Never underestimate the power of the First Post.
Diogenes died over two thousand years ago and we still remember him for being the first crazy homeless dude.
And for his gigantic brass balls. When Alexander the Great rolled through, he specifically went to meet with Diogenes, asking him "What can I, Alexander, give you?"
Diogenes, who had been sunbaking, responded irritably to the undisputed master of the Greek world "Get out of my sunlight."
Alexander laughed and remarked "If I weren't Alexander, I should like to be Diogenes."
Without missing a beat, Diogenes shot back "If I weren't Diogenes, I should also like to be Diogenes."
But to your point, it all depends on how much future societies can relate to our time and place now. How consequential does our time period right now
feel to them? We clamber over ourselves to compare our times with the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire of Antiquity, but don't generally think about the Roman Empire of the Medieval period except to point out that the Byzantines did some stuff too.
For all we know, the future population of Earth and its planetary colonies will identify with China much more than the Anglosphere and Europe. We'd be seen as an interesting but exotic sideshow, the way the Medieval Arab world plays second fiddle to the Latin West in our own histories, forgetting or ignoring that it formed the centre of wealth and power in Western Eurasia for hundreds of years.
It may go like this: Oh yeah, these periphery powers made some furtive moves to put people into space, but things didn't really get moving until Hong Li and his crew of adventurers founded the first permanent colony on Titan.
