The other night I was reading a bedtime dinosaur book to my two "older" boys (ages 7 and 3). Looking at the vibrant illustrations in the book, my adroit 7 year old asked, "Dad, if Paleontologists learned about the dinosaurs through fossils, then how do they know what colors they were?" "Good question!" I replied proudly. "Mostly they don't. They can guess and estimate about the color of the creatures from what they know about their feeding habits and their environment. But they don't really know for sure."

Modern historians learn about more recent human civilizations through written records. Yet there is often still much debate and interpretation over what may have actually occurred.

An article on www.columbiatribune.com called Your online status: Looking for attention got me wondering what historians of the future will make of our generation. The article quotes B.J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, "This is huge. There has never been anything like this before. We have never had the tools to capture and recover and share our lives like we have today."

Will future philosophers be led to believe that every one of us was famous? Or just that we all wanted to be? Certainly they won't have any trouble discovering what important things were happening in our age as long as silicon (computer chips, not breast implants) survives any forthcoming apocalypse.

It may just be so easy to look back at our age and see what happened here that there won't be any need for such a job as historian. And it may also be that all of our blog posts and Twitter Tweets just won't be very interesting compared to issues and technology of tomorrow. -CF