How will future civilizations remember us?

So, I've got a story that's set a few hundred years from now. Part of the setting's flavor is how people of The Future will view us in the 20th and 21st centuries. A few minor details are based on how we think of older cultures.

A few examples:

• Eternal English is averted through heavy use of the Translation Convention. Star Trek sounds to future-people like William Shakespeare sounds to us.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future is subverted where the "iPod" look is exclusive to stuck-up high-class people (like how Victorian styles are used today). Also, Gothic architecture saw a revival.
• Similar to how kids today view historical figures like Napoleon, future!kids will look at events like 9/11 and the War On Terror and they'll say "why do we have to learn this crap?"
• Internet memes will be viewed by scholars as the start of a major literary shift.

Those are some of my thoughts. I wanna know what you think: How will people of The Future see us?

How about fashion? I'm really hoping the future people will dump the necktie.

It's hard to say how people 50 years from now will view us, let alone 200.

However, I don't the people of the future would be stupid enough to think LOL Cats was a great literary achievement. I mean, it'll definitely be recognized, but I doubt it'll be revered like Shakesphere.

Oh, I'm sure LOLcats won't become some major thing like Shakespeare or Chaucer, but it's entirely likely that the Internet's absurd humor will become more mainstream.

And, I know it's hard to make even educated guesses about the future. Even so, some guesses have been pretty accurate.

I wouldn't say that Internet humor is 'absurd'. It's a new kind of more unrestrained humor, but no less coherent than the stuff that came before.

"Jesus Christ, Superman, committed public ritual suicide yesterday morning in front of his adoring masses to protest the policies of Romulan Security. The religious figure and social radical will be remembered for his spiritual teachings, his progressive social campaigns and his gloriously feathered hair. In other news, the Emperor has declared today that he will finally come forth as the true inventor of the airplane. Political analysts had previously suspected the Empire to credit Our Glorious Leader with the invention of the helicopter, but that honor has been posthumously awarded to Saint Leonardo Da Vinci of the Holy Order of the Sciences and Humanities. According to the Imperial Council for Engineering, the more basic airplane, which inspired the helicopter, is a more fitting invention for the leader of the Romulan Empire."

edited 3rd Dec '13 6:21:10 AM by fulltimeD

How do most of us view the 17th and 18th century? By and large... we don't.

If I ever write anything in the far future, this is how the past will be remembered in textbooks:

"From 16,000 BC to 4032 AD, there was a period of restructuring and reformation."

Before Einstein, After Einstein

Before and After the invention of the internet.

There was a whiz, and a big bang, and then, and then, and then, somebody shouted riot and somebody landed on the moon and a brilliant piece of art was created, then a bunch of people got killed.

Kinda like every other period of history.

They'd probably remember the current generations as the a-holes who ruined the earth's ecosystems and got the coastlines flooded.

A.I. Is a Crapshoot movies will become the black face of the 2060s

Little Green Men will become the black face of the 2160s

That is if something doesn't happen to render all our current data storage methods obsolete and unreadable. Older civilizations recorded things in stone, bone, wood, and skins. Those tend to have a longer shelf life than paper and some electrical charges in fragile silicon. If anything what we would be remembered for is all our skyscrapers and other concrete and steel buildings, possibly also all the plastic crap we'll leave behind. I'd almost think that future civilizations would be able to know more about the ancient Egyptians than the 21st century.

Barring intentional erasure of records that seems unlikely. We have access to long-term data storage methods that are very survivable, and there will probably be more of it around just by virtue of the fact that we store magnitudes more information than the ancient Egyptians could ever dream of. Hell, we’ve probably got more carved in stone in a single city (monuments and plaques, details and dates on buildings, commercial stonework and the like) than the ancient Egyptians had in their entire civilization.

The past is always seen as prologue, so everything depends on what life is like two centuries from now. If the environment has been ruined and life is very hard, our choices will be seen as having led toward that. If the environment has been saved and they live on a garden planet, then we will be seen as the begining of the process that created it. The same for the economy, democracy, human rights and technology. If distributed intelligence is the rule two hundred years from now, then our internet will have been the genesis. If they had a revolt of the robots then our internet started the downfall. Whatever cultural legacy they appreciate and enjoy, it was our wise decisions that made it possible. Whatever terrible conditions they deeply regret or have overcome (much like ourselves and colonialism, or slavery), it was our foolish mistakes and deliberate misdeeds that made it possible. The role of chance in history will be ignored or denied. Whatever happens, they will see us as their precursor, as we do our own past.

Edited by DeMarquis on Sep 19th 2018 at 7:39:46 AM