Tyler Cowen, an economist and the blogger behind Marginal Revolution, was asked by a reader:
He answered (in part):
Who do you think will be famous in 10,000 years?
Link | Photo by Flickr user jake.auzzie used under Creative Commons license
Who do you think will still be famous in 10,000 years? People from history or now. Shakespeare? Socrates? Hawking?
He answered (in part):
In that case, I'll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong.[...]
My thinking is this. The major religions last for a long time and leave a real mark on history. Path-dependence is critical in that area.
Otherwise, an individual, to stay famous, will have to securely symbolize an entire area, and an area "with legs" at that. The theory of relativity still will be true and it may well become more important. The computer and DNA will not be irrelevant. Hitler will remain a stand-in symbol for pure evil; if he is topped we may not have a future at all. Beethoven and Mozart still will be splendid, but Shakespeare and other wordsmiths will require translation and thus will fade somewhat. The propensity to truck and barter will remain and Smith will keep his role as the symbol of economics.
Who do you think will be famous in 10,000 years?
Link | Photo by Flickr user jake.auzzie used under Creative Commons license
The Singularity will sweep over humanity within a century, leaving it first with optimized DNA, then later without DNA.
Humans will undergo more change in the next couple of centuries than they did in the previous 200,000 years of Homo sapiens.
In essence, our successors will accelerate unimaginably far beyond what we now are, making them capable of achievements far beyond (and different from) those of the people mentioned in this story.
Change will not be simply quantitative, but qualitative.
I think that visual artists will be known in 10,000 years. Sculptors of stone, in particular, because their work survives without special preservation. Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Remington are my picks.
Take the time between now and Christ and multiply it by 5. Take the time between now and Tutankhamun, and let that much time pass AGAIN (plus another 2000 years).
And ANYTHING that exists now will be reduced to sand, if civilization survives and we keep a catalog of everything we may remember some of this but I'm sure what's what people at the Library of Alexandria thought too.
Basically if you want an answer to the question think who do you know from 10,000 years ago?
Then think of whoever it the modern equivalent of that.
Considering most famous figures from classic antiquity (only half as long as we're talking about here) are conquerors or dictators I'm afraid Hitler may be the only famous name that survives more than 5000 years.
The Robot Civil Rights Act of 102064. Big deal. Makes the guy who passes it pretty famous.
Probably not going to be famous in 10,000 years if he's not famous now -- although I suppose that's not always true.
But I do hope they have gigantic Neil Armstrong statues in 10.000 yrs time.
(sorry I had too. You know it's possible.)
Interesting parallel: The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation
http://longnow.org/clock/
That is a real project that Brian Eno is part of (how I learned of it). Monumental Chiming Clock...
"The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine "Scenarios" issue. Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long-term thinking would be far more focused and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth -- two key requirements of anything lasting a long time."