Must-Read: What will people in 3000 remember from the history 1700-2300? I would say:
- Universal literacy.
- Artificial birth control.
- The coming of the Replicator--or close enough--for foodstuffs and for things made out of metal, wood, plastic, and sound.
- The coming of information technology in whatever its flowering will be.
- The death of global distance.
- Plus whatever disasters lurk at the bottom of not the Pandoran but the Promethean Box of 1700-2300.
But I am an optimist...
: The Present in Deep History: "Assume you are a historian in the 30th century...
...compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD... a 600 year span—around the duration of the entire mediaeval period. Events a mere 20 years apart, such as the first and second world wars, merge.... Individual people... are a jumbled mass of names with dates attached. [What are] the big issues... big enough to remember half a millennium hence, like the Black Death, the Crusades, or the conquest of the Americas[?]... Anthropogenic climate change is obviously one of the big ones, and I have a number of others in mind; I want to see if I've missed anything obvious.... My list of candidates are:
- The great fossil fuel binge
- The population/GDP/innovation bubble (fueled by #1)
- The parasite crash and social rebalancing, including the end of patriarchy (made possible by medical advances facilitated by #2)
- The end of [vertebrate] meat eating (side-effect of #1 and #2)
- The collapse of cognitive distance and the perfection of memory (side-effect of #2)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/09/the-present-in-deep-history.html
