How Will Our Descendants Remember the 20th Century?

I assume you are right in that the farther into the future People live, the less significant they are going to find inventions or events that were groundbreaking to us. To use Your 1800s anology, for People living then the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War must have seen comparable to how we view the World War 1 and 2 now, wars that completly changed the way wars were fought and gave rise to the British Empire as the first global superpower. On the scientific front many inventions like steam engines, electricity, vaccines etc. etc. completly reshaped the way People lived their lives and made Western hegemony as we remember it possible because now it was suddenly all "we have the Maxim gun and they don't". Today we regard those wars as important but not "that" important and take all those inventions for granted.
Same Thing With the 1800s attitude to the 1600s, which for the People living then also must have seen like an era of change and possibilities. 

So using that example, the poeple living in the 2200s are going to think of Our time period as interesting, but not as interesting as what happened last Century when they began colonising the Solar System or some gigantic war happened.

To continue on this, I'm especially interested to see how countries that had transformative experiences during the 20th Century (whether good or bad) remember them by the late 21st/early 22nd ones, when we can safely say that everyone who witnessed them is long dead.

By this, I mean how will a still-surviving Russia regard the long-gone USSR, or what will former Axis Powers make of their WW2-era counterparts? 2100s+ China's memory of the Civil War, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etcetera is certainly something to speculate on, too. Similar can be said of former Communist Bloc nations as well as Korea, depending on how its future turns out.

I'm also concerned about what sort of effect the inevitable extinction of the remaining WW2, Korea, Vietnam, etcétera-war veterans will have on how our descendants perceive those periods in history and, of course, behave towards one another. I've read a prediction or two that a tiny minority of the first few might celebrate/mourn/reflect upon the 100th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but the accuracy and long-term reliability of such reports can be questionable, to say the least.

Regardless of when they finally bite the big one, though, I don't know that it'd be quite like the passing of the last WW1 veterans. Keep in mind that even with them no longer with us, we still had plenty of decades-younger elders who served in its bigger brother (which was WW2, of course) to directly tell us about how horrible conflict on that scale can be. Having all witnesses of one of two World Wars dead =/= having all witnesses of both World Wars dead.

And I fear that their collective passings might make it all that much easier for future generations to repeat their mistakes.

Assuming that enough goes well and that society remains functioning and stable by the late 21st/early 22nd Century, I might live to tell my grandkids about how it was to have grown up alongside the last Greatest Generation members--not to mention today's divisive political climate, the beginnings of the Information Age, all of those topics that aren't to be discussed in the FH forum.

One person on AH.com said that far-future people might remember WW2 as we regard the Thirty Years' War. In the long term, I can see this being true.

In the (historically-speaking) short one, however, I think that late 21st/22nd Century-era society will treat either of the World Wars as more akin to how modern people treat the Napoleonic Wars.

What do the rest of you think?

I wonder how the 100th anniversary of various key events of WW2 will go--from its (albeit debatable) initiation when German forces blitzed Poland on September 1, 1939, to a battered Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945. Once September 2, 2045 finally rolls around, we can finally claim that the Second World War--from beginning to end--took place a century ago; I feel surreal just thinking about how life will be with no more Greatest Generation members left.

To a lesser extent, I also feel this way about remembering the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etcétera. Eventually, society will reflect on the 100th anniversary of 9/11, and the War on Terror that ensued. But there's little assurance that I'll become a centenarian who witnesses those commemorations happen.

Either way, though, I hope that I live to see such turmoil confined to the history books. Fifty, sixty, seventy more years is a lot of time for things to get better, or to get worse...