Thanks for this account, I love such wider-than-history perspectives. It literally helps us put things in perspective, realize that there is so much already.

A city that's 200 years old today is "young" by human standards; even civilizations (cultural shapes) a thousand years old have probably only gone 10% of the temporal distance since the first settlements.

I sometimes wonder how our current present could possibly be seen by people 7,000 years from now in the future (well, I tend to stop at 1,000 because it's already too big, but contemplating 10,000 or 100k even is humbling). There's this sense that we would be "ancient" to them, a different world. That most of our preoccupations would be long solved, and that only a few memes of our culture would remain to their day. To wonder if, in the grander scheme of things, we're "empty" like so many times before us and will leave pretty much nothing substantial, or if we're "decisive" like those ideas and people and eras that shaped civilization as we know it today.

Would future eras see our computers and AI-attempts as foolish delusions like some people thought vapor machines could solve everything? Would our cars and planes and trains be seen as a temporary means of transportation that only lasted a couple centuries before something much better, much more "obvious" would take place? When would we escape Earth and grow beyond, is it for this century or much later, would it even be a done deal by 3,000? What new science lies beyond us in time simply because we just can't see it now, and yet we could actually make now if we just thought of it? (like we could have invented electricity in Ancient times, but conversely Einstein's GR was a gift from the Gods because it was at least 100 years too early in refinement). How much of what we take for granted is actually debatable or plain wrong; how much of what we doubt today is actually true, the right intuition? When do we eventually cease to be "homo sapiens sapiens" because too many mutations is too many and we've become something else? How much of "something else" is of our own doing (volition, objective) though genetics, epigenetics, culture? Etc., etc., etc.

I find that far from being sterile or futile, these are extremely valuable thought experiments because they let us break our current mold and observe things from an arbitrarily different (call it "weird") standpoint. They let us re-imagine the past and unfold it differently, thus see many futures — and as always, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.