‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
1,000 years into the future what names will still be known from the second millennium? I suspect Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Probably Charles Darwin. Perhaps Genghis Khan. Due to the likelihoods of demographics, I would bet that more will recall Mao Zedong than Joseph Stalin.
But the men who stepped on the moon, I suspect, will also be known as names. It was a singular accomplishment.
As a subscriber to The New York Times I decided to go look at some of the articles from July 1969. I was surprised to find this: SURVEY FINDS PUBLIC BACKS MOON LANDING:
With the Apollo 11 moon mission to start tomorrow, the American people now favor landing a man on the moon by 51 to 41 per cent, according to a new poll by Louis Harris published yesterday in The New York Post.
Support was much more equivocal than I would have guessed. The public was quite aware of how expensive it all was.
My own suspicion is that humans will go back to the moon. But I think it will be a private company or an effort led by China. I don’t think our culture has the will to engage in such a task anymore.
Most Americans at the time Understood very well the motivation was the Cold War and anti-communism. Many hated it as a waste.
Analogy would be if Trump raced China to the moon now. Many would detest it for exactly the same reasons. A political stunt.
But nationalistic motives don’t detract from great accomplishment. Both can be true. Many great past accomplishments also had a status race angle. They remain great.
“1,000 years into the future what names will still be known from the second millennium?”
There is enough bandwidth for to know dozens of names from the first millennium BCE. The list should be longer. Here are some more names for your consideration:
William Shakespeare — We still read Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. Bill’s plays are better.
Dante Alighieri — Heaven and Hell. What else is there?
Dostoevsky, Fyodor — Argued with the devil. Read The Grand Inquisitor and understand everything.
Leo Tolstoy — Napoleon is on the List. War & Peace is the greatest book about him and his tragic ending. It is also the form of Russian civilization.
Nicholas Copernicus — Heliocentric theory is an intellectual watershed in human history.
Galileo Galilee — Telescopic Astronomy, the moons of Jupiter, and Galilean Relativity.
Johannes Kepler — Dynamic Astronomy.
Thomas Aquinas — The Catholic Church will still be around and he is foundational.
Moses Maimonides — Judaism will still be around and he is foundational.
Niccolo Machiavelli — The first modern writer on politics.
Rene Descartes — Cartesian coordinates. Numeric solutions to geometry problems.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Created the notational system of modern mathematics.
Thomas Hobbes — the most realistic writer on politics
John Locke — Empiricism, constitutional government.
David Hume — the last Philosopher
Adam Smith — economics
Ernst Schrodinger — The Wave equation is absolutely fundamental.
Kurt Godel — Showed the limits of mathematics and logic using their tools
Alan Turing — The Universal Turing Machine is the platonic form of digital machinery. He did not see machines and abstract them. He solved knotty problems in mathematical logic with an imaginary machine.
John Von Neuman — Game theory, Cellular automata, Turned Turing’s machines into workable things.
Louis Pasture — understood infections diseases and showed how to avoid them.
Napoleon Bonaparte — The modern Alexander
Adolph Hitler — The most evil man in History.
Joseph Stalin — The key players in the bloodiest war in human history. Sometimes negatives are memorable.
Winston Churchill won the war Hitler started.
Franklin Roosevelt same.
Johann Sebastian Bach — Absolute music. Humans will still listen to music, they will play Bach.
Wolfgang Mozart — Angelic music.
Ludwig Van Beethoven — Op 80 may be the most sublime creation of the human spirit.
Michelangelo Buonarroti — Leonardo was a poseur. The greatest plastic artist of the Renaissance and perhaps all time.
Walter: Good that you mentioned Hitler. I wonder whether he and the Nazis will ever be replaced as an icon of the devil-incarnate-on-earth in popular psyche. (Also will swastika ever be rehabilitated in the West?) Of course if something worse comes later. Also I wonder was there anybody even remotely of the similar magnitude of notoriety before him. Attila the Hun? But hardly anybody knows Timur aka Tamerlane now (“Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.” – Wikipedia), and Uzbekistan is now even branding him as the national hero (“Timur has now been officially recognized as a national hero in Uzbekistan. His monument in Tashkent now occupies the place where Karl Marx’s statue once stood.” – Wikipedia).
Furthermore, how long a person’s name or an event stays in popular memory is also a function how often there is renewed interest in it. Even though the name of Augustus is mentioned in bible, Caesar is much more known, not just because of his calendar and writings and dramatic end, but also because he Shakespeare wrote a play about him, and especially, often appears in Asterix.
I’m sure the World War II and its main players will be a popular topic for authors, comic book writers and other artists for centuries to come, when almost nobody will remember that there was almost as big war just two decades before. Even now you need a professional historian to tell what were the real reasons for the WWI (a feud between cousins?), but the WWII was so ideologically loaded that it is easy to convince oneself who were its villains and who were its heroes. This depends of course on one’s ideological leanings, and it is not excluded that someday there could be a state where Hitler is rebranded as a hero and martyr (cf. Tamerlane, cf. Stalin).
Also, seen far enough from future, the moon landings occurred almost the same time as WWII, so I can envision there will be stories and legends where Armstrong and Aldrin themselves fought against the nazis.
“I don’t think our culture has the will to engage in such a task anymore.” – Yes. Even building a new railway tunnel beneath Hudson seems to be next-to-impossible challenge. Maybe twitter wars are more important for American elite now than doing anything real?
@Walter: I think Razib meant by his question what names will be remembered by ordinary people. Historians and historians of science and art will of course know everything much more in detail. But even now hardly any ordinary people know who were Gödel or Schrödinger. Turing is better known for the recent movie and the dramatic elements in his life (code cracking in WWII, homosexuality, suicide).
On the other hand, mathematicians have devised a clever trick that their names will be remembered by posterior mathematicians, with the habit of assigning the names of their predecessors to various related (and sometimes not so related) formulas and conjectures, in the hope that their own names will be similarly tagged one day. For example, “Riemann’s hypothesis”, which will keep Riemann’s name alive, together with those of Fermat, Euler, Gauss, Galois, Cantor, Poincare, Ramanujan. Even though one day it might be viewed that the mathematics took wrong turn after Cantor and all the new axioms that soon were needed, and Kronecker was right after all.
Now I wonder, what 20th century music will be remembered as long as Beethoven or Bach? Some classical composers, Strauss, Sibelius, etc., certainly yes, among those people who are especially into classical music, but any other kind of music? What jazz and especially pop (“rock”) performers will be remembered after their teen diggers have been in grave for a century or more? Jimi Hendrix? – “Can you believe, they listened to this kind of music at the time of moon landings?!”
Nehru