The vast, vast majority of people are forgotten within 100 years. Pretty much need to be in an extremely high position where records are kept, like presidents, or do something extraordinarily positive or negative.
I strongly doubt anyone reading this post will be remembered after the people they met or interacted with directly have died.
Or be a really shitty copper merchant
Yeah, weird random chance makes a huge difference. Otzi was probably well known, but only hyper-regionally. Lucy was basically just an unusually smart animal, and that was millions of years ago.
And just because you’re forgotten for a bit doesn’t mean you won’t come back into style.
Hmm. So if you want 15 minutes of fame a long time from now, what’s some weird easter egg you can leave?
Buttplug
Archeologists actually dig up a lot of sex toys, believe it or not. That won’t get you noticed.
A time capsule with something that nobody else will think to preserve might do it. Way too many preserve things the future is actually meh about. I wonder if a weird data footprint might be even better at this point. Like, if you filled out some official form thousands of times just for fun, and someone a long time from now is doing analysis and turns it into a meme.
What sort of forms about buttplugs do we have?
I actually have a geneology book （族谱） from my paternal lineage (everybody does this in China). Its just a bunch of names, and some history of the village summarized. I hate tradition and I’m already in the US right now, I dont give a shit about the stupid geneology book anymore, my ancesters will probably be so pisses to find out that I totally ignored all the hard efforts lol. (My village still has a copy, but I’m not adding more name to the stupid thing, a waste of time, its also misogynistic AF, if there’s a daugher, then the lineage doesn’t record their decendents. So dumb, as I guy, I hate this patriarchal bullshit)
Some aspects of that tradition are commendable, though. It would be neat to see this updated in a less male-centric fashion.
Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
Tradition is just narcissists convincing you to do things their way because change is ✨scary✨
Sure, but what if the dead people are right? Statistically, they will be some share of the time.
The catch is that that goes for all the various disagreeing traditions. Putting priority on your own is sus.
I think the opposite with happen with the same results. Everyone’s DNA will be on the books. It’ll be revealed that we’re all related somehow. You’ll be able to orient the database any way that you want to see how you’re related.
I’m still alive and I’m already forgotten. 👌
That’s quite sad tbh, we’re all just tiny specks on the timeline of humans
Perhaps but what is the value of human life? Being remembered of living and enjoying life? You won’t be around to care that no one remembers you, but you are here to enjoy life right now. So why be bothered by what people in 600 years are up to.
Im glad you replied what I was going to reply… just in a way more positive way :D
Fair point! We’re here to enjoy life now.
It’s your’s to make of it what you will. It doesn’t have to be sad. It’s pretty incredible any of us are here in the first place with how many conditions had to be present for life to even be on earth. And then we evolved from single cell organisms into these complex beings that we are today. It’s pretty fucking nuts and fascinating.
Yeah, it is incredibly fascinating.
I am 100% in favor of being forgotten, because trying to stand out in the sea of billions of people is a ridiculous expectation.
Well, do you remember anyone from 1425 or even 1625?
Wikipedia does.
That’s pretty neat actually.
Tbf, they didn’t have mass surveillance back then.
If the data doesn’t get lost, someone could find an average human in a developed country born in the 21st century, and could know what their entire life is like.
To be fair I don’t remember anyone from 600 years in the future.
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.”
No one needs to remember me except my kids. Maybe my grandkids.
Too late, thanks to big tech, your grandkids will know what type of porn you watch.
Yeah, and they’ll like it, whether they like it or not!
“JAYNE, the man they call Jayne.”
I imagine some archivists might find the lost fragments of this server is some ruins and by some miracle, maybe extract this very thread.
We all will be living inside the weights of LLMs from this era.
Ok that’s actually an interesting use of AI. Train on only media from that time period. This is Daniel, from the year 1400. Tell me about the Catholic Church
This is basically how the persona AIs work. Some of them are focused on an individual, others are trained on a group of individuals.
I think I’m part of what makes it stupid tho :(
Fat chance, we’re not carving things on glass or stone. SSDs and HDDs lose their contents and are irrecoverable even within our own lifetimes
You are most likely right but it really depends on what we come up with in the future.
Yes. Or, they’ll get the thread with the awkward dog meme about a microwave. It’s beautiful to contemplate.
Hi to the future! 👋
ngl I don’t know if the earth will even be inhabitable in 600 years
Yeah true, to be remembered we need someone alive to remember us
There’s a running phrase that gets’ mentioned a lot in the Peanuts comic strip: “500 years from now, who’ll know the difference?”
Just wanted to mention that. Peace ✌️
Dude I’ll forget you ever existed when I leave this thread. Bye.
Gonna be awkward as fuck if there is an afterlife and you run into OP after you both expire.
The afterlife being on Lemmy isn’t the worst thing I can think of.
Brave of you to assume that humanity will exist in 600 years.
Actually, we might be, but the better-off ones will be back at sticks and stones and huddling around wood fires and the like.
I really doubt this. Humanity is really good at surviving things.
My prediction - at a certain point, we gain the ability to port human brains to computers. The most wealthy gain this tech first, and effectively become immortal. Using their wealth (which is likely always accumulating) they are able to afford lots of redundency and good tech + energy to function at extremely high levels of performance - essentially making them immortal gods. I assume they will form alliances and rivalries, and stake out ground based on the now-general-intelligence AIs they have created.
Most people who choose transhumanism after this will need to utilize their afterlife continuing to work in order to pay for the ongoing cost of running their servers.
Meanwhile, humans still made of meat will have started conducting experiments on their genetics. Initially this will be about simply reducing or removing the chance of carrying a genetic disease. But soon they will start working on how to generally be better than others - improved cognitive abilities; sexier, stronger bodies; improved emotional regulation. Not long after, it will start being considered irresponsible to have children without the standard genetic modifications that the middle class can afford. Permanent class stratifications will be etched into dna. Even further along, the rich take genetic modification into fashion, creating physical markers of class stratification which will gradually make them look less human. As genetic class differences widen, there will be increasing class wars - in each one, the upper classes and those aligned with them will eliminate more and more of the lower classes. Slavery will also make a comeback, as those without genetic modifications (or with sufficiently lesser modifications) will be deemed too irresponsible to manage their own affairs and function in society. The descendents of the ultra-rich transhumanist gods, who will have the best and most fashionable genetic modifications, will be the first to achieve immortality in the flesh. But there will probably develop a sort of cultural expectation that they eventually give up their flesh and become transhumans like their anscestors.
Therefore, I will not have children unless I earn enough to afford their genetic modifications. To do otherwise would be irresponsible.
Is that even human tho?
Like the scientist who invented it will say its human, but from an ontology perspective, you can’t ever be sure about that. That could just be killing you and copying your brain.
No way in hell I’m gonna “upload” my brain. It’s suicide. Star trek teleporters are murder machines.
Why not? It has the thoughts, feelings, memories, and personality of a human. What else is a human? A physical body? Does, then, losong one’s leg male one less human?
Isn’t this the plot of Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling, the rich Mechanists that extend their life through machines vs the Shapers who rely on genetic modifications. Love, Death and Robots adapted a few short stories from this books universe that were very good
No idea, never heard of it. It just seems obvious to me with the way tech is going.
The only thing I find hard to believe in is DNA manipulation tech becoming affordable enough for the masses to choose to get it themselves, more likely it will be forced upon people to turn them into useful slave labor
I don’t think humanity is going to make it another 600 years tbh
I think humans might, but we won’t have fancy skyscrapers, we’ll be living in bunkers hiding from whatever disaster (war, plague, radiation, alien invasion) is on the surface.
An alien invasion couldn’t possibly make things worse.
I find it odd that natural disaster isn’t on your list considering it’s by far the most realistic scenario. Hell, it’s already happening.
I guess the word “natural” isn’t very accurate for a climate disaster, but still, it’s not on your list.
Technically, climate change by itself isn’t what will destroy civilization, its the aftermath, mainly, the crops wouldn’t be able to grow properly in a fucked up temperaure, weather, ecosystem…
Similar to “old age” in humans, nobody “dies of old age” in of itself, rather, its the complications that result from old age.
We sure are a dumb species. We’re able to construct all this stuff using the world around us but we can’t seems to figure out working together instead of constantly competing
It all started in Eden with that fruit.
Doesn’t even take that long. My parent passed away and left boxes of pictures from 50 to 75 years ago and no one recognizes. Why did they have these pictures and boxes of them? No notes. Nothing.
As they say in preservation, metadata is key.
Upload it to Google photos or Facebook bet their face recognition AI would know lol
No.
Because history remembers people or groups who have made astounding and monumental moments that change the course of history.
They aren’t going to remember a dude who spent most of their time jerking off and doing the average lifestyle.
And why 600 years?
No, but AIs will be able to generate a statistically accurate simulacrum of a set of people like us.
I am doing Genealogy as a hobby and in most of the lines I am in the 18the century, in some in the 17th century.
What I learned during this hobby is a simple thing - the more generations you go back, the more ancestors you have - the formula is 2^n. So if you go back 10 generations, you have roughly 1,024 ancestors.
Now imagine how many descendants these people have? I have met plenty of others nerds who are also doing genealogy, cousins by 7the grade and so on. There is always some dude doing this stuff, so I am pretty sure there will be one in the future.
Of course I can only go back about 300-350 years, but we people today are leaving way more traces on this planet than my ancestors in the 17th century.
the formula is 2^n
This breaks down eventually. Eventually, incest.
That’s why I said roughly. The genealogical concept behind this is Ahnenschwund or pedigree collapse.
Fair enough. I just wanted to make an incest joke
I have a geneology book dating back 20 generations. Its all in tradition chinese and kinda blurry and I kinda never learned most of the charcters besides the basics. But I skimmed it and aparantly it dates back to 1200s. A lot of mention about emperors and stuff. Unfortunately I can’t share it with y’all since that’s kinda doxxing and I posted too much political stuff on Lemmy.
It’s only the male ancestors, patriarchy and all, ya know.
Honestly, besides the snippets if history, I don’t know what the point of the whole name lists is. Can’t even find the aunts on there, what good is that for.
Like… there’s not even a portrait (like a hand drawn one), just a bunch of names. What, am I gonna use that inherit some long lost magical kingdom that’s gonna appear out of nowhere? Am I the Dragonborn? No lolz. I can’t understand “tradition”
I guess its cool for declorations, make the house look ancient and mysterious?
The original is alresdy falling apart lol (probably not the original original, probably copied at least 5 times already, no way it survived 800 years), then all the genology books in the village kinda got consolidated into one big one containing all households. Everyone in the village has the same last name (I think). Y’all get to have sex in highschool, back in the days, people didn’t get to choose, my parents kinda just got introduced to each other and they wete pressured to marry. Its technically consensual, but if they reject, they are just gonna introduce you to someone else. Kinda reminds me of the beginning of House of Dragon (except the part about being royalty of course, we are all just ordinary people). And my parents yell at each other a lot, kinda a fragile marriage… 🤷♂️
That is pretty impressive!
So let me explain what my motivation is… I am not so much interested in origin. I don’t feel any connection to the ancestors I do not know, which starts with my great grandparents. I don’t even know my grant parents, however, there is a bound through my parents, who were brought up by them. So their character, how they see their world etc. is influenced by my grand parents.
Now, this is limited to my grand parents, we are speaking of a period of roughly 100 years. What about the ancestors before that time? My family tree is mostly made out of dates like you said, baptisms, marriages, deaths. A huge list of more or less random people that have nothing to do with me.
However, I am using these people to tap into the historical contexts they were born in.My family is entirely made out of day laborers in Germany. There are a few masons, but most of them day laborers, the lowest class you can imagine. Usually, when you study history, you are looking through a certain perspective. In Germany this will most likely be counts and dukes, aristocracy, wars, territories etc. - but not so much about the poor people. My genealogical research is basically opening a new window for me, to view history from another perspective. I collected an extensive collection of literature about the weirdest little villages and stories you would never even have heard of, if you’d just follow the “traditional” way like history is taught in schools.
I hope this explains it a bit!
They will if I eat the Mona Lisa
