Who will be remembered 1,000 years from now?
Of people who lived in the last 100 years (currently alive or deceased), who do you think will still be remembered 1,000 years from now?
9 comments
The best way to answer that question is to flip the sign bit and the verb tense. Whom do we remember best from the past one thousand years? Or longer?
The best way to be remembered across the millenia is to be either a sage of some sort (philosopher, mathematician, prophet, law-giver) or to kill a lot of people (conqueror, ruler, and so forth).
Therefore, the people who lived in the past hundred years who will be best remembered a thousand years from now will be Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and some thinkers that you've never heard of but that ultra-conservative Christians love to quote.
"Those of you who will live into the twenty-first century, come put a wreath on my grave, because this will be the slogan: No more twentieth centuries…" - Isaac Asimov (1974)
Have a nice day, and pleasant dreams.
The best way to be remembered across the millenia is to be either a sage of some sort (philosopher, mathematician, prophet, law-giver) or to kill a lot of people (conqueror, ruler, and so forth).
Therefore, the people who lived in the past hundred years who will be best remembered a thousand years from now will be Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and some thinkers that you've never heard of but that ultra-conservative Christians love to quote.
"Those of you who will live into the twenty-first century, come put a wreath on my grave, because this will be the slogan: No more twentieth centuries…" - Isaac Asimov (1974)
Have a nice day, and pleasant dreams.
Along those lines, I'm going to go with the great philosophers of the past century, Sartre and Nietzsche; the murderers Hitler and Pol Pot, the physicist Einstein, the revolutionaries Guevara and Lenin, the composer Shostakovich, and the mathematician Gödel.
(Yes, I know that Neitzsche and Lenin have a half-century head start. They're still worth mentioning for their enduring legacies, and Lenin's gonna be lying in that glass box for a long time.)
(Yes, I know that Neitzsche and Lenin have a half-century head start. They're still worth mentioning for their enduring legacies, and Lenin's gonna be lying in that glass box for a long time.)
My guesses for who's name will be most widely known by an average person 1000 years from now, no particular order:
Hitler
Neil Armstrong
Gandhi (showing effectiveness of nonviolent resistance)
Einstein
Vanevar Bush (for his essay "As We May Think")
Bin Laden (showing power of terrorism)
Craig Venter (as important early bioengineer)
Milton Friedman (market economics)
Lawrence Roberts (Arpanet)
Steve Jobs (mainly just for the iPhone)
William Shockley (Head of transistor team)
Wright Brothers
Richard Stallman (Just because DRM will always exist and he will be known as an early popularizer of related issues)
Darwin will be far more important than any of these, but is outside your date range.
Who I don't think will make the cut: Tim Berners Lee (world wide web will be too anachronistic) Turing (no emotional resonance with his work, unlike Vanevar Bush)
Hitler
Neil Armstrong
Gandhi (showing effectiveness of nonviolent resistance)
Einstein
Vanevar Bush (for his essay "As We May Think")
Bin Laden (showing power of terrorism)
Craig Venter (as important early bioengineer)
Milton Friedman (market economics)
Lawrence Roberts (Arpanet)
Steve Jobs (mainly just for the iPhone)
William Shockley (Head of transistor team)
Wright Brothers
Richard Stallman (Just because DRM will always exist and he will be known as an early popularizer of related issues)
Darwin will be far more important than any of these, but is outside your date range.
Who I don't think will make the cut: Tim Berners Lee (world wide web will be too anachronistic) Turing (no emotional resonance with his work, unlike Vanevar Bush)
Most of those people are relatively unknown now, outside of specialized fields.
viz. Bush, Venter, Roberts, Shockley, Stallman.
viz. Bush, Venter, Roberts, Shockley, Stallman.
As long as we have the technology we have today, everyone notable. If there is a nuclear war, biological outbreak or other 1000x Black Swan event, perhaps no one. Those who do survive an apocalypse won't be too worried about remembering anyone as they'll be too busy foraging and trying to defend themselves from roving bands of cannibals.
Albert einstein, bohr, schrodinger(text books), zizek(still alive!), gandhi and neil armstrong.
The people that will be remembered in 1000 years aren't actually those frequently in the media(say, steve jobs), steve jobs is clearly overhyped and will fade away just like justin bieber did.
The people that will be remembered in 1000 years aren't actually those frequently in the media(say, steve jobs), steve jobs is clearly overhyped and will fade away just like justin bieber did.
A partial list -
- Albert Einstein (relativity)
- Bohr, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac (quantum mechanics)
- Kurt Godel (incompleteness theorem)
- Alan Turing (universal computer)
- Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (computers, software/philanthropy)
- Tim Berners Lee (world wide web)
Maybe Reinhold Messner, Neil Armstrong and someone that invents the next widely used cryptocurrency.
Memories 1,000 years from now will be pretty impressive. So I'll go with 'everyone who has been mentioned somewhere on the Web right now'.
Depends on the dominant culture/... in 1000 years. History is written by the victors.
You're right about that! In Soviet Union a lot of discoveries were attributed to some russian figures! ...or at best, their real authors weren't mentioned at all. An entire history & reality rewritten!
1000 years? That is a timeframe long enough to virtually guarantee the occurrence of the Singularity, so I would have to say Vinge/Kurzweil/Eliezer/Goertzel/De Garis, or whomever switches on the first self-modifying artificial general intelligence.