What Will We Leave Behind?
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / LESSON 1.4ACTIVITYWHAT WILL WE LEAVE BEHIND?Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Credit: “What Will We Leave Behind?”, OER Project, www.oerproject.com/What Will We Leave Behind?Otzi died 5,300 years ago, but dedicated researchers from several disciplines have been able to work out many details of what happened to him, and about how people lived during that time. What do you think our current society will look like to the historians of the future, say5,300 years from now? We have so much information recorded in so many ways by so many different people—and these people all have different perspectives on what the world is like. How much time will a history student in the year 7325 spend on “The Information Age”—or whatever they call this sliver in time when electricity, computers, phones, and the internet came into people’s lives? That history student might only have one day for that lesson because there will be so many other things to cover. What will that historian or studentlook at? Will whatever we leave behind make us seem like a happy people? Will history students in the future learn about the things that caused stress and controversy in our culture, things like racism or climate change or cancer, all of which may be foreign concepts by then? Will the things we value, such as democracy, chocolate, and education seem as strange to them as some characteristics ofhuman life from 5,300 years ago seem to us?But when they look at our world, the historian in 7325 will have a very different problem than we have when we look at Otzi’s world. Otzi didn’t have the internet, television, printed books, or any of the tools we use for recording and storing information.We might wish we had more evidence from Otzi’s time, but future historians might wish they had less information about us. There is more information on one smartphone than all the information historians have ever collected about Otzi’s world. And our modern world has billionsof phones, computers, books, magazines, newspapers, and websites. Most of this will probably be available to future historians, but that wealth of evidence might not be manageable because of the vast quantity of it.What information will future historiansfocus on as truly important? American politics? Popular streaming shows? Fast food restaurants?