Galactic Museum

I was browsing the books on the history shelf in a library nearby my home one day about a few weeks ago, and happened to pick up a popular history book, "Millennium - A history of the last thousand years" by Felipe Fernandez- Armesto. It's a book of 800 or so pages, and I was recently too busy to put through it. With a thought I may check it out in another time when my schedule would be more relaxed, so I scanned the contents and its preface. What caught my interest was the mental approach Felipe took to write this book. He envisioned some galactic museum of the distant future in which so much of our significant trash will have biodegraded into oblivion, but material from every period and every part of the world will be seen by visitors as evidence of the same quaint, remote culture: totem poles and Tompion clocks, Netsuke ivories and Nayarit clays, bankers' plastic and Benin bronzes...The distinctions apparant to us, as we look back on the history of last thousand years from just inside it, will be obliterated by the perspective of long time and vast distance. Our assumptions about the relative importance of events will be clouded or clarified by a terrible length of hindsight. To the galactic museum-keepers, as Felipe put it, events commonly invested with world-shattering importance - such as the English and American civil wars, the European wars of religion, the French and Russian revolutions - will all look parochial. Envision if we would have that kind of detachment as a future age might, will we think of and look at the world in quite different ways from what we used to?