Who will be remembered in 500 years?

[felice]

8 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I guess the title of the thread speaks for itself. Who from our current era will be most famous among humans 500 or even 1000 years from now? 

As a corollary, what currently famous people from previous eras are going to be forgotten to make room for the newbies in popular history? The list of long-term famous people isn't going to just keep growing indefinitely, barring significant enhancements to the human brain.

6 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Perhaps an analogy is a situation where one day a man comes along and builds the first ships that can take humans to America, puts people on those ships, lands the first humans ever in America, and then starts sending thousands of ships to build the first colony in America as well.

...do you have any idea how appalling an analogy that is?

[The Marquis de Leech]

55 minutes ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

The difference is that there are no extensive written and visual records of Gengis Khan's atrocities, plus GK wasn't putting people in extermination camps or experimenting on them.

Plus, if even writers like Plato or Aristoteles are remembered, I can't imagine Shakespeare being forgotten. Plus, there will be at that point thousands of movies and TV adaptations.

We've got a pretty good idea of Genghis' role as Genocidal Monster - as a proportion of the human population of the time, the Mongols make the horrors of the twentieth century look tame. It's just we're so far removed... very few people get angsty about him, and plenty of people actually apologise for him. Five hundred years from now, with undoubted more modern atrocities in people's minds, I can imagine Hitler not having the status he has today.

As for Plato... you are aware that apart from the first half of the Timaeus, there was no Plato in Western Europe for a millennia? And that this loss happened a good eight centuries after Plato himself? We're barely four centuries after Shakespeare - who knows if he'll go missing eventually too.

(Cicero wrote his own version of The Republic. Cicero is hardly obscure... but the only part of his Republic that survives today is a dream sequence at the end, which only survives because someone else in Ancient Rome wanted to write an essay on it).    

[Maltaran]

1 hour ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

 

Some icons from sport and entertainment would be up there- while of course, time will dilute that a lot, I can't imagine Pelé or, to a lesser extent, Michael Jordan being completely forgotten 

Don Bradman is likely a better option than Michael Jordan - I think cricket is more widely played than basketball, plus he retired in 1948 and everyone in the sport still knows who he is so he’s already proven to have some longevity.

[The Marquis de Leech]

People also need to realise that there might be no United States in 2520. Why on earth would people know the names of Presidents of a long-defunct country?

[Maltaran]

3 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

People also need to realise that there might be no United States in 2520. Why on earth would people know the names of Presidents of a long-defunct country?

We know the names of Roman Emperors.

If the US is defunct, it’ll likely just be the presidents like Washington and Lincoln who are known outside of the historians, like we all know Augustus and Nero but not Galba or Pertinax

[The Marquis de Leech]

32 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

We know the names of Roman Emperors.

If the US is defunct, it’ll likely just be the presidents like Washington and Lincoln who are known outside of the historians, like we all know Augustus and Nero but not Galba or Pertinax

Agreed, though even that assumes some level of enduring cultural interest/fetish (Western Culture being built on fetishising Rome). By 2520, there simply might not be much interest (outside history geeks, or people actually living in the relevant territories) to memorise the leadership of a republic that might have been gone for three and a half centuries.

(On the other hand, there's Oliver Cromwell, so who knows...).

[Ser Reptitious]

1 hour ago, felice said:

do you have any idea how appalling an analogy that is?

I’m surprised no one else has commented on that yet. So according to @Free Northman Reborn the first humans to land in America were white people in the 1490s? 

[Heartofice]

16 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

I’m surprised no one else has commented on that yet. So according to @Free Northman Reborn the first humans to land in America were white people in the 1490s? 

Don’t wanna have to speak for the guy but that isn’t the point he was making.

[williamjm]

2 hours ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

To answer the question, first we have to define what exactly are we talking about being remembered exactly. Due to extensive records, there won't be many names lost to time, like it happened in the past. But who will be remembered in people's daily lives it's something else, and of course, varies from place to place, your job, education level, etc.

Probably major scientists and explores, as well as some major political figures are the main candidates.

I think being the first person to discover or invent something of lasting importance has advantages because it'll be difficult for that status to be replaced (I was going to say impossible but I suppose the people we remember as the discoverer or inventor aren't necessarily the people that did that). They might well be remembered, although perhaps more as trivia in most cases rather than people knowing much about them.

Thinking about major discoveries/inventions in the 20th Century I would suggest Einstein, the Wright brothers, Gagarin, Armstrong, Alexander Fleming, Crick/Watson/Franklin. Computing and the Internet would also be significant but it's more difficult to tell who would be primarily credited with it in the future - possibly Alan Turing who also has the advantage of an interesting backstory.

[john]

If we assume some general progress will be maintained then remembering is going to be aided artificially, at the very least by access to data even more instantly than we have now. Of course we already live in a world of alternative facts and edited history so who knows if people will be remembered for what they actually did even if they come from an era of record collecting.

Still, pretty sure Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad are going to be up there.

[Fury Resurrected]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Don’t wanna have to speak for the guy but that isn’t the point he was making.

Still not amusing if you are descended from the people who actually were already here though. Since we have a hard enough time convincing white people we exist now, it’s annoying

[Free Northman Reborn]

1 hour ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Still not amusing if you are descended from the people who actually were already here though. Since we have a hard enough time convincing white people we exist now, it’s annoying

Yeah, I think it was fairly obvious from the analogy that it was a hypothetical, to try and create a broadly equivalent example to what colonizing Mars would represent.

Taking the familiar real world example of Columbus reaching America, but elevating it to an higher level on every front - including being the first humans to do so.
 

[Week]

The Musk fanfic is really pretty out there these days.

[Winterfell is Burning]

6 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

We've got a pretty good idea of Genghis' role as Genocidal Monster - as a proportion of the human population of the time, the Mongols make the horrors of the twentieth century look tame. It's just we're so far removed... very few people get angsty about him, and plenty of people actually apologise for him. Five hundred years from now, with undoubted more modern atrocities in people's minds, I can imagine Hitler not having the status he has today.

As for Plato... you are aware that apart from the first half of the Timaeus, there was no Plato in Western Europe for a millennia? And that this loss happened a good eight centuries after Plato himself? We're barely four centuries after Shakespeare - who knows if he'll go missing eventually too.

(Cicero wrote his own version of The Republic. Cicero is hardly obscure... but the only part of his Republic that survives today is a dream sequence at the end, which only survives because someone else in Ancient Rome wanted to write an essay on it).    

What I meant is that there are no recorded images and very few written accounts of the horrors Gengis Khan did. Plus, his atrocities, while horrible, weren't atypical for any conqueror at the time. Not only the Holocaust is perhaps the most documented tragedy of all time, including by the Nazis themselves, the horror they did it was just unprecedented- not just the number of murders, but the methods and the pseudo-cientific approach to it. There are people that killed more- Stalin, for example- but there is absolutely nothing quite like what the Nazis did. Plus, it's associated with WWII, which will (hopefully) remain the world's greatest conflict for a long time.

And yes, I know Plato pretty much disappeared from historical record for a long time, but records there were much, much different than today, and it was much, much, much easier for something to get lost.

 

  

6 hours ago, Maltaran said:

Don Bradman is likely a better option than Michael Jordan - I think cricket is more widely played than basketball, plus he retired in 1948 and everyone in the sport still knows who he is so he’s already proven to have some longevity.

Not really. For example, I don't think I ever heard of him until you mentioned him (if I did, I forgot) and I bet as much as you want than 99,9% of the people outside cricket playing countries haven't either. Jordan is very famous in the entire world.

[Corvinus85]

Queen Elizabeth II... actually she'll still be alive so never mind.

[DMC]

43 minutes ago, Week said:

The Musk fanfic is really pretty out there these days.

I think this thread should be retitled "I  Elon Musk."

[Fury Resurrected]

2 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Yeah, I think it was fairly obvious from the analogy that it was a hypothetical, to try and create a broadly equivalent example to what colonizing Mars would represent.

Taking the familiar real world example of Columbus reaching America, but elevating it to an higher level on every front - including being the first humans to do so.
 

It is obvious, but it’s still pretty annoying to be like hey let’s have a hypothetical where an entire race of people who currently struggle to remind people they exist because of the genocide spurred by the not hypothetical version of what you described didn’t exist at all.

[Free Northman Reborn]

13 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

It is obvious, but it’s still pretty annoying to be like hey let’s have a hypothetical where an entire race of people who currently struggle to remind people they exist because of the genocide spurred by the not hypothetical version of what you described didn’t exist at all.

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

[Gorn]

I think this will be very regional and culture-based, and also on a personal level depending on how much of a history geek someone is. When you look back at 500 years ago, Ivan the Great was one of the most important people in Russian history, but most people in the West would say "who?", or in the best case "don't you mean Ivan the Terrible?". Matthias Corvinus is remembered by Hungarians, but he's irrelevant to everyone else. Martin Luther is remembered among Christians (especially Protestants), but not so much among non-Christians.

This means that the question is impossible to predict without also predicting what cultures, societies, nations and religions will exist 500 years from now, and what values and actions from our time will they consider to be the most worth remembering.

[Gorn]

Edit: double post