How much will be remembered 2000 or 5000 years from now?

[zealo]

With how common casual literacy and mass production through printing has become in recent centuries, there's a not a whole lot that won't be remembered if there's still anyone around by then.

[vindicatorx]

What will be remembered about the Holocaust or the Cold War in thousand years?

Difference between them and us is we have a written record.
I'm sure most of the significant things to us now will no longer be taught in schools. Things like space exploration, rise of computers and AI and other technological advancements will be what is preserved and passed on.

[smityx]

Well, surprisingly we are already struggling quite a bit with storage obsolescence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence

It really doesn't take much to lose massive amounts of data.

Should something serious happen I would liken it to the modern day version of the Library of Alexandria burning.

[Azerate]

Most probably, almost nothing.

Just think about the current times. Most people are pretty much unaware of anything that happened prior their adult life in the world. They might remember a couple facts here and there from history lessons in school, but that's that. The advent of technology doesn't help. People don't use technology for learning or reading about history, they use it to share funny pictures and hook up for sex.

The only exception I can see to that are 'local' tragedies, because they are always used by politicians to build the founding myth of a country and to reinforce patriotism.

[Th3Scourge]

Everything material will be remembered. Almost everything trivial will be forgotten. There's so much of the ancient world that is only remembered because it was written down or constructed.

Everything trivial will be forgotten. Future SJWs will still remember that tweet you sent 2000 years ago, though

[Weeps]

Everything online is archived by the government I think. Don’t hold me to that.

We are living the fledging social media era. The future is going to be social media on steroids, pictures and videos will be so insignificant like VHS.

[Omega10]

- - - Updated - - -

Thinking that far into the future I'm pretty pessimistic anything will be remembered. The possibility of total human destruction by our own hands, or at least destruction of all higher societies in favour of barbarism, weighs pretty heavily on me. I drown it out with video games...

We've created weapons capable of eradicating humanity. We still have people on earth who are religiously convinced that would be a good idea.

Imho there is nothing pessimistic about it, it's just reality. How much do we remember from the 1800s, which was just 200 years ago? Not much. In the US, there was a civil war, Abraham Lincoln, and the US grew a lot. The War of 1812 happened, and we know what year that happened cuz it was in the name. Other than that not a lot will be remembered. Go back 200 years before that, the 1600s, and the only stuff remembered is stuff that there are stories, movies, or plays about.


A few people know what happened 1000 years ago (much less 2k or 5k) - but not many. What WERE the major events of the year 1019?

[Kelathos]

Imagine the poor anthropologist that has to document and read this entire forum for posterity

If anyone is still reading an old internet forum, then we can assume we did not regress back into the dark ages. Therefore technology has progressed. No human will process this data. The "anthropologist" will read whatever report an AI produces.

[breadisfunny]

Imagine the poor anthropologist that has to document and read this entire forum for posterity

yeah imagine the poor guy that has to read all your posts.

[Kokolums]

Dictators whitewash history to protect their wealth and power. With modern technology at their disposal, they can get increasingly efficient at it. That means they will be able to completely erase the history of entire civilizations. They will also get increasingly efficient at discrediting valid sources. So a lot will be lost. Anything that survives will get propagandized so no one will be able to tell what is truth and what is lies.

[D Luniz]

Digital storage is getting cheaper and cheaper though. The only reason people wouldn't remember everything is if they decided to erase all the digital files or if future people had no interest in history.

ehhhh, between the effects of bit rot in magnetic media, and loss of the software that goes to some file fomats or hardware(looking at you 5 1/4in floppies), I could see a lot of information lost over 2000 years

[Kuja]

Probably as much as we remember from 5000 years ago now. Technology breaks and gets updated, and most old stuff will be inaccessible if it still exists. Unless it gets backed up. But we will most likely destroy everything way sooner than that, so not much will exist 2000 years from now.

[PC2]

ehhhh, between the effects of bit rot in magnetic media, and loss of the software that goes to some file fomats or hardware(looking at you 5 1/4in floppies), I could see a lot of information lost over 2000 years

You can avoid that by simply transferring data from an old device to a new device before the old device experiences deterioration.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Commercials, I think commercials will be remembered and people will think a lot of our values and the way we live is really more reflected by them than anything else, just my guess.

[bmjclark]

Is there really any reason all the major events won't be remembered? Unless every computer in the world spontaneously combusts we're probably fine in that regard (unless of course humans somehow get wiped out)

[Mihalik]

Is there really any reason all the major events won't be remembered? Unless every computer in the world spontaneously combusts we're probably fine in that regard (unless of course humans somehow get wiped out)

Very little is actually stored on an individual computer.

Especially since the rise of cloud storage. Almost everything exists distributed somewhere in a data center. It is accessible to you under the conditions that a) the data center remains intact, powered and serviced, b) you have access to it aka the internet works.

I run a small industrial services company Spain. Spain is pretty highly regulated when it comes to data storage, all our internal records and financial records have to be physically stored on properties owned or operated by us, and we are required to have at least 1 backup which also has to be physically in Spain (for legal reasons, so Spanish courts can have jurisdiction). Most companies, ours included, have essentially only those 2 data storages and absolutely no physical or hard copies of anything.

I read a government report somewhere recently that said that even major financial institutions only typically have those 2 storage formats and the requirement for the backup storage has only came into effect recently after a political party accused of corruption had all their servers and computers physically destroyed in a "break-in".

I know this is a relatively minor scale example, but the main point of the problem of data accessibility and retention remains.

And the reason for forgetting things?

Well, there's already a bunch of studies that show that many younger kids don't know what the Holocaust was. I wonder how many teenagers know what the Space Race was? Ad to that the increasing push for reducing the importance of History as an academic subject, or its elimination from the curriculum.

I only have a cursory understanding of Chinese history for example. Most Asians equally only have a cursory understanding of European history. China already greatly censors access to its own history, people in China literally cannot look up the Tienanmen Square massacre. For someone living in China that might have never even occurred.

[Sylar Hao]

WoW will be around expansion number 900, so that's a thing.

Spoiler: Murlocs are a playable race and Alliance and Horde have merged together for the 8th time into The Hordance, who's Supreme Lord is the singing Sunflower pet (can't recall its name). Also Garrosh manages to come back from another universe and timeline, Tyrande is still screaming Malfurion all over the place, and the new 2 Lich Kings (yeah, 2) are Hogger and Mickey Mouse (yeah, something related to Disney).

[zealo]

Very little is actually stored on an individual computer.

Especially since the rise of cloud storage. Almost everything exists distributed somewhere in a data center. It is accessible to you under the conditions that a) the data center remains intact, powered and serviced, b) you have access to it aka the internet works.

I run a small industrial services company Spain. Spain is pretty highly regulated when it comes to data storage, all our internal records and financial records have to be physically stored on properties owned or operated by us, and we are required to have at least 1 backup which also has to be physically in Spain (for legal reasons, so Spanish courts can have jurisdiction). Most companies, ours included, have essentially only those 2 data storages and absolutely no physical or hard copies of anything.

I read a government report somewhere recently that said that even major financial institutions only typically have those 2 storage formats and the requirement for the backup storage has only came into effect recently after a political party accused of corruption had all their servers and computers physically destroyed in a "break-in".

I know this is a relatively minor scale example, but the main point of the problem of data accessibility and retention remains.

And the reason for forgetting things?

Well, there's already a bunch of studies that show that many younger kids don't know what the Holocaust was. I wonder how many teenagers know what the Space Race was? Ad to that the increasing push for reducing the importance of History as an academic subject, or its elimination from the curriculum.

I only have a cursory understanding of Chinese history for example. Most Asians equally only have a cursory understanding of European history. China already greatly censors access to its own history, people in China literally cannot look up the Tienanmen Square massacre. For someone living in China that might have never even occurred.

General history education being awful in many places doesn't mean things are forgotten about at an academical level if there were contemporary sources describing those events in the first place. And that's ultimately what matters to these things actually being preserved for future generations.

[FuxieDK]

We have a lot of threads that pop up here about ancient alien and long lost ancient civilization conspiracies as there seem to be something of an obsession around that.

What I find more interesting tho, is the question how much of the modern history (past maybe 2500 years) will be remembered 2 or 5 thousand years down the road.

One of my favorite book series growing up was Frank Herbert's Dune. Dune is set at some indeterminate point in the future by which most of what we consider modern history is largely forgotten or is spoken of and understood much the way we speak of the Trojan War today, mostly myths and conjucture and few reliable sources.

Recently I got into Warframe again, another game which is seemingly set so far in the future that there aren't even passing mentions to anything we consider modern history.

Considering how increasingly almost all the information we record and generate is stored digitally much could be lost either due to storage format obsolescence or due to things like cyber warfare, data corruption etc.

Not to mention the problem of the reliability of sources. What if the only things that would accidentally be preserved about an event would come from sources like Breitbart and Info Wars?

What will be remembered about the Holocaust or the Cold War in thousand years?

In a few centirues (or millenia), the world circa 2019, will be remembered as "Back when people actually believed in god(s) and fought over who had the 'best' imaginary friend"...

[Lochton]

By knowledge of human nature, all the bad will be remembered, all the good won't.