Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

The past is so much closer than you think. We are only three human lifetimes away from the American Revolution. The last living children of American slaves were around into the 2010s. Back to Teddy, the last living person who could have met him was still around in the 2000s as well, meaning in your lifetime you could have talked to someone who knew someone who saw Abe Lincoln alive.

View on HN

Indeed this is one of the things I most enjoyed when I first visited DC, the realization of just how recent these historical events really were. Standing on a battlefield in Gettysburg and thinking "This all happened in the 1860s, barely more than 100 years before I was born. I have relatives who lived in this area at that time, and only a few generations back."

When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they know about people and events that were major news when I was young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30 years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.

Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or two, though.

"Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. "

The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)

Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated garbage as WW2 documentations. And that was just garbage generated for attention (ad money). Once big actors with money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will arise.

I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.

It's the "if you think the news is all lies, bullshit and agendas you should see the history books" meme.

Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the past we just repeat because they're what got written down.

That's a good point. When I wrote my comment only my optimistic side was engaged ;-). The pessimistic side shares your concerns. I hope that we develop some technologically diffult-to-overcome solutions for preserving the integrity of media. Like methods for cryptographically signing raw content from a digital camera that guarantees it was produced by that hardware. Not a panacea, but a step in the right direction I think.

Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

Jason Kottke occasionally uses the term The Great Span over at his blog on similar musings: https://kottke.org/tag/The%20Great%20Span

I think his post that really got me was the 2021 headline, The Last Documented Widow of a Civil War Veteran Has Died: https://kottke.org/21/01/the-last-documented-widow-of-a-civi...

That's a pretty extreme case that shifts the data by 70 years.

Weird thought: someone born in the 1800s was (most likely) alive when the first transformer model ran.

Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before then.

There is an anecdote a regarding Napoleon and Bertrand Russell. One lifespan can be relatively close to two events that an are seemingly far apart.

Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather met Napoleon when Napoleon was imprisoned in Elba, and talked about this with Bertrand.

Bertrand was alive to watch the moon landing on TV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4OXtO92x5KA

"Last Witness to President Abraham Lincoln Assassination on 'I've Got A Secret' Television Show"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

Lincoln died in 1865. If you were born in the 50s, there’s a chance. But most people don’t live to 90.

For me, that person would be 115 when I was born for our lives to overlap.

Yes, history is closer than we think, but it still moves on

The last Civil War soldier died in 1956.

Last Civil War died in 2020:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...

Where are you seeing 2020? Also, this list is widows, not veterans.