Who will be remembered in 500 years?

[DireWolfSpirit]

Maybe it will be a angry leader that nukes 3/4's of us off the planet. 

Question being will he or she then be remembered as hero or villian?

[sologdin]

how long five centuries actually is, or the capacity for knowledge to be lost.

totally. milton's 'on shakespeare 1630' captures this well--

Quote

What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame, 
What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart 
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book,
Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving;
And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie, 
That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.

--to the extent that the reader is the marble tomb, superior to pyramids--but still as yet limited by the quality and quantity of active cogitation.

[A wilding]

Classic poem that.

[The Sunland Lord]

Donald Trump.

[maarsen]

3 hours ago, The Sunland Lord said:

Donald Trump.

He will be remembered the same way King John Lackland of England will be remembered. There has never been a John II.

[Jen'ari]

On 5/27/2020 at 7:29 AM, Erik of Hazelfield said:

I feel I have to defend Elon Musk a bit. He's wildly eccentric, quite vulgar at times, and has a hubris that's something out of this world. But he did transform a small electric car startup company into the world's biggest manufacturer of electric cars. Tesla showed the world what an electric car can be - fast, practical, cool - and this has forced the competitors to invest in EV technology. Without Tesla, it's likely that EVs would still be small, impractical things with a way-off price tag.

Same goes for SpaceX. The cost of launching a Falcon 9 is less than half of what launches used to cost. Even if both companies would disappear tomorrow, the impact they've made is here to stay.

While the guy can admittedly be an ass, as a Tesla owner I really do have to take my hat off to his company being able to build an amazing car.

[DMC]

5 hours ago, maarsen said:

He will be remembered the same way King John Lackland of England will be remembered. There has never been a John II.

 

[mcbigski]

On 5/24/2020 at 11:27 AM, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Businessmen like Jeff Bozo and Bill Gates are completely out of the question, I think. Their innovations, while currently profitable, are quite incremental and small compared to the huge, flashy types of discoveries that are remembered throughout the centuries. And in 500 years from now, whatever products they offer will have been replaced by more advanced solutions many, many times over, and thus lack any contemporary relevance.

There must be a German word for something that is perversely comforting.

What if there is a non-trivial chance that there are still legacy computer systems saddled with Windows at least in the coding bowels five centuries hence? 

On 5/24/2020 at 3:55 PM, ThinkerX said:

Sadly, Trump will likely be better remembered than Obama - 'the man who crashed the US,' sort of a 'Nero fiddled while Rome burned' type deal. 

Reagan gets remembered as the president who ended the cold war and prevented thermonuclear Armageddon.

Roosevelt gets remembered as a famous wartime president.  The more historically aware will remember that he initiated massive social programs. 

Nixon, Clinton, both Bush's, and Obama barely even rate footnotes.  

Gates and Zuckerburg  (SP?) are remembered as the founders of technological titans.

Musk gets remembered for privatizing space travel and maybe the first Mars colony.

Limbaugh and Hannity are considered key historical agitators and sources, often quoted in the history texts of the time.  

 

Really the only one there that has a shot is Musk, and that's only if there's a sustainable Mars colony that starts in the next few decades, using his company.

Next is maybe Roosevelt, but with WWII as the hinge, I'd put him behind Eishenhower and Patten on the US side, as far as memorability and I don't think either of them make the cut either.  Other than "A day that will live in infamy" he seems like a much less vivid war time personality than Churchill, De Gaulle, Stalin or Hitler.

On 5/25/2020 at 7:47 AM, A wilding said:

Just had a straw poll here (UK): 75% never heard of Jordan, 25% vaguely knew the name but thought he was a US film star.

Though Bradman fared little better; 50% knew who he was (both cricket fans), 50% never heard of him.

I doubt any sports stars will be remembered. How many people could name famous Roman gladiators?

I don't think any athlete has much of a chance.  How many current sports will still be played in 500 years, at a level where any current players have any transcendent greatness?  Absent genetic engineering, drug supplements, and cybernetics, we might be approaching what you can do with nutrition, training and practice, but even if our best current athletes are at 98% of potential, to pull a number from me nethers, there will be countless future athletes at 99%, assuming the same games continue to get played. 

So I would second those who said Einstein and Armstrong.  (Limiting to 20th century and later, not sure that was explicit but where I'm going.)  Going to add Churchill, not globally but at least in whatever the Anglosphere consists of at that point.  Hitler as the Genghis Khan of our era, even though he was a lot less competent.  The Wright brothers and possibly Ford as footnotes, well enough known as trivia, but not front of mind.  I have a much harder time seeing people famous from my lifetime (say 1980 and on) as that transcendent.  9/11 for example was absolutely an enormous event at the time, but how much was it a pivot point?  Too early to tell, and too many things that seem small or are even unnoticed, that will have repercussions we can't foresee from here.

So much more depends on a few factors like:  Is English still a dominant language?  (If not, forget about almost all novelists, poets, musicians, actors, etc who perform in English).  Is there a political jurisdiction that traces back to 1776, whether validly or not?  If so, then bump up a bunch of US Presidents.  Washington paralleling Augustus for this comparison, you still had the five good emperors well remembered in the time of Justinian.  Are current electronic records and formats still accessible?  Then give pop culture more a plus factor, but while mass replication through electronic media magnifies current fame, and it also allows for a lot more competition, and I suspect that over time, current popularity and future judging of quality won't be highly correlated.

And while Walt Disney is an interesting choice, most of the original Disney characters are awfully dated at this point.  I'd put my money on Superman or Batman being widely known 500 years from now over Mickey or Donald. 

Excellent topic btw.

[Liffguard]

7 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Really the only one there that has a shot is Musk, and that's only if there's a sustainable Mars colony that starts in the next few decades, using his company.

Even then I'd be sceptical. Neil Armstrong is a household name. Buzz Aldrin is pretty well known. Who remembers the name of the CEO of Boeing (or the head of NASA) at the time? My guess is that the first person to set foot on Mars has a way better chance of being remembered than the CEO of the company that built the vehicle they used to get there.

[polishgenius]

7 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I don't think any athlete has much of a chance.  How many current sports will still be played in 500 years, at a level where any current players have any transcendent greatness?  Absent genetic engineering, drug supplements, and cybernetics, we might be approaching what you can do with nutrition, training and practice, but even if our best current athletes are at 98% of potential, to pull a number from me nethers, there will be countless future athletes at 99%, assuming the same games continue to get played. 

 

That the popular sports now may no longer exist is one reason (though that's one of those things where it's hard to say because there has never been a sport, possibly indeed nothing ever at all including any single religion, that has transcended any single nation or culture the way football in particular has) that athletes will be forgotten, but if they do 'the players then are better than the ones now' won't be a reason for them to be forgotten. After all everyone levels up at broadly the same time so achievements and efforts don't change. People aren't gonna be marking down Ronaldo and Messi coz they haven't got cybernetic legs, they'll just not remember them because we tend to remember the people we watched, and the ones our parents watched, and the rest must by necessity fade a bit. And sports is by its nature a far more 'in the moment' thing than film or music, too, so that gets more extreme.

And like someone said earlier, there's a good chance that Don Bradman will be the highest scoring batsman ever in cricket for ever. I saw it said once that there's a decent argument that no-one has ever been better, compared to his peers, at anything than Don Bradman was at batting; it's almost hard to disagree.

[Jo498]

8 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I don't think any athlete has much of a chance.  How many current sports will still be played in 500 years, at a level where any current players have any transcendent greatness?  Absent genetic engineering, drug supplements, and cybernetics, we might be approaching what you can do with nutrition, training and practice, but even if our best current athletes are at 98% of potential, to pull a number from me nethers, there will be countless future athletes at 99%, assuming the same games continue to get played.

So much more depends on a few factors like:  Is English still a dominant language?  (If not, forget about almost all novelists, poets, musicians, actors, etc who perform in English).

And while Walt Disney is an interesting choice, most of the original Disney characters are awfully dated at this point.  I'd put my money on Superman or Batman being widely known 500 years from now over Mickey or Donald.

I think the language is not so important. As a child around 1980 I knew of and had read stories or seen cartoons or movies about Ulysses, Marco Polo, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, figures that were between 280 and 2800 years "old" by then and none had been in German literature or history.

Sports and pop culture are very difficult to judge because we only have a large sports culture/fandom since little more than a century (or maybe actually less with many international sports only beginning to get big in the 1930s and much bigger in the last ca. 60 years). Similarly for popular culture. There are more plays by Shakespeare on stage today after more than 400 years than 1920 operettas and musical comedies after less than 100 years.

[Gorn]

57 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

Sports and pop culture are very difficult to judge because we only have a large sports culture/fandom since little more than a century (or maybe actually less with many international sports only beginning to get big in the 1930s and much bigger in the last ca. 60 years). Similarly for popular culture. There are more plays by Shakespeare on stage today after more than 400 years than 1920 operettas and musical comedies after less than 100 years.

Organized sports (chariot racing, wrestling, gladiator fighting, athletics) existed more than 2000 years ago with huge fandoms - Emperor Justinian was almost overthrown by racing fans during the Nika riots.

And yet none of them are remembered today, except as historical footnotes. Leonidas of Rhodes was the most successful runner in history, and running still exists as a sport, and yet I doubt that even actual professional runners have ever heard of him.

[A wilding]

2 hours ago, Liffguard said:

Even then I'd be sceptical. Neil Armstrong is a household name. Buzz Aldrin is pretty well known. Who remembers the name of the CEO of Boeing (or the head of NASA) at the time? My guess is that the first person to set foot on Mars has a way better chance of being remembered than the CEO of the company that built the vehicle they used to get there.

I suspect Musk has it in his head to be that first person to set foot on Mars.

[Jo498]

3 hours ago, Gorn said:

Organized sports (chariot racing, wrestling, gladiator fighting, athletics) existed more than 2000 years ago with huge fandoms - Emperor Justinian was almost overthrown by racing fans during the Nika riots.

And yet none of them are remembered today, except as historical footnotes. Leonidas of Rhodes was the most successful runner in history, and running still exists as a sport, and yet I doubt that even actual professional runners have ever heard of him.

That's true (I mentioned Milo of Kroton who was the most famous wrestler in classical Greece above myself). But unlike poetry and philosophy, ancient sports died (except for a while in Byzantium) with the ancient world.

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Gorn said:

Organized sports (chariot racing, wrestling, gladiator fighting, athletics) existed more than 2000 years ago with huge fandoms - Emperor Justinian was almost overthrown by racing fans during the Nika riots.

And yet none of them are remembered today, except as historical footnotes. Leonidas of Rhodes was the most successful runner in history, and running still exists as a sport, and yet I doubt that even actual professional runners have ever heard of him.

True. Although, the marathon could have just easily been named the pheidippides, and then everyone would know his name (although I guess its debatable whether to call him an athlete). I think an awful lot of people know the story behind why marathons are called that, but few know the runner's name.

So basically if an athlete can get a sport named after him, or his name becomes synonymous with the sport, I could see their name being remembered for as long as the sport exists.

[Jo498]

The names are remembered, but they are not household names. In Europe there are several running magazines and running clubs (maybe today also other endurance sports like triathlon) called "Spiridon" after the Marathon winner at the 1896 Olympics (Pheidippides Club would probably have been a bit too morbid). There is also a Thorpe Cup in multi-events (a meeting between Germany and the US) but it's not a big event and Thorpe is hardly a household name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe

[williamjm]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

So basically if an athlete can get a sport named after him, or his name becomes synonymous with the sport, I could see their name being remembered for as long as the sport exists.

I wonder if future generations still see Hitler and Nazi Germany as the most famous example of an evil regime if Jesse Owens' exploits at the Berlin Olympics might be one athletic feat that is remembered longer than most of the other 20th Century sporting feats because of it being seen as defying the Nazi ideology?

[Jo498]

The 1936 Olympics are going to be remembered for all kinds of reasons. They were the Nazi Olympics but also the first one that made a huge media spectacle out of them which became later the norm, including the torch relay etc.

Jesse Owens most spectacular feat was not at the Olympics (Carl Lewis topped this in 1984, IIRC) but a year earlier when he broke a bunch of world records within one afternoon (actually 5 within 45 min. on May 25th 1935). This was obviously facilitated by the early amateur stage of athletics and the fact that because of separate yards/meters records one could break the 100m and 110y in one go, but it was still quite incredible.

[DireWolfSpirit]

If I had to bet on one performer from the last 100 yrs as the one with the longest "staying power", slash remembrance chances, I'd bet on Charlie Chaplin as the guy no-one will forget.