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Who will be remembered in 1,000 years?
- ukulele 9y agoI'd argue that the best chance for anyone reading this to be remembered in 1000 years is to be the first person to do X on Mars, where X is probably "set foot". That'd get you in the history books for anything related to space travel for generations to come.
- baddox 9y agoMaybe not, if humans have set foot on a bunch of other celestial bodies in 1000 years. In that case, perhaps only Armstrong would be in history books as the first human to set foot on a body other than Earth.
- EGreg 9y agoMars is the first planet we would set foot on outside Earth. The moon is nice but we are far more likely to actually colonize Mars first. In short - it will mark the ACTUAL expansion having started. Who woudn't remember that?
- nostrademons 9y agoNo guarantee that the definition of "planet" stays the same for 1000 years. Hell, it's already changed once in my lifetime. If we end up colonizing other worlds, it's likely that future space colonists will regard a "planet" as any habitable world, whether it's actually a planet, planetesimal, moon, or asteroid. Armstrong's accomplishment would stand in the record books in that case.
- chillacy 9y agoI dunno, do you remember the first person from Polynesia to set foot in Hawaii? 1000 years is a long time, and the galaxy is a big place. All bets are off.
- chubot 9y agoThere's a funny bit in the Norm MacDonald special on Netflix about that exact thing... He challenges the audience to name the 3rd guy who went to the moon.
- uoaei 9y agoI have a long-term plan to start a pizza chain on Mars that delivers with rockets and capsules.
- TheGrassyKnoll 9y agohttp://www.marscoin.org/ http://www.marscoin.org/
- abritinthebay 9y agoDepends what you mean by remembered. History will record rulers but is that really remembered? Feels like it’s more a footnote. I’d argue that remembered means something... more.
- valuearb 9y agoArnold will.
- vadimberman 9y agoThe pattern is: * politicians * travelers * scientists In many cases, their names are attached to something that sticks around: locations, laws (of nature or in legal sense), inventions. Musicians, actors, sports people need not apply. What writers wanted to say will not make sense in a thousand years, with some minor exceptions. Painters may be remembered by experts and some art lovers, which is not a lot. Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance.
- ars 9y ago> Religious figures, hopefully, will lose their relevance. People have been saying that for thousands of years. Hasn't happened yet, and isn't going to later. That's essentially what the story of Hanukkah is all about. The Assyrian Greeks wanted the Jewish culture, but not the religion. Instead they got a religion that persisted despite pretty much the worst humanity has to offer - and has flourished despite it all. If they couldn't do it, no one in the future can either (and science was just as important to them as it is to us, so don't try to use that as a "this time it's different"). It's also really not a nice sentiment. Virtually every single thing you consider a positive can be traced to ideas that came from religion. (Charity, helping your neighbor, community, law, proportional punishment (i.e. [the value of an] eye for an eye, instead of life for an eye), praising being a good person instead of a powerful person, the desire to give life meaning instead of hedonism - the list is almost endless.)
- soperj 9y ago>traced to ideas that came from religion None of those ideas necessarily came from religion.
- sp527 9y agoIt's shockingly ignorant and quite offensive to assert that fundamental tenets of morality and ethics originated in or necessarily had to be promulgated by religious doctrine.
- lamarpye 9y ago
- adrianN 9y agoHopefully in 1000 years we will have augmented ourselves sufficiently that "forgetting" is not something that happens anymore.
- abootstrapper 9y agoForgetting can be a wonderful blessing.
- scirocco 9y agoTime heels all wounds..
- mkez00 9y agoYes. The reason why the decade one grew up in usually gets labeled "the good ol days" by said individual.
- coldtea 9y agoAnother reason is many things always going downhill, and people remembering them, while younger people grew up already familiar with the decline. That's not very different a story than the continuous progress myth, just has an opposite sign. Fact is, some eras progress for the better, and others regress (Weimar Republic, the fall of Rome, and countless other examples). And that's overall. In specific things, it can vary as well in opposite direction to the overall trend. And long periods are relatively stagnant, such that people for centuries on end, or even millennia, live more or less the same (e.g. most rural areas in Europe between 400 A.D and 1900 A.D.), and few speak about the "good old days" there.
- mc32 9y agoFor most people "forgetting" is a valuable phenomenon. There are lots of minor injuries and torts which are better off forgotten than recalled. Doesn't even have to be things other people did to you, but things you did yourself while learning.
- stordoff 9y ago
- Semiapies 9y agoJudging by the "great men" of the past we remember? Mass-murder a lot of people.
- aisofteng 9y agoA moments reflection shows this to be hyperbolic and cynical.
- knocte 9y agoSatoshi
- collyw 9y agoYou reckon the human race will make it that far?
- firefoxd 9y agoWhy not?
- collyw 9y agoThe way we are wrecking the environment. Possibility of nuclear war.
- sewer_bird 9y agoA total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind. That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.
- platz 9y agogamma ray burst vacuum decay
- Dylan16807 9y agothose are both ridiculously more unlikely than any kind of self-caused extinction a gamma ray burst probably won't happen even once in our entire galaxy
- platz 9y agoThat's fake news. We are due for a gamma ray burst. https://youtu.be/8HvwNOSnveE https://youtu.be/8HvwNOSnveE
- forkLding 9y agoYeah, that does make sense, I think even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be remembered in the same manner as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie where the name is familiar but doesn't ring a bell whereas a contemporary of that time, a modern-day Mark Twain will still be remembered.
- electic 9y agoIt's a bit simpler than this article outlines. How much you are remembered is based on what your accomplishments/stores/press/etc are recorded in. For example, if you were a world renowned inventor and everyone wrote and communicated about you via clay pots then your memory is only carried on as a function of how many clay pot readers there are. Since all clay pot readers are dead and the medium itself is dead, your memory is dead. This is assuming no one transcribed the text from clay pots to whatever new communication medium came next.
- alexasmyths 9y agoRamses was probably only recorded on stone tablets for quite some time, they stopped that a while back and he is still remembered :)
- electic 9y agoHe is remembered because people took the tablets and transcribed it from medium to medium. Wrote books about it. Made movies about it. And created internet articles about it. If no one moved it from tablets to these new mediums, he would not have been remembered. Tutankhamun is a great example of this. His name was forgotten. His existence forgotten until they discovered his tomb, read the tablets, and then transcribed knowledge of his life to the modern medium. His memory now exists because we transcribe and communicate this information today.
- mc32 9y agoI think they mean remembered in the public consciousness rather than remembered at all --as in having a record of the person [as in the Sayers example]. Now, it's true that we might have some more people in our consciousness if some of those people had been recorded in more durable media --or that they had a written medium at all.
- platz 9y agoWe'll all be blown to smithereens by then, my friend
- interfixus 9y agoSurprised nobody has mentioned Elon Musk yet. The best, and possibly only, contemporary bet for lasting fame.
- cooper12 9y agoAfter Musk launches his Tesla into Mars orbit Man I can see Musk one of the first people on Mars, stays there for like a year, no one knows what the fuck he's been really doing there, people start speculating what he can possibly be doing. He stays quiet, we look through the Hubble Telescope and see him driving around jumping ramps and shit in his Tesla. After a year, he comes back. Everyone goes crazy, the man who went to Mars is back on Earth. Throws huge parties. He says he will take a few people back to Mars. Takes 100 girls, goes to Mars. He instantly starts colonizing Mars(he wastes no time) making a civilization, after 50 or so years of doing this, the population is up to 100,000… he dies from old age, on his deathbed his last words are, "don't stop, we came this far, I believe in all of you" His face after his death goes everywhere, on statues, people crying, the God of Mars is dead. Tesla renamed to Musk, he becomes like what Kim Jon wants to become like in North Korea there. Everyone talks about him as a God, a legend, everyone working to make his dream of Mars becoming like Earth and fully self sustaining. Science is in full force researching shit and what not. 100 years go by and Mars is advanced asfuck, everything digital, crazy tech everywhere. Earth and Mars have a trading Post and shit, sending shit back and forth, it's like two countries now, you either live on Mars or Earth, but things start getting sour, there's shit like racism and stuff that start to develop with the two planets. People calling Mars people MuskCunts, saying Earth is better and shit, fuck the "redpeople" starts a war between planets. Start nuking shit and what not (literal world war) everything is going to shit, like history repeating itself from Earth. This goes on for many years. The 1000th year anniversary of Tesla rolls by, a press conference is scheduled by Musk Inc...there hasn't been one since Musk was alive...... Everyone is waiting and nervous in anticipation of what the fuck it could be... The day comes by... The two world's watching the conference live, 100 million viewers. A computer turns on the live stream... Musk face appears... "War.... War never changes....... Untill now.... I have risen from the dead, and back to restore world's order. (THIS MOFO PLANTED HIS BRAIN INTO ONE OF HIS DEEP LEARNING ROBOTS, WOW THE FIRST TIME EVER DONE, BEFORE HE DIED, HOLY FUCK EVERYONE IS THINKING OMG WHAT A FUCKING LEGEND, WOW. "All your dead relatives and friends and everyone you knew has had their brains transported as well, and there is a new planet that will launch in an hour where everyone will be back alive and living on this planet, their brains and body's have been fermenting and being developed but they will be ready in an hour and you can go visit them and shit. Everyone goes FUCKING CRAZY! wttfff everyone is now praising musk, both planets cheer and go apeshit celebrating together, people laugh, people cry, world Peace becomes a thing, the new planet has enough room on it to transfer everyone on both planets there and everyone can live there at peace together. World hunger is eliminated, the new planet also had lab grown meat that was being grown for the last 100 years, being stored for this moment, all free. Everyone teleports there in an hour (he also invented the teleportation device, never before seen too) automatically and it becomes the happiest time in human history.
- EGreg 9y agoChuck Norris
- hyperpallium 9y agoIt seems a safe bet that the people who have already been remembered for thousands of years will continue to be remembered for a thousand more: Jesus, Euclid, Aristotle, Socrates, etc. But as for contemporaries, there's two big differences: a great many more people, and increasing pace of achievements and change - and both will hopefully continue. So, it's possible no one alive today will be remembered in 1000 years. Maybe things done in 100 years will push them all out of the public consciousness. On the other hand, it's much easier to discover fundamental truths, of enduring consequence, in the early phases. Finally, it matter how consequential the achievememt is. It's hard to know what will be used in 1000 years, and what turned out to be consequential. Perhaps we don't see its significance today. Notable achievements might be: understanding/creating life (from scratch, not just pokimg memory locations); understanding/creating intelligence; understanding/curing physical disease; understanding/curing mental disease; inventing FTL travel; establishing a growing non-earth colony (note: who established the vikings colony on Greenland that was abandoned after 100 years?); first contact (that leads to growing trade); modifying human nature; founder of a new and better approach to community (or exposition of it); whoever blows up the world. There's a limit to how many people can be remembered in the public consciousness. Newtom amd Einstein will be remembered by math/science historians... but will anyone else, if there are many of the above acheivements? (or ones I haven't and can't imagine...)
- mythrwy 9y agoAgreed. Another limitation to contemporary people being remembered far into the future is it's currently hard to believably claim coming back from the dead or turning water into wine. And it's easy to find out if a person plagiarized an essay or harassed a co-worker. Thus the era of legendary heros may be largely over.
- hyperpallium 9y agoThat's interesting, and "no man is a prophet in their home town". With social media, perhaps everyone knows you as a child/teenager. OTOH there are PR firms who manage one's online presence. Yet, someone like Elon Musk, though highly capable, also gets credit for the all the work of his teams - at least in the public eye. And if "he" saves the world from climate change, AND "he" colonizes Mars, perhaps that's a greater miracle than magic catering. i.e. He could be a legendary hero. Also, I'm not sure how important Jesus's miracles were for the success of christianity. Of course, the PR helped, but I think it's more that his teachings worked better for city-living than the alternatives. Today, most secular societies have incorporated his ideas. (They are "Christian" is the sense that their economic policy might be "Keynesian"). Though he wasn't the only one with such ideas (e.g. Buddha), I think that's the main reason for his profound influence, and this influence is the main reason he is remembered. I mean, many prophets performed "miracles" but not all are remembered.
- amriksohata 9y agoThe sheer ignorance of the title is astounding as if to suggest we will know, entire cultures have been wiped out in the last 1000 years so who knows what would happen in the next 1000, couple nuclear wars would wipe out remembering many names mentioned above.
- rurban 9y agoEinstein (relativity, nuclear), Heisenberg (uncertainty principle), Obama (for his color). I would place Bezos before Musk, because Musk risks too much and is not really that successful. But even Bezos will be forgotten. Who remembers the founder of the richest and then most important company of the world for centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC)? Johan van Oldenbarnevelt? The worlds first bond and stocks sensation. Any rubber baron? None. Only those who wrote about them became famous. Literature.
- PacketPaul 9y agoNo way Obama is remembered. He is too insignificant. He did noting that will impact life in 1000 years. You are viewing the future with 21st century rose colored glasses.
- actuallyalys 9y agoI don't think he'll be a household name, but he seems likely to be remembered among students and scholars of American history.
- mythrwy 9y agoAlong with George Bush. Kind of like Emperor Cladius. And they'll likely bore the shit out of poor first year students lecturing on "By the way, Obama's father was from Kenya!" and only some of them will remember it for the test.
- rurban 9y agoI said why.
- howdy999 9y agoKardashians
- PacketPaul 9y agoThink of who is remembered from the years around 1000 AD. Basically war generals and scientist. So my top contenders are Einstein and Hitler.
- goatlover 9y agoFamous philosophers, writers, painters, inventors, explorers, religious visionaries and rulers are also remembered over millennia, as long as something about them is transmitted faithfully to succeeding generations.
- nitwit005 9y agoI suspect Einstein might be "remembered" due to use of his name as a word: "He's no Einstein". Already plenty of people saying his name who don't know anything about the man, or his ideas.
- sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg 9y agoWhen people no longer remembers who Einstein was, such saying would lose popularity and eventually die out of the language. https://www.virtuescience.com/etymology-how-words-change-over-time.html https://www.virtuescience.com/etymology-how-words-change-ove...
- nitwit005 9y agoThat happens sometimes, and other times it doesn't. Not many people know the word gadget is from the builder of the statue of liberty, but the word hasn't dropped out of usage. There are plenty of lingering names from people and ethnic groups that have been forgotten by most.
- Iwan-Zotow 9y agoPutin
- ataturk 9y agoWith any luck, not a single founder of any company like Facebook or Twitter, or any of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley today.
- thirstysusrando 9y agoMathematicians are immortal.
- TheGrassyKnoll 9y agoYes, if there's any kind of educated people left, guys like Pythagoras, Euler should be known.
- sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg 9y agoWell, Pythagoras should maybe not be remembered, since he didn't actually discover the theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
- louithethrid 9y agoWhy would somebody remember Nelson Mandela? South africa is a legacy of ashes. Martin Luther King, yes. Gandi, yes. But the ANC saw to this ones monument deteriorating.
- saasdev 9y agoI think the only ones you can safely say are Biblical figures who have already stood the test of time for thousands of years.
- sunstone 9y agoTrump will be remembered as prominent political figure? Surely not. Not him and not Bush. He'll sink beneath the waves of history in less than 3 decades unless he gets impeached and has to resign.
- jeff_petersen 9y agoBush and Trump both will be remembered for a long time. We’ve only had 45 presidents, the English learn about god knows how many insignificant kings in school, so the notion that two of your least favorite presidents will be forgotten in short order seems to be wishful thinking.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago> Trump will be remembered as prominent political figure? Surely not. Nixon is remembered, so far. It's not always a good thing.
- nitwit005 9y agoProbably only Washington, and possibly Lincoln will be remembered by anyone but historians. There are far too many world leaders in 1000 years for anyone to care, unless it's some pivotal point in history.
- scotty79 9y agoI'd say Freud. Because he's still remembered and cited despite immense stupidity of his ideas about how human mind works. I believe stupidity can last thousand years.
- leashless 9y agoStallman.
- kwoff 9y agoProbably valueable to consider who will be remembering at that time, since that impacts who is remembered.
- foobaw 9y ago"Simple" solutions: build a time machine or cure every cancer. Name these devices after your name. With all the money you'll gain, name a bunch of cities and islands after your name.