Should-Read: Charlie Stross (2015): The Present in Deep History: "Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?... http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/09/the-present-in-deep-history.html
...Please note that this is 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 together when viewed through the wrong end of a temporal telescope, just like the 30 years' war or the Wars of the Roses. Individual people, even hugely influential thinkers and rulers and tyrants, are a jumbled mass of names with dates attached. This is a question about the big issues—the ones big enough to remember half a millennium hence, like the Black Death, the Crusades, or the conquest of the Americas.
I'm not asking for specific historical events but for major trends. 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. (For the sake of argument we assume: no singularity/rapture of the nerds, no breakthroughs that lead to wholesale invalidation of the known laws of physics, and no catastrophic events that render humanity extinct, destroy all archival records, or consign us all to a pre-industrial level of civilization.)... I'm looking for stuff... like the emancipation of women, which looks to me like it may be as much an irreversible phase change in human society as the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies during the neolithic. Huge changes that take place over a period of centuries, in other words. Things so big we see a snapshot of them -- they're bigger than our lifespans.
Note: my list of candidates are:
- The great fossil fuel binge
- The population/GDP/innovation bubble (fuelled 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)....
- The Enlightenment.... It begins as a Protestant near-heresy, then broadens into a rationalist pseudo-religion that coexists with an atheism that would have gotten its adherents hanged in earlier centuries... an enabling precursor to both Marxism and capitalism, not to mention the scientific worldview and post-monarchism....
- (Mike Scott): The domestication of homo sapiens. In 1700, violence and violent death are commonplace; in 2300 (if current trends continue) they are practically unknown.
- (Mike Scott): The demographic/economic/scientific/cultural/technological transition from one steady state (patriarchal agricultural late feudal society with high fertility and high mortality) to another (currently unknown, but certainly with low fertility and low mortality).
- (Mike Scott): The environmental crises caused and also eventually resolved by the transition in point 8....
I'm more worried about what I used as a throw-away in "Glasshouse" as "cognitive dictatorships" -- systems which impose dictated limits on the thinkable thoughts by control of information streams or actual direct brain interfaces. People inside a cognitive dictatorship wouldn't see it as bad; quite possibly they wouldn't even notice the limits on their freedom of cognition, it's just that some ideas would be repugnant or difficult to express semantically in a manner that could be transmitted to other people. Doesn't sound too bad? Consider if the suppressed ideas included abstractions like freedom, emotions reinforcing undesirable primate behavior patterns like love, or the idea that one shouldn't have to work at whatever one's employer deems appropriate in order to live....
Birth control. Don't think that's a big deal? You might get a different ancestor from your great-great-great grandmother, who had 14 children and NO modern appliances..... Seriously, this hit Iran in the 1980s to 2000s. TFR dropped from over 6 to around 1.5 in 2 decades flat....
Every nation has prisons. They seem rather popular with the general populations, as long as the right people are locked up.... But if you go back 500 years pretty much every nation also held public executions and tortured prisoners; these days that's a minority pursuit. I suspect (per the Stephen Pinker hypothesis) that in the long term carceral punishment will be superseded by geofencing and tagging, and a switch from retributive to rehabilitative treatment of criminals. Assuming current long term trends continue, of course....
The current mass media are not deterministic. They can throw thoughts at your head, but they can't make you accept them against your better judgement....
From the Year 3000, they'll likely lump migrations in the 21st century as part of a broader trend of mass migration that began even earlier than 1700. In fact, I suspect they'll talk about the backlash in the early 20th century as a mere interregnum in a broader period of mass migration around the world. The collapse of empires is usually linked with either mass migrations or die-offs on a huge scale. The mass migrations are usually a side-effect of the wars of imperial succession.
In the case of the 20th century we've had -- and are still living through -- the aftershocks of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (what did you think the Arab Spring and the situation in Syria and Iraq right now is about?), a post-imperial period-of-warring-powers within the territories of the former Russian Empire (hint: Poland, Finland ...), and the collapse of British imperial power in the Indian subcontinent (and in case you thought that latter was a benign event it's given us Partition, four Indo-Pakistani wars, a nuclear arms race, a civil war in Pakistan that gave birth to Bangladesh, and several coups and assassinations).
China has also had a period-of-warring-powers, from the Double-Ten Revolution through to the Cultural Revolution, but seems to be settling down again -- modulo troublesome Uighurs in the west, Taiwain/Formosa, and so on. Internal migrations? You betcha. But these are nothing new. Compared to the movements of the barbarian tribes during the downfall of the western Roman empire, or the Arab tribes in the middle east during the ascendancy of the Rashidun Caliphate, or the Mongol conquest, what happened circa 1900-2000 was nothing.
I'm also betting on much bigger migrations happening in the mid-to-late 21st century as chunks of the planet become non-viable, while northerly (European and Canadian and Russian) territory suffers from an ageing population and shrinking workforce just as the climate becomes more accommodating. But we also need to bear in mind that the proportion of per-capita productivity that transport costs in the 21st century is minute compared to the cost of travel back in earlier centuries. ...
Paul, I did this because I decided to use the interwebs to brainstorm the feasibility of doing a 1000-year-future mundane SF novel. Call it the logical inverse of a historical novel; one where the setting is ahistorical but follows logically from the shape of our own history, and there's room for a lot of baroque recomplication and variation in the final outcome but it's still recognizably built on the mossy bones of our own time. Because I got bored again. (Too much near future/fantasy/space opera in my workload, I think.)...
In our terms this is akin to snorting a kilo of coke up your nose and running around like maniacs. ... And evolution cannot function on such time scales, and that's ignoring the basics of geological time. You fuck the environment, you end up with desert.... Cue the sixth great extinction, mass migrations of humans trying to avoid ecosystem collapse, genocide of humans ditto, and so on.... There's stuff we can do about the environmental catastrophe eventually. But we're going to have to come down from the cocaine binge first, and the hang-over is going to be epic....
What I would bet against (and I'm not a betting man) is that the currently popular concept of the Singularity, which has borrowed heavily from the design patterns of Christian apocalyptic mythology, doesn't happen, for the same reason that we're not living in Left Behind land and worrying about Jeezus throwing us all in the boiling lake of lava: it's a sin/redemption evangelical hard-sell narrative, not a plausible extrapolation. (If you want to see what I think about AI these days, go read "Rule 34" and pay attention to The Gnome's lecture about the singularity, late in the book. TLDR: what people mean when they say AI isn't what we're going to get. Although if you fold, spindle, and mutilate it to mean "Augmented Intelligence" we're already seeing the results all around us.)...
If I was going to write a book set in 3000AD on Earth ... I'd probably open with our protagonist sitting in their small urban garden -- the climate is probably mediterranean: it'll be a chapter or two before I enclue the reader that they're in Norway -- with a ~book (something that occupies the same niche), looking up and noticing their pet housecat is stalking a tyrannosaur. The tyrannosaur has purple feathers and is about the same size as the cat, but much more stupid, and has escaped from the neighbour's kid's dinosaur run in the yard next door. Protag to cat: "stop that at once, you know you can't eat it, and [neighbour] will be mad at you." Cat to protag: "aw, mum...." (How much implied background is there in this outline paragraph?)...
