Who will be remembered in 500 years?

[polishgenius]

43 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I am afraid you are woefully uninformed.

[Week]

10 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Please let us know what reddit threads, chain emails, and/or YouTube videos that you find. I pray that we can all be so uninformed.

[sologdin]

going with Bjork

addicted to triphop for memory's sake.  some of us needed more than your childish pop music to remember. some of us needed a more exquisite brutality than any of your feuds could render. the great curse of our kind—do you know it? of course you know it! what slave fails to exult in his master’s degradation?

[Larry of the Lawn]

9 minutes ago, sologdin said:

going with Bjork

addicted to triphop for memory's sake.  some of us needed more than your childish pop music to remember. some of us needed a more exquisite brutality than any of your feuds could render. the great curse of our kind—do you know it? of course you know it! what slave fails to exult in his master’s degradation?

And rather than fight against the future, we knelt and bared our throats to their steel

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

The purpose of a Space Elevator is to provide vastly more affordable access to earth orbit. Estimates for the cost to orbit using a Space Elevator are approximately $200/kg, compared to the current minimum of around $2000/kg (achieved by SpaceX). Starship will exceed that target, aiming as low as $50/kg. So you are right, it is not a Space Elevator. It is better than a Space Elevator, and makes an actual Space Elevator obsolete.

The point is the transformative impact this will have on humanity’s ability to branch out into space. 

It's not just about cost per kg though, it's about the ability to take absurd amounts of kg into orbit. Starship might (HAH) be ready in 5 years, but even if it is it's still only going to be able to take like 2000kg into orbit per trip, and it's only going to be able to take a few trips a year at best. Scaling that up will take a lot of time too, and is still not as reliable as an actual space elevator. 

So why is this called 'who will be remembered in 500 years' and not 'why Elon Musk is the bestest person ever'? 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Wha does "god" has to do with anything?. 

A tribute to my favorite character from literature.
 

 

[Kalbear]

On 5/24/2020 at 9:11 PM, Free Northman Reborn said:

Ok, whatever. Call it continent X then. Seeing as there is no real world equivalent as all continents were obviously inhabited 500 years ago. 

I think it's amusing that you can't count the continents. Who was the first person to settle Antarctica? That wasn't a particularly notable figure. 

[maarsen]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think it's amusing that you can't count the continents. Who was the first person to settle Antarctica? That wasn't a particularly notable figure. 

Closest person to settle or at least overwinter would be Shackleton. He was a somewhat notable figure.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, maarsen said:

Closest person to settle or at least overwinter would be Shackleton. He was a somewhat notable figure.

Somewhat, but not particularly. Nothing like, say, Columbus or Napoleon or anything like that. Not even close to, say, Armstrong. 

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

still not as reliable as an actual space elevator. 

To be totally fair here, space elevators remain completely science fictional while super heavy rockets have already existed and Starship largely uses already-proven technologies, just at a somewhat greater scale than previous efforts. The $50 per kilo thing is far-future looking, as many of Musk's projections tend to be, and I'd put no stock in it, but the basic idea that fully-reusable super heavy rockets will achieve noteworthy things while space elevators remain nonexistent seems perfectly reasonable.

 

 

[maarsen]

10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Somewhat, but not particularly. Nothing like, say, Columbus or Napoleon or anything like that. Not even close to, say, Armstrong. 

I am surprised that Shackleton is remembered al all these days.  I still think just about anyone who was famous since the turn of the  19th century will be forgotten in 500 years except as a trivia question. Ford and Disney have been put out as being memorable but the problem is that copyrights expire and industries die. Name a corporation that has lasted for over 300 years. I can only think of one. The Hudson's Bay Company and i think they are on the verge of bankruptcy. Elon Musk? He may be remembered but also cursed for his Starlink satellites that are ruining  visual astronomy.

The only way to be remembered is to have your name put on something that will last 500 years, create a theorem in mathematics named after you, discover something really notable in science, or do something so stupid or despicable, or both, and you forever become the bad example everyone points to as a cautionary tale.

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, Ran said:

To be totally fair here, space elevators remain completely science fictional while super heavy rockets have already existed and Starship largely uses already-proven technologies, just at a somewhat greater scale than previous efforts. The $50 per kilo thing is far-future looking, as many of Musk's projections tend to be, and I'd put no stock in it, but the basic idea that fully-reusable super heavy rockets will achieve noteworthy things while space elevators remain nonexistent seems perfectly reasonable.

Sure! But the idea that it replaces the kind of mega-engineering that a space elevator actually enables is really not accurate, not at all. It's not a space elevator - it's FedEx. And if you want to scale that up, that's great - but that requires significantly different kinds of things than what a space elevator provides. (another example: space elevators aren't weather-dependent for launch windows). 

It's similar to a lot of Musk's ideas, where he takes something like underground transportation, fucks with it to make it entirely unrecognizable and largely useless, and then says how he was able to make light subway rail SUPER CHEAP. Well, no, you created a one-person tunnel with absurdly bad safety that only enables your cars to drive through it slowly. Similarly, you have theorized (not created, mind you) a high-cargo capacity shuttlecraft and compared it to a mega-engineering project.

[lacuna]

If "included in history lessons" counts as being remembered, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay will probably be remembered. By the same token, Roald Amundsen might be remembered as the first to reach the South Pole, but is he "current era"? Are Hillary and Norgay, for that matter?

[Ran]

28 minutes ago, maarsen said:

 

The only way to be remembered is to have your name put on something that will last 500 years

It's interesting to think of how things shift. Writers and philosophers and poets and artists of more than 2000 years ago seem to be pretty much locks to be remembered another 500 years from now (if the human species is in position for such things, etc.; let us be optimistic for the sake of discussion), but damned few of the ones from the 20th and 21st century are necessarily going to be remembered in the same way. I suppose partially this may be that there's all sorts of ancient artists and philosophers who are lost to us and history, so we don't care about 'em, but it's hard to imagine any currently living philosopher in the 21st century being considered part of the foundational history of modern thought as it is taught in the year 2520. Chomsky, maybe? And he's not likely to be in a junior high textbook the same way Socrates is likely to be...

 

26 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Sure! But the idea that it replaces the kind of mega-engineering that a space elevator actually enables is really not accurate, not at all.

I mean, space elevators can only move so many payloads at a time, and it will take days for them to crawl up into orbit. Puts a limit on things there as well, whereas presumably if there was a lot of demand you'd just build more Starships or similar craft, which spreads out the risk of catastrophic failure if you've got one space elevator vs. 10 Starships .

That said, the more telling part on the pricing suggested for Starship vs. a space elevator is that to get the pricing suggested, all these things have to fall right for Starship (re: Musk's optimistic projections) ... but the same is not being afforded to the space elevator, despite some saying the per kilo cost would ultimately become about €50 per kilo as well if power beaming technology becomes much more efficient. Optimistic projections are fine, but then counter projections on other projects should be afforded the same generous assumptions.

 

 

[Erik of Hazelfield]

When it comes to science, the more advanced it gets, the less you'll be remembered for it. For example, Pythagoras is way more famous than any current mathematician, Newton is more famous than the physicists of today, and so on.

Part of the reason is that when you study a subject, you often get taught who first came up with the idea. The more basic the idea, the more likely you are to have studied it at some point. Pythagoras and Newton did work that you teach nearly all children, hence the fame. Einstein is the exception. I guess he just became synonymous with the cliche of an intelligent but goofy professor.

 

[Maithanet]

2 minutes ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

When it comes to science, the more advanced it gets, the less you'll be remembered for it. For example, Pythagoras is way more famous than any current mathematician, Newton is more famous than the physicists of today, and so on.

Part of the reason is that when you study a subject, you often get taught who first came up with the idea. The more basic the idea, the more likely you are to have studied it at some point. Pythagoras and Newton did work that you teach nearly all children, hence the fame. Einstein is the exception. I guess he just became synonymous with the cliche of an intelligent but goofy professor.

Sort of.  Einstein work on relativity was hugely important in how a ton of things today work, and a lot of that work was done alone.  E=mc2 is simple enough to remember, even if it isn't an easy formula to use in everyday life.  I don't think it's the "goofy professor" thing at all wrt Einstein's fame. 

I think that a big part of the reason current scientists aren't more famous is that they work in huge teams so the credit is diffused over dozens, hundreds or thousands of people.  If just one person had invented the internet, we would know that person's name.  But it was a bunch of people, so we don't. 

[Fez]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

I am surprised that Shackleton is remembered al all these days.  I still think just about anyone who was famous since the turn of the  19th century will be forgotten in 500 years except as a trivia question. Ford and Disney have been put out as being memorable but the problem is that copyrights expire and industries die. Name a corporation that has lasted for over 300 years. I can only think of one.

There's more than you'd think, although admittedly most are pretty niche; various hotels, pubs, restaurants, and breweries for the most part. 

But I know there's the Merck Group, which is a pretty massive pharmaceutical company founded in 1668, and Lloyd's of London, an insurance company founded in 1686. I doubt most people know the names Friedrich Jacob Merck or Edward Lloyd. But the difference is that their companies were still quite small when they died, they just so happened to keep existing and eventually become huge for reasons that had nothing to do with their founders. Whereas Ford and Disney created companies that became massive during their lifetimes.

[DMC]

58 minutes ago, Ran said:

it's hard to imagine any currently living philosopher in the 21st century being considered part of the foundational history of modern thought as it is taught in the year 2520. Chomsky, maybe? And he's not likely to be in a junior high textbook the same way Socrates is likely to be...

If we're talking political philosophy, I think the 20th century has some good candidates - if not currently living.  Maybe not in a junior high textbook, but in an intro undergrad course - or whatever the equivalent would be.  I'd put Rawls at the top, followed by Foucault.  Duverger has a "law" named after him, so he's got that going for them, and the basics of Downsian theory are unlikely to go away even in 500 years (same goes for Keynes with economics).  Plus, Downs is actually still alive.  If we're talking just pure philosophy, Popper would be up there too.

[polishgenius]

 

Just now, DMC said:

If we're talking political philosophy, I think the 20th century has some good candidates - if not currently living.  Maybe not in a junior high textbook, but in an intro undergrad course - or whatever the equivalent would be.  I'd put Rawls at the top, followed by Foucault.  Duverger has a "law" named after him, so he's got that going for them, and the basics of Downsian theory are unlikely to go away even in 500 years (same goes for Keynes with economics).  Plus, Downs is actually still alive.  If we're talking just pure philosophy, Popper would be up there too.

 

Yeah, but that does depend what you mean by 'remembered'. Because of our current technologies, we're gonna have huge masses of figures that are better remembered than equivalent figures of the past, and specialists in their fields will know of significant forerunners in a way that was not necessarily possible before. But I feel like the original question is what names will be in the common parlance (the examples FNR gave were Genghis Khan and Napoleon), who permeate pop culture or who you learn about at school.

Plato and Aristotle are in that bracket. I doubt Duverger and Popper will be (Keynes might I suppose since his name comes up a lot just casually in a way the others don't I don't think, but even still it'd need a rise in awareness of him).

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Yeah, but that does depend what you mean by 'remembered'. Because of our current technologies, we're gonna have huge masses of figures that are better remembered than equivalent figures of the past, and specialists in their fields will know of significant forerunners in a way that was not necessarily possible before. But I feel like the original question is what names will be in the common parlance (the examples FNR gave were Genghis Khan and Napoleon), who permeate pop culture or who you learn about at school.

Sure, it'd be specialists.  But there's a big difference to me even within "specialists" since sociology as a discipline is really only 200 years old - and political science considerably even younger in how we approach it today.  Any equivalent to an intro to sociology course will still likely include Comte, Durkheim, Marx and Weber.  By the same token, I mentioned Rawls as the top candidate for political philosophy because his work actually does build on social contract/state of nature theorists that already dates back almost 400 years to Hobbes. 

I am always surprised how many students/people are familiar with Foucault, and Discipline and Punish is a unique contribution I could still see being assigned (or portions of it) in undergrad courses in 500 years.  Grad students across a number of disciplines would likely still be forced to read Popper. 

But yeah, I agree none of them will be as widely known as the ancient greek trio.  I think a few do, however, have a good chance to be named in the same breath with more recent but still fairly old thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau.