaning instead of hedonism - the list is almost endless.)
It's shockingly ignorant and quite offensive to assert that fundamental tenets of morality and ethics originated in or necessarily had to be promulgated by religious doctrine.
Religions don't impose morality on societies; they're a marketplace competing to communicate the society's morals. when society decided human sacrifices weren't moral, they ditched those religions in favour of ones without human sacrifice.
it doesn't have to be a relgion that communicates what the morals are; some other structure can do that.
morality itself seems to be good for societies ability to reproduce, so it'll probably stick around regardless.
> Virtually every single thing you consider a positive can be traced to ideas that came from religion. (e.g.) Charity, helping your neighbor, community, law, proportional punishment...
You mean judeo-christian morality. The prevailing theory, as I understand it, is that this morality evolved from the play circuit that exists in mammals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI9n2yC14fU
A quote of his, which I cant find, sounds something like "For all the flaws in Catholicism, it's probably the closest that humanity has gotten [to an optimal moral framework]".
I think that's overstated. The enduring religious orders that have survived thousands of years, do have a some sort of claim to such a thing. Generation after generation responding to archetypes (repeated in non-religious culture) is compelling, to me.
A) It's the power centres that we remember, because they make the decisions - most notably, Royalty. The articles comments are off on this - maybe 80% of UK Royal heads of state are almost household names in the UK. Even around the world.
B) 'Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.' - as we dive into selfish consumer materialism, and narrow minded scientific materialism, the better religious figures words are more important than ever now, I for one wish some legitimate leader would come along in this regard.
C) Musicians - Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are still household names.
The one's that will be around:
QE2, Hitler, possibly Obama - I think American academics will create a big historical thing around him and America is a 'big power' they have the ability to bend history. Think JFK but times 10, and more globally oriented. Mao especially due to his foundational status of the new Chinese state - and they are huge. Possibly Stalin. Gandhi - depending on how Indians decide to propagate his history. He has some really ugly spots that we overlook.
Possibly Marx and Adam Smith as 'founders' of economics.
Maybe another common thread is 'those who are the foundation of something' - because Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are taught in Music class as kind of the kings 'basic of music' (even though they were not there at the start). No matter how many music genres we go through, at music school the rudiments will likely still be interpreted with them in mind.
Any serious Monarch that lasts more than 30 years will get a spot in the textbooks at least.
As for Scientists - how many can the average person name past 'Einstein'? And FYI - Einstein had a marketing/branding campaign behind him that he was aware of and somewhat weary of. Niels Bohr? Oppenheimer? Walk down the street nobody knows who they are. Maybe if they get a particle or theory named after them ...
Athletes not really.
Actors - this is a new one - because we now have the ability to record performances for future generations. Maybe the early actors will be minted as 'the originals' and be studied for 1000 years ...
The kind of history we have post 1900 will be very different than before because now everything is recorded and written down. Imagine if we could just pull up Billy Shakespeare on YouTube ...
I disagree about Obama. He did nothing special as compared to other presidents. He will be remembered as much as they are, but not any more than that.
As I think back pretty much the only thing I remember about him is healthcare, and that's he's the first half-back-half-white president.
That's really not much, as compared to other presidents.
Even Trump's antics will not be remembered in detail (how many do you remember from 6 months ago?) He will be remembered in a general sort of "said lots of dumb things" kind of way, as a trope basically.
Want to be specially remembered as President? Start [or end] a huge social program, or make peace in Israel.
But I have to distinguish peace in Israel vs. peace in the Middle East.
Peace in Israel is likely to be a military kind of peace where no one dares attack, and with the Palestinians having their own state, no one has a good excuse anymore.
But they will still have bad excuses, because no one is even trying to bring peace to the Middle East.
i.e. it will be a famous conflict zone for a lot longer than you might expect because of Sunni/Shia conflict.
Also the underlying hate and antisemitism will persist even after the Palestinian negotiate a state, giving another reason for it to stay a famous conflict zone.
> Quick, who was involved in bringing peace to Northern Ireland?
Obama was the 'First Black President' - this is, on a historical scale - massive. Just massive. Also, America is kind of a 'world leading' country, so 'leader of the free world' - meaning, a black man as 'leader of the free world' - only about 150 years after slavery. This is a big deal, historically. I think his story is just getting written. Academics love him and they will write the history books. In 50 years, I think Obama will be up there with the 'big ones' in terms of being a 'landmark president'.
But I'm coming to think they may go: Lincoln, Washington, Obama as the 'big 3' over time. Again, a 'Black leader of the free world' is historically massive, and it transcends USA issues.
Not saying I think that, just how academics will write it.
> because we now have the ability to record performances for future generations
I think this has the potential to be extremely interesting. Until relatively recently, you could see a performance and be influenced by it, and that fusion of ideas could still be seen as new and original. As more and more things are recorded, and become more readily accessible to a much wider audience, I wonder if we'll start to see people unpicking the minutiae of an actor's influences and what effect that will have on how actors are perceived.
I'd bet on at least one President - Bush. Because every history book of the next couple of centuries will mark the millennial new year with imagery of 9/11 and the "Clash of Civilizations" meme. 19 guys and 1 President changed the course of history.
Musical theory only developed during the renaissance and was basically formalized by the baroques i.e. Bach - and Moazart/Beethoven mastered it.
Music as we understand it really didn't exist before that. No real way to write it down, no way to create complex arrangements.
Italians thought of it, Germans formalized it and then mastered it. Nobody has pushed it much further since.
---> Scientists ...
Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes - not Scientists, but I get what you are saying - again I'd suggest that these are 'fundamentalists'. Founders of rational thought.
Newton = foundations of classical physics.
There are 1000x more Scientists alive today than ever before, and the only one we're going to remember is from 300 years ago? Point being - maybe there are no easy/major discoveries to be made so nobody will be remembered. Who will be remembered for CERN? Probably nobody.
Yes, technically there were 'people who wrote music' but we wouldn't really call them composers, and we were not attributing anything to them.
And it wasn't a 'maslow' thing - it was that we had yet to develop proper instruments, scales, etc. etc.
FYI Music during about that time was mostly Gregorian chanting and what not - and for a time music was banned by the church, at other times it was only allowed to be made 'for God' type thing. Come to think of it there are I think some composers and attributions but minimal stuff. We don't 'remember them' because what they did was not remarkable like Beethoven.
Another reason is many things always going downhill, and people remembering them, while younger people grew up already familiar with the decline.
That's not very different a story than the continuous progress myth, just has an opposite sign.
Fact is, some eras progress for the better, and others regress (Weimar Republic, the fall of Rome, and countless other examples). And that's overall. In specific things, it can vary as well in opposite direction to the overall trend.
And long periods are relatively stagnant, such that people for centuries on end, or even millennia, live more or less the same (e.g. most rural areas in Europe between 400 A.D and 1900 A.D.), and few speak about the "good old days" there.
For most people "forgetting" is a valuable phenomenon. There are lots of minor injuries and torts which are better off forgotten than recalled. Doesn't even have to be things other people did to you, but things you did yourself while learning.
A total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind.
That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.
for MAD to work all you need to assure is that you can damage the opponent enough that their power structure will not survive, not to destroy all of their people/land/capital.
No, it wouldn't come close to doing that. It would flatten and burn cities, military bases, and missile silos that were targeted, and irradiate places downwind. But there's much more land that would not be targeted and isn't near those sites.
For example, what would be the reason to nuke the Amazon, the Arctic, or the Himalayas? How much of Africa would be targeted? What percentage of the US Midwest or Siberia do you suppose would actually be irradiated? What about islands in the Pacific? Is Easter Island going to dosed in lethal radiation from fallout tens of thousands of miles away?
I'm somewhat sure we will turn trans-human in the next 50 years, and then all bets are off. There may not be humans, not because we die off, but because we turn ourselves into something better, totally different.
1000 years is a long long time to make any predictions. Predicting 10 years into the future is hard enough.
I still think that in the next hundred years some gene splicing cowboy will cut and paste a bad sequence that gets out in the wild and changes everything.
Yeah, that does make sense, I think even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be remembered in the same manner as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie where the name is familiar but doesn't ring a bell whereas a contemporary of that time, a modern-day Mark Twain will still be remembered.
It's a bit simpler than this article outlines. How much you are remembered is based on what your accomplishments/stores/press/etc are recorded in.
For example, if you were a world renowned inventor and everyone wrote and communicated about you via clay pots then your memory is only carried on as a function of how many clay pot readers there are. Since all clay pot readers are dead and the medium itself is dead, your memory is dead. This is assuming no one transcribed the text from clay pots to whatever new communication medium came next.
He is remembered because people took the tablets and transcribed it from medium to medium. Wrote books about it. Made movies about it. And created internet articles about it. If no one moved it from tablets to these new mediums, he would not have been remembered.
Tutankhamun is a great example of this. His name was forgotten. His existence forgotten until they discovered his tomb, read the tablets, and then transcribed knowledge of his life to the modern medium. His memory now exists because we transcribe and communicate this information today.
I think they mean remembered in the public consciousness rather than remembered at all --as in having a record of the person [as in the Sayers example].
Now, it's true that we might have some more people in our consciousness if some of those people had been recorded in more durable media --or that they had a written medium at all.
Man I can see Musk one of the first people on Mars, stays there for like a year, no one knows what the fuck he's been really doing there, people start speculating what he can possibly be doing. He stays quiet, we look through the Hubble Telescope and see him driving around jumping ramps and shit in his Tesla.
After a year, he comes back.
Everyone goes crazy, the man who went to Mars is back on Earth. Throws huge parties. He says he will take a few people back to Mars. Takes 100 girls, goes to Mars. He instantly starts colonizing Mars(he wastes no time) making a civilization, after 50 or so years of doing this, the population is up to 100,000… he dies from old age, on his deathbed his last words are, "don't stop, we came this far, I believe in all of you" His face after his death goes everywhere, on statues, people crying, the God of Mars is dead. Tesla renamed to Musk, he becomes like what Kim Jon wants to become like in North Korea there. Everyone talks about him as a God, a legend, everyone working to make his dream of Mars becoming like Earth and fully self sustaining. Science is in full force researching shit and what not. 100 years go by and Mars is advanced asfuck, everything digital, crazy tech everywhere. Earth and Mars have a trading Post and shit, sending shit back and forth, it's like two countries now, you either live on Mars or Earth, but things start getting sour, there's shit like racism and stuff that start to develop with the two planets. People calling Mars people MuskCunts, saying Earth is better and shit, fuck the "redpeople" starts a war between planets. Start nuking shit and what not (literal world war) everything is going to shit, like history repeating itself from Earth. This goes on for many years.
The 1000th year anniversary of Tesla rolls by, a press conference is scheduled by Musk Inc...there hasn't been one since Musk was alive...... Everyone is waiting and nervous in anticipation of what the fuck it could be... The day comes by... The two world's watching the conference live, 100 million viewers. A computer turns on the live stream... Musk face appears... "War.... War never changes....... Untill now.... I have risen from the dead, and back to restore world's order. (THIS MOFO PLANTED HIS BRAIN INTO ONE OF HIS DEEP LEARNING ROBOTS, WOW THE FIRST TIME EVER DONE, BEFORE HE DIED, HOLY FUCK EVERYONE IS THINKING OMG WHAT A FUCKING LEGEND, WOW. "All your dead relatives and friends and everyone you knew has had their brains transported as well, and there is a new planet that will launch in an hour where everyone will be back alive and living on this planet, their brains and body's have been fermenting and being developed but they will be ready in an hour and you can go visit them and shit. Everyone goes FUCKING CRAZY! wttfff everyone is now praising musk, both planets cheer and go apeshit celebrating together, people laugh, people cry, world Peace becomes a thing, the new planet has enough room on it to transfer everyone on both planets there and everyone can live there at peace together. World hunger is eliminated, the new planet also had lab grown meat that was being grown for the last 100 years, being stored for this moment, all free. Everyone teleports there in an hour (he also invented the teleportation device, never before seen too) automatically and it becomes the happiest time in human history.
It seems a safe bet that the people who have already been remembered for thousands of years will continue to be remembered for a thousand more: Jesus, Euclid, Aristotle, Socrates, etc.
But as for contemporaries, there's two big differences: a great many more people, and increasing pace of achievements and change - and both will hopefully continue. So, it's possible no one alive today will be remembered in 1000 years. Maybe things done in 100 years will push them all out of the public consciousness.
On the other hand, it's much easier to discover fundamental truths, of enduring consequence, in the early phases.
Finally, it matter how consequential the achievememt is. It's hard to know what will be used in 1000 years, and what turned out to be consequential. Perhaps we don't see its significance today.
Notable achievements might be: understanding/creating life (from scratch, not just pokimg memory locations); understanding/creating intelligence; understanding/curing physical disease; understanding/curing mental disease; inventing FTL travel; establishing a growing non-earth colony (note: who established the vikings colony on Greenland that was abandoned after 100 years?); first contact (that leads to growing trade); modifying human nature; founder of a new and better approach to community (or exposition of it); whoever blows up the world.
There's a limit to how many people can be remembered in the public consciousness. Newtom amd Einstein will be remembered by math/science historians... but will anyone else, if there are many of the above acheivements? (or ones I haven't and can't imagine...)
Agreed. Another limitation to contemporary people being remembered far into the future is it's currently hard to believably claim coming back from the dead or turning water into wine. And it's easy to find out if a person plagiarized an essay or harassed a co-worker. Thus the era of legendary heros may be largely over.
That's interesting, and "no man is a prophet in their home town". With social media, perhaps everyone knows you as a child/teenager. OTOH there are PR firms who manage one's online presence.
Yet, someone like Elon Musk, though highly capable, also gets credit for the all the work of his teams - at least in the public eye. And if "he" saves the world from climate change, AND "he" colonizes Mars, perhaps that's a greater miracle than magic catering. i.e. He could be a legendary hero.
Also, I'm not sure how important Jesus's miracles were for the success of christianity. Of course, the PR helped, but I think it's more that his teachings worked better for city-living than the alternatives. Today, most secular societies have incorporated his ideas. (They are "Christian" is the sense that their economic policy might be "Keynesian"). Though he wasn't the only one with such ideas (e.g. Buddha), I think that's the main reason for his profound influence, and this influence is the main reason he is remembered.
I mean, many prophets performed "miracles" but not all are remembered.
One simple reason that we remember scientists is that we use their names for things. We use Maxwell's equations, Ohm's law, Newtonian mechanics, Euler-Lagrange, the Einstein coefficients, Avogadro's number and so on. And then there are the SI units which are mostly named after people. Perhaps we'll enter a sci-fi scenario where we've forgotten why things are named the way they are.
The general public? You learn from the high school syllabus, which has a finite amount of time and content. This is expensive educational real estate! That means you can learn the basics (mechanics, electricity, cell bio, etc), and some current state-of-the-art to add relevance and interest. Will the basics change in 1000 years? No idea. Classical equations "work" well enough to predict common phenomena, even if we come up with some unified theory in the future.
Most of the people that we think of as "scientists" were post-Renaissance. Galileo onwards. Newton, Euler, Farady, Darwin, for example: these are new people - barely 500 years old at most. It's helped that we've been increasingly good about writing things down, and science has been heavily romanticised. Quantum mechanics and relativity are babies.
A lot of recent discoveries, even Nobel winning science, go largely unnoticed because they're so niche technically that most people have no idea about them. Things like the giant magnetoresistive effect - absolutely world changing, but it's not trivial science and we're probably not going to be using magnetic media in 1000 years.
What about algorithms and mathematics? There are algorithms which are provably correct methods for doing things, named after people (e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm). Are these likely to be forgotten by computer scientists? There are lots of extensions and optimisation tweaks, but the core remains the same.
The sheer ignorance of the title is astounding as if to suggest we will know, entire cultures have been wiped out in the last 1000 years so who knows what would happen in the next 1000, couple nuclear wars would wipe out remembering many names mentioned above.
Einstein (relativity, nuclear), Heisenberg (uncertainty principle), Obama (for his color).
I would place Bezos before Musk, because Musk risks too much and is not really that successful. But even Bezos will be forgotten. Who remembers the founder of the richest and then most important company of the world for centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC)? Johan van Oldenbarnevelt? The worlds first bond and stocks sensation. Any rubber baron? None.
Only those who wrote about them became famous. Literature.
No way Obama is remembered. He is too insignificant. He did noting that will impact life in 1000 years. You are viewing the future with 21st century rose colored glasses.
Along with George Bush. Kind of like Emperor Cladius.
And they'll likely bore the shit out of poor first year students lecturing on "By the way, Obama's father was from Kenya!" and only some of them will remember it for the test.
Famous philosophers, writers, painters, inventors, explorers, religious visionaries and rulers are also remembered over millennia, as long as something about them is transmitted faithfully to succeeding generations.
I suspect Einstein might be "remembered" due to use of his name as a word: "He's no Einstein". Already plenty of people saying his name who don't know anything about the man, or his ideas.
That happens sometimes, and other times it doesn't. Not many people know the word gadget is from the builder of the statue of liberty, but the word hasn't dropped out of usage. There are plenty of lingering names from people and ethnic groups that have been forgotten by most.
Why would somebody remember Nelson Mandela? South africa is a legacy of ashes. Martin Luther King, yes. Gandi, yes.
But the ANC saw to this ones monument deteriorating.
Trump will be remembered as prominent political figure? Surely not. Not him and not Bush. He'll sink beneath the waves of history in less than 3 decades unless he gets impeached and has to resign.
Bush and Trump both will be remembered for a long time. We’ve only had 45 presidents, the English learn about god knows how many insignificant kings in school, so the notion that two of your least favorite presidents will be forgotten in short order seems to be wishful thinking.
108 comments
[ 1263 ms ] story [ 4847 ms ] threadThat'd get you in the history books for anything related to space travel for generations to come.
The moon is nice but we are far more likely to actually colonize Mars first.
In short - it will mark the ACTUAL expansion having started. Who woudn't remember that?
If we end up colonizing other worlds, it's likely that future space colonists will regard a "planet" as any habitable world, whether it's actually a planet, planetesimal, moon, or asteroid. Armstrong's accomplishment would stand in the record books in that case.
1000 years is a long time, and the galaxy is a big place. All bets are off.
I’d argue that remembered means something... more.
* politicians
* travelers
* scientists
In many cases, their names are attached to something that sticks around: locations, laws (of nature or in legal sense), inventions.
Musicians, actors, sports people need not apply. What writers wanted to say will not make sense in a thousand years, with some minor exceptions. Painters may be remembered by experts and some art lovers, which is not a lot.
Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.
People have been saying that for thousands of years. Hasn't happened yet, and isn't going to later.
That's essentially what the story of Hanukkah is all about. The Assyrian Greeks wanted the Jewish culture, but not the religion. Instead they got a religion that persisted despite pretty much the worst humanity has to offer - and has flourished despite it all.
If they couldn't do it, no one in the future can either (and science was just as important to them as it is to us, so don't try to use that as a "this time it's different").
It's also really not a nice sentiment. Virtually every single thing you consider a positive can be traced to ideas that came from religion. (Charity, helping your neighbor, community, law, proportional punishment (i.e. [the value of an] eye for an eye, instead of life for an eye), praising being a good person instead of a powerful person, the desire to give life meaning instead of hedonism - the list is almost endless.)
it doesn't have to be a relgion that communicates what the morals are; some other structure can do that.
morality itself seems to be good for societies ability to reproduce, so it'll probably stick around regardless.
> People have been saying that for thousands of years. Hasn't happened yet, and isn't going to later.
I see. How many people worship Jupiter or Ba'al today?
As the number of atheists and agnostics is growing in the West: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-a... and the Western trends are followed elsewhere, who is going to remember the mythical deities?
> It's also really not a nice sentiment. Virtually every single thing you consider a positive can be traced to ideas that came from religion
They didn't come from religion. They came from the social practices which worked for the society and got enshrined in some religions.
You mean judeo-christian morality. The prevailing theory, as I understand it, is that this morality evolved from the play circuit that exists in mammals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI9n2yC14fU
A quote of his, which I cant find, sounds something like "For all the flaws in Catholicism, it's probably the closest that humanity has gotten [to an optimal moral framework]".
I think that's overstated. The enduring religious orders that have survived thousands of years, do have a some sort of claim to such a thing. Generation after generation responding to archetypes (repeated in non-religious culture) is compelling, to me.
B) 'Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.' - as we dive into selfish consumer materialism, and narrow minded scientific materialism, the better religious figures words are more important than ever now, I for one wish some legitimate leader would come along in this regard.
C) Musicians - Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are still household names.
The one's that will be around:
QE2, Hitler, possibly Obama - I think American academics will create a big historical thing around him and America is a 'big power' they have the ability to bend history. Think JFK but times 10, and more globally oriented. Mao especially due to his foundational status of the new Chinese state - and they are huge. Possibly Stalin. Gandhi - depending on how Indians decide to propagate his history. He has some really ugly spots that we overlook.
Possibly Marx and Adam Smith as 'founders' of economics.
Maybe another common thread is 'those who are the foundation of something' - because Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are taught in Music class as kind of the kings 'basic of music' (even though they were not there at the start). No matter how many music genres we go through, at music school the rudiments will likely still be interpreted with them in mind.
Any serious Monarch that lasts more than 30 years will get a spot in the textbooks at least.
As for Scientists - how many can the average person name past 'Einstein'? And FYI - Einstein had a marketing/branding campaign behind him that he was aware of and somewhat weary of. Niels Bohr? Oppenheimer? Walk down the street nobody knows who they are. Maybe if they get a particle or theory named after them ...
Athletes not really.
Actors - this is a new one - because we now have the ability to record performances for future generations. Maybe the early actors will be minted as 'the originals' and be studied for 1000 years ...
The kind of history we have post 1900 will be very different than before because now everything is recorded and written down. Imagine if we could just pull up Billy Shakespeare on YouTube ...
As I think back pretty much the only thing I remember about him is healthcare, and that's he's the first half-back-half-white president.
That's really not much, as compared to other presidents.
Even Trump's antics will not be remembered in detail (how many do you remember from 6 months ago?) He will be remembered in a general sort of "said lots of dumb things" kind of way, as a trope basically.
Want to be specially remembered as President? Start [or end] a huge social program, or make peace in Israel.
PS. For Einstein did you mean weary or wary?
Quick, who was involved in bringing peace to Northern Ireland?
But I have to distinguish peace in Israel vs. peace in the Middle East.
Peace in Israel is likely to be a military kind of peace where no one dares attack, and with the Palestinians having their own state, no one has a good excuse anymore.
But they will still have bad excuses, because no one is even trying to bring peace to the Middle East.
i.e. it will be a famous conflict zone for a lot longer than you might expect because of Sunni/Shia conflict.
Also the underlying hate and antisemitism will persist even after the Palestinian negotiate a state, giving another reason for it to stay a famous conflict zone.
> Quick, who was involved in bringing peace to Northern Ireland?
St. Patrick :)
Sorry, I meant wary :)
But I'm coming to think they may go: Lincoln, Washington, Obama as the 'big 3' over time. Again, a 'Black leader of the free world' is historically massive, and it transcends USA issues.
Not saying I think that, just how academics will write it.
I think this has the potential to be extremely interesting. Until relatively recently, you could see a performance and be influenced by it, and that fusion of ideas could still be seen as new and original. As more and more things are recorded, and become more readily accessible to a much wider audience, I wonder if we'll start to see people unpicking the minutiae of an actor's influences and what effect that will have on how actors are perceived.
I'd bet on at least one President - Bush. Because every history book of the next couple of centuries will mark the millennial new year with imagery of 9/11 and the "Clash of Civilizations" meme. 19 guys and 1 President changed the course of history.
Very recent ones. Name a composer from 1300s or 1100s.
> As for Scientists - how many can the average person name past 'Einstein'?
A lot. Everybody knows Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Freud, Newton, Galilei, Darwin, da Vinci, Pascal.
There were no composers then ...
Musical theory only developed during the renaissance and was basically formalized by the baroques i.e. Bach - and Moazart/Beethoven mastered it.
Music as we understand it really didn't exist before that. No real way to write it down, no way to create complex arrangements.
Italians thought of it, Germans formalized it and then mastered it. Nobody has pushed it much further since.
---> Scientists ...
Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes - not Scientists, but I get what you are saying - again I'd suggest that these are 'fundamentalists'. Founders of rational thought.
Newton = foundations of classical physics.
There are 1000x more Scientists alive today than ever before, and the only one we're going to remember is from 300 years ago? Point being - maybe there are no easy/major discoveries to be made so nobody will be remembered. Who will be remembered for CERN? Probably nobody.
Of course there were. There was music, so someone had to compose it.
But since the bulk of the mankind was struggling somewhere at the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, nobody really cared about the nice sounds.
> Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes - not Scientists
Every encyclopaedia calls them scientists and, quite frankly, there is no reason to claim they aren't. Although Plato might be an exception.
> There are 1000x more Scientists alive today than ever before, and the only one we're going to remember is from 300 years ago?
The titular question is, who will be remembered in 1,000 years. I'm saying, those who have things named after them.
Not really, especially not someone who is a "composer".
And it wasn't a 'maslow' thing - it was that we had yet to develop proper instruments, scales, etc. etc.
FYI Music during about that time was mostly Gregorian chanting and what not - and for a time music was banned by the church, at other times it was only allowed to be made 'for God' type thing. Come to think of it there are I think some composers and attributions but minimal stuff. We don't 'remember them' because what they did was not remarkable like Beethoven.
At least they are one of the fews whose name and music have reached us after about a thousand years.
But your point stands, music travels the years pretty badly.
That's not very different a story than the continuous progress myth, just has an opposite sign.
Fact is, some eras progress for the better, and others regress (Weimar Republic, the fall of Rome, and countless other examples). And that's overall. In specific things, it can vary as well in opposite direction to the overall trend.
And long periods are relatively stagnant, such that people for centuries on end, or even millennia, live more or less the same (e.g. most rural areas in Europe between 400 A.D and 1900 A.D.), and few speak about the "good old days" there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM
Mental real estate is very expensive, and our ability to forget is what allows us to remember the things that are important to us.
Mass-murder a lot of people.
That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.
vacuum decay
a gamma ray burst probably won't happen even once in our entire galaxy
We are due for a gamma ray burst. https://youtu.be/8HvwNOSnveE
https://www.quora.com/How-destructive-is-the-worlds-entire-n...
for MAD to work all you need to assure is that you can damage the opponent enough that their power structure will not survive, not to destroy all of their people/land/capital.
For example, what would be the reason to nuke the Amazon, the Arctic, or the Himalayas? How much of Africa would be targeted? What percentage of the US Midwest or Siberia do you suppose would actually be irradiated? What about islands in the Pacific? Is Easter Island going to dosed in lethal radiation from fallout tens of thousands of miles away?
1000 years is a long long time to make any predictions. Predicting 10 years into the future is hard enough.
For example, if you were a world renowned inventor and everyone wrote and communicated about you via clay pots then your memory is only carried on as a function of how many clay pot readers there are. Since all clay pot readers are dead and the medium itself is dead, your memory is dead. This is assuming no one transcribed the text from clay pots to whatever new communication medium came next.
Tutankhamun is a great example of this. His name was forgotten. His existence forgotten until they discovered his tomb, read the tablets, and then transcribed knowledge of his life to the modern medium. His memory now exists because we transcribe and communicate this information today.
Now, it's true that we might have some more people in our consciousness if some of those people had been recorded in more durable media --or that they had a written medium at all.
Man I can see Musk one of the first people on Mars, stays there for like a year, no one knows what the fuck he's been really doing there, people start speculating what he can possibly be doing. He stays quiet, we look through the Hubble Telescope and see him driving around jumping ramps and shit in his Tesla.
After a year, he comes back.
Everyone goes crazy, the man who went to Mars is back on Earth. Throws huge parties. He says he will take a few people back to Mars. Takes 100 girls, goes to Mars. He instantly starts colonizing Mars(he wastes no time) making a civilization, after 50 or so years of doing this, the population is up to 100,000… he dies from old age, on his deathbed his last words are, "don't stop, we came this far, I believe in all of you" His face after his death goes everywhere, on statues, people crying, the God of Mars is dead. Tesla renamed to Musk, he becomes like what Kim Jon wants to become like in North Korea there. Everyone talks about him as a God, a legend, everyone working to make his dream of Mars becoming like Earth and fully self sustaining. Science is in full force researching shit and what not. 100 years go by and Mars is advanced asfuck, everything digital, crazy tech everywhere. Earth and Mars have a trading Post and shit, sending shit back and forth, it's like two countries now, you either live on Mars or Earth, but things start getting sour, there's shit like racism and stuff that start to develop with the two planets. People calling Mars people MuskCunts, saying Earth is better and shit, fuck the "redpeople" starts a war between planets. Start nuking shit and what not (literal world war) everything is going to shit, like history repeating itself from Earth. This goes on for many years.
The 1000th year anniversary of Tesla rolls by, a press conference is scheduled by Musk Inc...there hasn't been one since Musk was alive...... Everyone is waiting and nervous in anticipation of what the fuck it could be... The day comes by... The two world's watching the conference live, 100 million viewers. A computer turns on the live stream... Musk face appears... "War.... War never changes....... Untill now.... I have risen from the dead, and back to restore world's order. (THIS MOFO PLANTED HIS BRAIN INTO ONE OF HIS DEEP LEARNING ROBOTS, WOW THE FIRST TIME EVER DONE, BEFORE HE DIED, HOLY FUCK EVERYONE IS THINKING OMG WHAT A FUCKING LEGEND, WOW. "All your dead relatives and friends and everyone you knew has had their brains transported as well, and there is a new planet that will launch in an hour where everyone will be back alive and living on this planet, their brains and body's have been fermenting and being developed but they will be ready in an hour and you can go visit them and shit. Everyone goes FUCKING CRAZY! wttfff everyone is now praising musk, both planets cheer and go apeshit celebrating together, people laugh, people cry, world Peace becomes a thing, the new planet has enough room on it to transfer everyone on both planets there and everyone can live there at peace together. World hunger is eliminated, the new planet also had lab grown meat that was being grown for the last 100 years, being stored for this moment, all free. Everyone teleports there in an hour (he also invented the teleportation device, never before seen too) automatically and it becomes the happiest time in human history.
But as for contemporaries, there's two big differences: a great many more people, and increasing pace of achievements and change - and both will hopefully continue. So, it's possible no one alive today will be remembered in 1000 years. Maybe things done in 100 years will push them all out of the public consciousness.
On the other hand, it's much easier to discover fundamental truths, of enduring consequence, in the early phases.
Finally, it matter how consequential the achievememt is. It's hard to know what will be used in 1000 years, and what turned out to be consequential. Perhaps we don't see its significance today.
Notable achievements might be: understanding/creating life (from scratch, not just pokimg memory locations); understanding/creating intelligence; understanding/curing physical disease; understanding/curing mental disease; inventing FTL travel; establishing a growing non-earth colony (note: who established the vikings colony on Greenland that was abandoned after 100 years?); first contact (that leads to growing trade); modifying human nature; founder of a new and better approach to community (or exposition of it); whoever blows up the world.
There's a limit to how many people can be remembered in the public consciousness. Newtom amd Einstein will be remembered by math/science historians... but will anyone else, if there are many of the above acheivements? (or ones I haven't and can't imagine...)
Yet, someone like Elon Musk, though highly capable, also gets credit for the all the work of his teams - at least in the public eye. And if "he" saves the world from climate change, AND "he" colonizes Mars, perhaps that's a greater miracle than magic catering. i.e. He could be a legendary hero.
Also, I'm not sure how important Jesus's miracles were for the success of christianity. Of course, the PR helped, but I think it's more that his teachings worked better for city-living than the alternatives. Today, most secular societies have incorporated his ideas. (They are "Christian" is the sense that their economic policy might be "Keynesian"). Though he wasn't the only one with such ideas (e.g. Buddha), I think that's the main reason for his profound influence, and this influence is the main reason he is remembered.
I mean, many prophets performed "miracles" but not all are remembered.
The general public? You learn from the high school syllabus, which has a finite amount of time and content. This is expensive educational real estate! That means you can learn the basics (mechanics, electricity, cell bio, etc), and some current state-of-the-art to add relevance and interest. Will the basics change in 1000 years? No idea. Classical equations "work" well enough to predict common phenomena, even if we come up with some unified theory in the future.
Most of the people that we think of as "scientists" were post-Renaissance. Galileo onwards. Newton, Euler, Farady, Darwin, for example: these are new people - barely 500 years old at most. It's helped that we've been increasingly good about writing things down, and science has been heavily romanticised. Quantum mechanics and relativity are babies.
A lot of recent discoveries, even Nobel winning science, go largely unnoticed because they're so niche technically that most people have no idea about them. Things like the giant magnetoresistive effect - absolutely world changing, but it's not trivial science and we're probably not going to be using magnetic media in 1000 years.
What about algorithms and mathematics? There are algorithms which are provably correct methods for doing things, named after people (e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm). Are these likely to be forgotten by computer scientists? There are lots of extensions and optimisation tweaks, but the core remains the same.
I would place Bezos before Musk, because Musk risks too much and is not really that successful. But even Bezos will be forgotten. Who remembers the founder of the richest and then most important company of the world for centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC)? Johan van Oldenbarnevelt? The worlds first bond and stocks sensation. Any rubber baron? None. Only those who wrote about them became famous. Literature.
And they'll likely bore the shit out of poor first year students lecturing on "By the way, Obama's father was from Kenya!" and only some of them will remember it for the test.
https://www.virtuescience.com/etymology-how-words-change-ove...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
Nixon is remembered, so far. It's not always a good thing.
There are far too many world leaders in 1000 years for anyone to care, unless it's some pivotal point in history.
I believe stupidity can last thousand years.