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Stepping Into The Future
While fanboys dream of billionaires’ panic rooms on Mars, the real world begins to crumble
For people alive at the time, 476CE had no particular significance. Then, as now, ordinary people had no capacity to see the bigger picture and instead focused on quotidian matters such as obtaining their daily food, complaining about individual hurts and ills, and gossiping about their neighbors. Rome had been sacked on several occasions before, and had limped back despite each time being weaker and more broken than before.
But 476CE was the last sack of Rome. Thereafter, the city fell into decay and was largely abandoned. Those who remained tore down the great buildings of the Empire and used them to build huts to live in and huts to contain their livestock. Nearly a thousand years later, Rome was still a ghost of its former self and had no relevance to the wider world except as (for some of the time) one of the centers of Christian mythology. Once, Rome had been the center of a powerful Empire and had shaped events across the Mediterranean world.
Today we are stepping into the future and just as was the case in 476CE, ordinary people have no concept of how dramatic a change is occurring. Excitable journalists, as they always do, focus on the sensation and the “human interest stories” of crying…
