The End of Prehistory
Assuming the internet is forever and searching this stuff becomes even easier, how many of your descendants do you think will read your blog? A little bit, at least.
Imagine 200 years from now. Estimate 25 years a generation. You have 2^8 = 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. That's probably too many to really spend any time thinking about each one individually. Maybe that's the wrong approach, though. Would you pick and read something from a couple of them? Maybe if you have over 2 kids per generation then you are expected to get readers.
I'm hoping this blog will get at least one reader post-2200. I just have to figure out what will still be interesting by then.
From Cory Doctorow:
Imagine 200 years from now. Estimate 25 years a generation. You have 2^8 = 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. That's probably too many to really spend any time thinking about each one individually. Maybe that's the wrong approach, though. Would you pick and read something from a couple of them? Maybe if you have over 2 kids per generation then you are expected to get readers.
I'm hoping this blog will get at least one reader post-2200. I just have to figure out what will still be interesting by then.
From Cory Doctorow:
Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.
posted by Kevin at
9:41 AM
1 Comments:
These days I read Descartes' Discourse on Method and related writings. The book has many letters written to fellow scientists and thinkers. What am I getting into? 300 years ago, there were few/dozens of them: thinking, writing, discussing, proving, disproving, writing articles and letters that you can just put in a book and go... Today (-100years..today) there are many of us, so some can go and put together, organize, summarize, study and make main stream the works of these few. Point is: does it scale? 200 years later, are there going to be humans going through the digital waste we create :)? I hope they will have good summary extractor and differentiators to make sense of today and our GB/TBs of personal data. And let's not forget that we might not have yet the energy sources to get us +200 years in the future.
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September 2, 2008 11:50 PM
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