In the social media age everyone thinks what they are doing or saying is newsworthy (guilty as charged). We are shouting our news through our Twitter streams, blogging our hearts out and vying for attention from anyone that can validate the worthiness of our announcement. The problem is that 99.999% of this “news” doesn’t really matter in the long run. It isn’t going to change the world and it is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Will anyone care social media marketing 10,000 years from now? Will it change the way in which all of us live that far into the future? Maybe…. but probably not.
You want news? How about this?
- It’s estimated that by 2050, the number of centenarians worldwide will reach nearly 6 million. And some say that half of the babies born in the U.S. today will live into the 22nd century.
- Today, humans speak to each other in nearly 7,000 languages; it’s estimated that 90% of those languages will be gone by 2050, displaced by English, Spanish, or Chinese.
- In 1971, President Nixon declared “war on cancer.” In the forty years since, the U.S. has spent some $200 billion on research, but we’ve only cut the death rate by 5% (measured since 1950). Cancer still accounts for 13% of deaths worldwide.
- In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000.
The above news is from longnews.org, a site dedicated to sharing the news stories that will still matter fifty, one hundred or ten thousands years from now. In other words it is the news that REALLY matters.
