The Truth is Out There

In the movie Serenity, the bad guys have a little problem on one of the planets they colonize and rather than try and fix the problem and/or report the problem to the general population, they just erase the fact that the planet was ever colonized or had any problems. People have vague memories of some sort of news about colonization, but nothing more.

At one time to research history, a person had to enter the dreaded 'stacks' of the library and flip through dusty old books to find information relating to their area of interest. If you were researching something that happened in the 1940s, it was more than likely that you would be looking at books that might have been written near or around that time in addition to more modern volumes. Today, more and more information is created first in electronic form which means it's far easier to access, but also far easier to change. Are we approaching the day when changing history is a simple search and replace function?

I wonder how the US text books present Columbus Day these days. On Columbus Day this year, there were protests (Columbus Day protest leads to arrests) because for some Columbus day represents the beginning of the end. In Japan there is a lot of controversy over how to present some of the events in World War II in textbooks (Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History) and there's been protests about this too.

Will the children of the future have access to the data of the past and will they bother to access it? Many companies have data retention policies. Will we one day have data retention policies regarding our everyday lives to document who came before and what they did? Or will the future 'define' history? Or for those who believe that time is a dimension that will eventually be conquered, will we have viewers of the past so each generation can do their own research and interpretation of the past.