We often assume that in a few million years civilization will reset or die off, but what if that never happens? Remember that writing as we know it is not even 10,000 years old.
What will happen with countries as continents continue shifting? Imagine all the history that will be accumulated. It will be unthinkable to study it all. Maybe countries become stable enough to live for millions of years thanks to technology or social shifts.
Imagine governments or even parties tracing their authorities back to thousands of years. Same for families… and the information is still there. Imagine all countries had their years to dominate and then decline… all countries have their old empires and heroes from the 1900s to the 200,000 AD.
Assuming no population collapse or overpopulation significant enough to make it all fall, imagine how much history will be different and yet similar because it will all be connected. Animals and our bodies start evolving. A million years become like a decade for us. We already see the 2000s as a blob, for example. Now imagine that at cosmic scale.
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Wow you really don’t know the difference between a thousand and a million do you bud?
The continents won’t shift in a meaningful or obvious way for hundreds of thousands of years at least. Evolution takes even longer.
A million years will never feel like a decade since humans will never live longer than 150 years unless some crazy sci fi life extending shit is invented.
You are making the assumption that human history and country history are one in the same. The USA has been a country for about 250 years, not 10,000 years. It will probably not last in it’s same size and governance for any more than a few more centuries (generously).
Also, assuming no overpopulation – dude our world is already overpopulated and growing exponentially. We won’t have to worry about any of this.
Bad take – do some actual research (not a google search either, real research from real sources) and learning before you start throwing around random years and scientific ideas (like plate tectonics and evolution).
The way I think kinda hurts the brain to fathom. I think everything always was and always will be. Like the circles we see everywhere, no beginning and no end.
People already try to specialize in specific areas of history, whether it’s by time, geography, or figure of importance.
But even more to your point, every US History course I took tried to do as much of US History as possible, from colonial times, revolution, civil war, but usually that’s about as far as they got. I think once I got to WWI. That’s some pre America pretext and 200 years of American history. Britain, just from the Magna Carta forward, is 800 years.
So the more that happens and is recorded, which in today’s society includes pictures of dogs and what was for lunch, the more history will capture. What is important will be written about more, studied, and analyzed.
Wouldn’t worry about it we’re def not lasting more than another 200 years without some kind of drastic technical innovation.
Not sure about most of this but I can tell you human evolution is stalled and will remain that way. Natural selection is negated by societies, technology, and globalism. Evolution is a process driven by natural pressures put on organism. There are no pressures on us to change and pressures that could come along would be catastrophic which means they’d happen way too quickly for us to adapt to through evolutionary means. You’re looking at humans final edition now. Other animals obviously can still evolve.
We don’t usually think about all the events of all of history, though. We have a basic timeline, and we zoom in on parts of it that seem interesting.
The basic timeline tends to be logarithmic, by which I mean that if you go back twice as far in time, there are only half as many events. For example, if you look at a history book from 1900, you’ll see it highlights a lot more events in the 1800s than a modern textbook would.
So a textbook for a million years from now might have a basic timeline where the immediately-previous 100 years had about as many facts as we would have. (Call that N.) Then 1000 years before that would also have just N events. And the 10,000 before that would also just have N. And 100,000 and finally 1,000,000 for a total of 5N events or about twice as much history as we have today.
Now if you wanted to zoom into a given era, there would be a lot more info than we have today, but that would be pretty much a matter of personal preference. Most people wouldn’t bother.
You know the universe is already billions of years old right? Anything you can think of has probably already happened millions of times already.
Honestly, this is a wild thought, and I love it. Just picture millions of years of history piling up. Yikes! But also, think about all the craziness that’d go down. States might end up evolving past borders, and maybe everyone becomes one giant, boring government. Imagine the world as one bland blob of people wearing the same grey jumpsuits! Sounds awful, right? And can you even imagine the level of bureaucracy after a million years? Forms stacked to the moon, probably! Sure, it’d make for some incredible history books, like 500,000 volumes long… but who would have the time to read any of it? Maybe we’ll end up with more scandals than Netflix shows, or worse, we’d grow nine toes or something. It sounds exhausting and chaotic but kinda fascinating, right? Unless someone hits the reset button, this could be our long, wacky road ahead!
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We’ll never know
I once pondered: what if we encountered an Interstellar Empire with millions of planets some with tens of millions of years of history. What would be taught? How far back would you have to go for the history to be practically forgotten regardless of written records?
An interesting variant to consider is the Star Wars Legends Universe with its 35,000 year timeline. While it’s based entirely in fantasy, it’s fun exploring how limited the knowledge in the Skywalker era is of, say, The Old Republic era.
I always found it odd that there are so many loss civilisation or ancient techniques unknown to us until it was somehow discovered. Will we become the loss civilisation.
I am looking forward to the days when today is going to be in a Period Drama movie! 😅
I’m really into the history of Italian American organized crime. The collection of criminal groups all adhering to similar rules and standards only lasted about a hundred years, but a lot happened in that hundred years. I study Cosa Nostra because it enables me to understand politics and economics better. They all do the same stuff, rarely does a geopolitical event or economic situation happen that can be likened to something that happened in 100 years of the mafia. It’s just more accessible for me to frame it in terms of gangsters. A mob boss being assisinated is identical to a military coup or the shareholders ousting the CEO. It’s all the same shit. Any distinction made between a country’s military, or a street gang, or organized crime group, or political party, or whatever is subjective. The top priority of groups in power is to retain power, they can fill in a narrative later. What technology will do is create an increasingly narrow and highly controlled public discourse. In the future you will get a choice between getting sodomized and robbed or getting robbed the sodomized.
The next few decades or couple of centuries are the most perilous for our species, but if we survive that, the possibilities are beyond our comprehension. Really, you could imagine anything happening given millions of years.
Unification of consciousness is the general direction. The internet and smartphones are an early step towards that. Think of it, you can be in constant contact with someone on the other side of the planet. Now add brain control interfaces (BCI), and you will be permanently online. Who knows what this will feel like. You may actually be able to feel other consciousnesses. These are already being developed. The result will be a primitive hive mind already. After that, the next step is deciphering consciousness and allowing uploading it, storing it in non-biological objects.
I think this is the only way we survive true AI as well. If we. An upload consciousness to the digital medium, we can merge it with AI. This is of course the only way we keep up with AI and don’t become it’s evolutionary prey. Otherwise it’s logical as an insanely more intelligent being, AI will eliminate us.
Now once we’re no longer biological, technological progress is even greater. The same way most technological progress has occurred in the last 0.001% of modern humanity’s history, we will accomplish even more in minutes or seconds.
The ultimate goal then becomes to leave the current reality we experience, this 3D space around us, where time flows one way. We will find a way to enter higher dimensions, where time isn’t so linear and uncontrollable. Think of the multidimensional beings in Interstellar.
Being non-biological and multidimensional, we will be able to travel the galaxy at unimaginable speed. We will certainly encounter other intelligent species. Will they be more or less advanced? Who knows. This will be another critical point where we can be exterminated as a species by something even more advanced.
But if we survive all of that, we start to span the universe like one big consciousness.
Needless to say, concepts like nations, money, whatever we know today, will no longer exist.
What happens when millions of years turn to billions, and those to trillions? We need to find a way to escape or reverse the heat death of the universe. Eventually spacetime will spread so far, and all stars will have died out. There will be nothing left.
Maybe we find a way to spark new big bangs, and new universes.
Great theory, show us the evidence.
Well it will have to end sooner or later, at least on this planet – the Sun won’t live forever.