I haven’t had a scary dream in years, but I had one recently. It was the kind that had me shook. 

I dreamed that a computer virus went through all the files and redid them all in the style of artificial intelligence art and ChatGPT writing. The result was that everything looked and sounded similar, but was false and weird at the same time. Nobody knew the difference between what was real or fake anymore. It not only messed up the daily news, but also historical archives and digital libraries. Nothing was untouched. Nothing was normal. Nothing was verifiable. Everything was ruined.

In the book of Genesis, the people build and abandoned a tower. Some scholars consider the Tower of Babel to be a fictional tale or an allegory, but if we look at the remnants of ancient civilizations, we see that it has happed more than once.  

Many societies, despite some seeming very “advanced” ended. There were hanging gardens in Babylon, aqueducts in Rome, pyramids in Egypt, ziggurats in Mexico and stone cities in central Asia and Africa. We’ve discovered abandoned temples in jungles that were so covered up that even the people in the nearby villages had no memory of them. We have found ships in deserts. 

As castles have been built and reduced to ruins, the desire for world domination continues not only physically, but mentally as well. Algebra was invented and forgotten then reinvented. The world was flat and then round then flat again. Then round and flat. The planets and stars have been named and renamed. The medicinal qualities of plants has been discovered and lost and rediscovered. Philosophies have been explored and libraries have been collected, buried or burned. 

My conclusion is that we worry too much about how history will remember us, but we don’t worry enough about how it may simply forget us entirely.