I have to agree with Seth. The world will go down in a handbasket and mankind will forever be stuck on this planet fighting each other's ass off, either with weapons or without.

The only chance of ever getting farther than our solar system would be a stargateueske scenario or a form of alien intervention.

2000 years ago it was 9 AD. Beginning to understand civil life? The Roman Empire was at its peak! And the Romans are anything but primitive.

Yes, the problem with western history is we did fall into a dark age. The world essentially fell apart around 300-400 CE with the fall of Rome and really did not begin to progress again for 1000 years. If you really look at things, progress didn't really start to be made again until the renaissance, at which point they were (in some aspects at least) reaching up to the point of technology available during the Roman period. If not for the dark ages, we would probably already have Mars terraformed by now and would be at the very least experimenting with theorized FTL travel.

If one looks back through history to compare technology, one must really start after the fall of Rome to get an accurate picture of how technology has progressed up the present. After the fall of Rome, we essentially fell back from a technologically advanced civilization to an agriculturally based primative society.

This is probably the thing I fear the most about the future, the possibility of another dark age. Falling back to a primative society is probably one of the worst options, the third worst as far as I can think of. It is topped only by the possibilities of the extinction of humans, and the absolute worst, the extinction of life on earth. Or as the famous saying goes: "It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."

The only thing more important than the acquisition of knowledge is making sure the knowledge we have obtained is passed down to future generations.

I think we fell into the second dark ages once we started using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC. Our Dark Ages have only just begun people think the middle ages were bad wait until PC police become a government agency. Technology, especially networking, makes centralization of power easier not harder. I think society and technology will radically change in the future so science fiction beyond the next 30 or so years is completely speculative.

The final sentence I agree with. Sci-fi has always been purely speculation, as any predictions of the future should be.

The third sentence is a false claim. The entire thinking behind the internet is the decentralization of knowledge. If you think having knowledge stored in only museums and books (most of which are only found in museums or great libraries) is more decentralized than having that same knowledge distributed across various web servers all around the world in tens if not hundreds of countries and available to anyone with access to a computer, I am sorry but that is just flat out wrong. For one, look at China. Despite all attempts to ban political opposition as well as pornagraphy on all computers in China, they have failed to be able to stop it. Quiet it down, sure, but not nearly as easily as if it were in the real world rather than the virtual. Networking makes centralization of power easier only if the network was built with that purpose specifically in mind.

I am not entirely sure what you mean by saying we are in a dark age now. We most certainly are not. Technology is increasing at a rate faster than ever (exponential growth), standards of living are rising, life span is rising, litteracy is rising. Tell me how you came to the conclusion we are in a dark age? And what does changing the naming system of years have to do with anything? Heck, even if there were 'PC police' I for one would really like that much more than facing starvation on a daily basis like the peasants of medieval Europe.

Information itself is a counter to autoritarian governments. Take the Soviet Union for example. Quoted from the wiki page 'Fall of Soviet Union:
"Relaxation under glasnost resulted in the Communist Party losing its absolute grip on the media. Before long, and much to the embarrassment of the authorities, the media began to expose severe social and economic problems the Soviet government had long denied and actively concealed. Problems receiving increased attention included poor housing, alcoholism, drug abuse, pollution, outdated Stalin-era factories, and petty to large−scale corruption, all of which the official media had ignored. Media reports also exposed crimes committed by Stalin and the Soviet regime, such as the gulags, his treaty with Adolf Hitler, and the Great Purges, which had been ignored by the official media. Moreover, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and the mishandling of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which Gorbachev tried to cover up, further damaged the credibility of the Soviet government at a time when dissatisfaction was increasing."
When a population find out they have been spoon fed lies, the reaction often leads to the collapse of the government which has power over them.

The only reason they hate it is it has a tendancy to change more rapidly and a previous version of a page is not easily accessable. Which means you could be plagarizing for all they know. As far as accuracy, a study done by Nature 4 years ago came to the conclusion it was really no less accurate than Encyclopedia Britanica.

Oh, and happy Pi Day!
3.14159265358979323846264338

You dont seem to realize that networking and the internet was designed by DARPA and the Department of Defense. You also miss the technologies and development being done that centralize power and give greater regulation over what goes on. Ive seen it first hand because telecommunications is what im studying right now. I am a student in networking and security so ive seen enough and read enough to know that "freedom" derived from the internet or networking is an illusion and a good deception at that.