Few younger than their 30s will get that one. I feel like there should be a word for “sadness from awareness of the ephemerality of cultural references”. Maybe a French word. In this case it’s just a silly commercial, but some day even the Wallace & Gromit reference from the previous page might garner no recognition. Granted, some works of art are privileged to be remembered or rediscovered hundreds or even thousands of years later — Shakespeare’s sonnets, Gilgamesh, etc. But there’s only so much attention to divide at any point. New things keep being layered on, compacting the memories of old things until no one will ever think of most of them again.
Of course, the far deeper sadness is the fading from existence of memories of actual people. A few get remembered for a long time (perhaps that’s part of why so many of us want to be famous— to stave off memory death) or have some aspect “immortalized” (in quotes because it’s not really forever) in art. (Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII is perhaps the most eloquent example of such an effort.)
But everything fades. Unless ALL intelligent races somehow ascend to some other state of being and enforce non-interference (as Qwerty guffawed, this seems improbable) with younger races (or unless they are already here in microbe colony form or whatever and have had no more interest in talking with us than most non-entomologists do with ants), the Fermi paradox suggests intelligent races generally die without traveling to the stars (Earth has been pretty comfy for most of the last 500 million years, more than enough time for someone to happen upon it, if space colonization was common, and leave obvious evidence — our own tech layer would be obvious to paleontologist billions of years from now.) So some day humanity will probably be wiped out or fade out.
One of the most appealing things about time travel is just the fact that by making the past and the people therein contactable, retrievable, it makes them not dead. Suddenly everyone is in some sense contemporaneous. The “brief candle” of our existences would feel more OK, because we’d never truly be lost to oblivion.
Sorry if the above went on too incongruous a philosophical tangent; I realize it may seem a bit silly for thoughts like that to be spurred by a beer ad reference, but really, I had been thinking it already while reading a bunch of the other references crammed into this comic.
Few younger than their 30s will get that one. I feel like there should be a word for “sadness from awareness of the ephemerality of cultural references”. Maybe a French word. In this case it’s just a silly commercial, but some day even the Wallace & Gromit reference from the previous page might garner no recognition. Granted, some works of art are privileged to be remembered or rediscovered hundreds or even thousands of years later — Shakespeare’s sonnets, Gilgamesh, etc. But there’s only so much attention to divide at any point. New things keep being layered on, compacting the memories of old things until no one will ever think of most of them again.
Of course, the far deeper sadness is the fading from existence of memories of actual people. A few get remembered for a long time (perhaps that’s part of why so many of us want to be famous— to stave off memory death) or have some aspect “immortalized” (in quotes because it’s not really forever) in art. (Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII is perhaps the most eloquent example of such an effort.)
But everything fades. Unless ALL intelligent races somehow ascend to some other state of being and enforce non-interference (as Qwerty guffawed, this seems improbable) with younger races (or unless they are already here in microbe colony form or whatever and have had no more interest in talking with us than most non-entomologists do with ants), the Fermi paradox suggests intelligent races generally die without traveling to the stars (Earth has been pretty comfy for most of the last 500 million years, more than enough time for someone to happen upon it, if space colonization was common, and leave obvious evidence — our own tech layer would be obvious to paleontologist billions of years from now.) So some day humanity will probably be wiped out or fade out.
One of the most appealing things about time travel is just the fact that by making the past and the people therein contactable, retrievable, it makes them not dead. Suddenly everyone is in some sense contemporaneous. The “brief candle” of our existences would feel more OK, because we’d never truly be lost to oblivion.
Sorry if the above went on too incongruous a philosophical tangent; I realize it may seem a bit silly for thoughts like that to be spurred by a beer ad reference, but really, I had been thinking it already while reading a bunch of the other references crammed into this comic.