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How will this age be remembered?

How will future generations remember us and our accomplishments?
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Re: How will this age be remembered?
sunday
   The invention of the computer and the technology that make possible its most powerful tool, the internet, will be this age's claim to destiny. These twin juggernauts are changing the face of information exchange, allowing all human endeavors...art, science, medicine, capitalism to grow exponentially. It is entirely likely we are not only able to crack open our own brains and share the wealth, but that we are creating a poweful meta-intelligence thru our million bits of posted information. The computer is the most important development for mankind since the wheel, and we watched it hatch!
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Re: How will this age be remembered?
ironchef08
I would have to agree with chopra, but he is considering it on such a deeper more analytical base that the masses may not concern themselves with. Some may refer to this small period as the technological medieval times as he describes. But I think in at least American text-books, much of our history will be shadowed by the two-term bush presidency. His blunders and small accomplishments which I cannot think of off the top of me head. They will remember the massive cultural boom of youtube and the internet. Of Iphones and the innovations in movies and even the writers strike. The world will be remembered for its clashes. Venezuala, Darfur, Russia, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon. The middleeast will be the center of this age as 9/11, madrid, and the uk bombings have defined for so many this region in postive and negative light. It is sad to say we are growing up in a greater industrial revolutionary age where pollution will create greater global warming problems, even as we try to become greener. I find that if we are going to define this past decade this way, the next two years will change the definition of our world. And the following 10 years will prove if we can improve our world or leave it worse for the next generation.
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Re: How will this age be remembered?
ShameSir

This era will be remembered largely for the incredible technological (specifically electronic, computing and biomedical) innovations which it has witnessed. It will be remembered by the spreading tentacles (or if you prefer, addictive vapors) of American cultural influence and waning American political/diplomatic influence. Iraq stands out as the presumed failure that will yet surprise. It will be remembered for a thousand celebrity/talking heads' bits of lip service to poverty, AIDS, cancer, and a thousand failures to resolve any of those problems, especially in Africa. It will be remembered as the age when the human mind managed to create a thousand new distractions while becoming inured to anything important. It will be seen as the age when sons did not fight wars on the battlefield, but at the computer screen; when old ways of thinking were reformulated by kids with internet startups, as much as by interdisciplinary thinking.

Collective memory will be seen as a thing of the past, as a fractionation of society into a million overlapping groups is confounded further by an increasing loss of a sense of identity. Religious belief will be seen through the 20/20 lens of seeing the past as the force which battled Western decadence to the last in the epic battle for hearts and minds. Radicals of all sorts will be seen as having framed overworked zombies tired of history and seeing only capital as their saving grace, on all sides. Making the picture more elegant will be both the seemingly endless decadence of Western hedonism, and the moderate religious forces which will have begun the reclamation process from the aforementioned cesspool of self-involved pleasure. At the forefront of this diabolical whirlpool will be the evangelical warriors of the South and Midwest, immigrants and their offspring, fending off the entirety of the West from the deadly malaise of civilizational decline, the only ones ready to give their loves for the principles which made the West what it is. If they will have succeeded, the decline will have been protracted that much further until the next round.

How the dance macabre will end is only for the Deity (if you are so inclined) to know... 

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Re: How will this age be remembered?
Alex Spalding
Haha, I agree! I imagine the present as being looked upon in the future as a period of transitional transgression against perhaps the natural law, or the way things should / could / would work, based upon humanitarian values which will supplant all flawed societal constructs, hopefully in the near future. Or we may just die, if we cross that threshold from where there's no turning back and the damage that's been done cannot be reversed.
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