History is more unknown than the future could ever be. We can see what we can create for tomorrow. We can think about what we do today and how that will translate to tomorrow. We can alter, minute by minute, what traspires going into the futre.
But we are wholly in the dark when it comes to history. Particularly before the era of computers, where we can at least now keep some sort of organized data that is comparable. And where we can take different information from different sources and compare it.
Before the computer we had printing, for only about 450 years in fact. And that made it a little easier to keep track of things -- because one could refer to a text that was printed decades or two or three centuries ago.
Before printing we only had writing. And as the destruction that rampaged across the planet for thousands of years, whether at the hands of man, or by nature itself, history was lost. The writing was lost. Only the inaccurate and fautly memories were left to try to reconstruct the history.
And the clearest example of this is genealogy. We know we can keep track of what our families are in the future, because we are creating the databases, which will be indestructible, for the future about today. Our great-great-grandkids will know more about today than we know about our parents and grandparents. When a family looks back at the past, what they find are legends and memories that when the documents are finally found are blown out of the water. By the time you go back just three or four generations nearly all the information is lost. There is no "history." We don't know, or know so little as to be of little use.
But history going into the future will be different, and the internet and the computer, where information isn't really anywhere, not physically located, will be the great change in the way we look at history.
Those, though, who rely on history for anything are always subject to the reality of not only incomplete information, but often bogus information.
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