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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

When you look at white noise from up close, you see dramatic changes, periods of calm, and what seems like patterns.

Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.

Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?

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We still speak today of Charlemagne, Muhammed, Caesar, Alexander.

Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.

All these men built our world.

What are a thousand years other than a couple of generations? What does it matter from further away? We always forget about the past eventually. There are so many great civilisations we only have tiny shreds of knowledge about, and yet in their time, they also had great leaders and epic stories to tell. It’s all inconsequential once enough time has passed.

Well, fifty generations.

Though by that metric, all of written history is 300 generations (6,000 years), of modern humans about 30,000 generations. About 100,000 generations separate us from chimpanzees.

But yes, our timescale is pretty short by that measure.

Na, all it will take is a shift in perspective. As humanity becomes more and more Asian, those names will trigger a "who?"

It'll then just be Confucius, Cao Cao, Oda Nobunaga. Doesn't really refute the point.

Pretty odd to say Mohammed a) isn't Asian, and b) isn't widely known across the continent, because he is, not just in western and central Asia but even in places like China, Jakarta and Mindinao. Islam is expanding rapidly in Japan now.

Mohammed was Asian. Julius Caesar had huge bits of his Empire in Asia. Most of Alexander the Great's empire was in Asia.

People love to mythologize. The truth is usually much more mundane. Columbus in particular has a combination of Mr. Magoo quality and nastiness that is will lead history to forcefully forget him in short order.

In short order after 500 years? You're not wrong about his qualities but he was still the guy who did it first, and it's still called the Columbian exchange.

When I was young Columbus was lionized in schools. Now young people I talk to demonize him more and more. He wasn't even first (Viking explorers beat him there by a lot), he was just first to brutally exploit. I'm sure the things that are named after him will be renamed eventually to honor more deserving figures.

That is a very US-ian perspective. AFAIK he is still lionized in Latin America, and likely will continue to be, as he is a sorta-kinda the ur-founder of all those nations.

Also, I'm not letting Columbus off the hook but he was on one island for like 3 years and he didn't even kill everyone.

The US and Canada genocided most of a continent over 2-300. We were killing buffalo herds and not even harvesting the meat just to deny them food.

That may be true, but if so it will be a failure of education, and a tragedy of identity politics (was that gleeful rapist who was so loathsome even his own people sent him back to Europe in chains, really the best icon anyone could find to rally around?)

The US still celebrates presidents' day, near the birthday of early presidents who killed far more natives.

Convenient to blame the non-anglo guy while most of the Spanish countries aside from Argentina didnt commit genocide to nearly the same extent.

We don't actually need icons to rally around, whether we're anglo or whatever else you may identify as.

That's a "fish don't know they're in water" sort of statement. Every other country is rallying around icons but we know the real truth?

The effort to blame Columbus ahead of our own presidents is all about protecting our own icons.

You don't have to rally around a country either. I'm not from the country you seem to imply with your "we" and "us" either way. I'm not protecting anyone's icons. It seems you're fishing for an identity politics argument.

Sounds like a pretty small difference in opinions then, cheers.

We talk about them because they are the ones who became famous. If they hadn’t existed we’d be talking about others that would most likely have done the same ish things with a couple decades of difference.

This is missing the point. If any of these people hadn't lived, you would have someone else in your list of world-builders, names we don't know. And you, living in that world, might be convinced your world was much preferable to our world.

The question isn't who should sit in the pantheon of great men of history. The question is, should we have such a pantheon? Are we wiser for it? Better off?

They both matter. All of the typewriters in the world doesn’t produce a play until you find the right monkey.

The right monkey is the one we are reading from. All other monkeys produced equally likely timelines.

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