Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
Unless you don't count them as US history events, it has to be the atomic bomb or the moon landing. They will be well known 50,000 years from now when only scholars will know who George Washington was.
I'd actually be quite surprised if the atomic bomb resonated for 50 millennia. That's making a lot of assumptions about the future of war and weaponry. Nuclear weapons made incredibly propaganda weapons but have alot of downsides, are difficult to deploy, and involve lots of risk to utilize for the attacker.
In a future where battlefields are likely populated by robots or nanotech and those battlefields might be in outer space and away from our atmosphere, I think it equally as likely nuclear weapons are a footnote in the history of warfare when considered over timescales that involve millennia. This borders on anecdotal, but many current first-world military budgets aren't really dedicated to nuclear weaponry; military tech budgets are far more focused on robotics, nanotech, space lasers, etc. than they are on nuclear weaponry and deployment systems or whatever. All the reasons for that are why I'd be shocked to see modern military might of say 500 years from now involve significant amounts of nuclear weapons. Future military power is going to involve self-replicating tiny robot nanotech or **** that can create massive explosions from space in seconds (e.g., lasers). Some future battle, probably no more than 250-500 years away, is going to involve trillions of tiny 1cm round or less nanodrones harassing people or infrastructure or whatever and some desperate clown will launch a nuke against it, maybe (if they're lucky) incinerate a few trillion of them, and then the remaining nanodrone robots will regroup and replicate themselves back into its former force post-blast within hours. And that will be the last of meaningful and useful of nuclear weapons in combat imo, and that's assuming the writing on the wall regarding nuclear weapon uselessness isn't clear already.
If there are historians 50k years from now covering us, nuclear weapons are going to be akin to spears and rocks.
Last edited by DVaut1; 12-31-2014 at 09:00 PM.