alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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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.
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...
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.
"Last Witness to President Abraham Lincoln Assassination on 'I've Got A Secret' Television Show"
I've had conversations with people born in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries!
And yet, anything beyond one lifetime is entirely out of reach...
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
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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