We can't learn from our own mistakes now. What makes you think, 2,000 years from now, our ancestors will look back and a) remember what happened accurately, an

We can't learn from our own mistakes now. What makes you think, 2,000 years from now, our ancestors will look back and a) remember what happened accurately, and b) learn from it? I can imagine someone in the future saying "No man, that wasn't humanity's fault... the earth just goes through natural cycles. Or maybe it was just the sun." In short: I think you're denying our contemporary and historical reality if you think that, in the future, we'll do any differently. Edit: As an aside, I want you to reflect, for a moment, on our ability to understand human society even just 500 years back. Even at a time with decent written records, there's still entire disciplines focused on trying to understand how those people worked and lived, and enormous amounts of disagreement on the same. Now imagine we fast forward, say, 2,000 years after we've destroyed modern society and started to rebuild in earnest. An enormous amount of information about who we are is now locked up in optical, magnetic, and solid state storage, and the technology to read that information will be destroyed right along with the rest of us. Much of the rest is stored on paper that doesn't have the long-term archival properties of something like vellum. Why do you think our ancestors will understand us any better than we understand people in the middle ages?