History Future Now Tristan Fischer

History Future Now is a website dedicated to looking at current events from a historical perspective and then using that vantage point to look to the future.

Most current events are just noise and will have very limited impact on our lives in the future. Some events, however, are significant and will have an impact for centuries to come. History Future Now is split into four overlapping themes of Natural Resources, the Global Balance of Power, Jobs & the Economy and Society.

The Covid 19 pandemic is a genuinely historical event. Future historians will analyse the period leading up to the outbreak, searching for clues about why it got so bad so quickly, will then investigate how societies managed the initial phase of the outbreak and finally will make conclusions about the long term impacts. When they do so they will have the benefit of hindsight and history will look neat, with few loose ends.

From our prospective, in the early phases of the outbreak, things look confused and even chaotic. Governments are struggling to find a way through the crisis whilst trying solve two seemingly contradictory problems; how to save individual lives and how to save their economies and societies.

This article provides a historical preview of how historians will look back at the longer term impacts of Covid 19. We look at 12 main forces, split into two parts, first what we refer to as “inevitable history” and second what we refer to as “broken history”.