You haven't seen the many-thousands upvoted threads of mashups of various locations in WWII and modern day? Or the sourcebooks that designers use for all the costume drama on TV and in movies?
EDIT: Here's an example Imgur thread. (http://imgur.com/a/2rNrn)
I mean, if the best you can come up as "value most people get from historical data" is photo montages of WWII/now and better designed costumes for period movies..
The same way most people don't care about archeological museums, old music and old books. How many copies do history books sell in your B&N, compared to cooking, self-help, crime novels and such?
At best, people watch some documentary on TV or visit a museum and quickly move on with their lives none the wiser.
(I, for one, do. I revel in old stuff, from Plato to the Retronaut website. And I'm doing a project with reconstructed ancient greek music. But people who care about such stuff are mostly outliers).
Judging from sales numbers, 90% of the population could not care less.
You seem unable to grasp that something might be irrelevant TO most people (as in: they could not care less about it) and still relevant IN ITSELF.
Plus, science is a bad example, because it's totally unlike history or classical music. Someone not caring about science still comes into contact every day with products of science, they shape his life in major deegree, the economy he lives in, his health, his food, etc.
With classical music or history, people can forget about them and nothing happens to them (well, apart from them being less educated, but since most other people are too hardly anyone notices).
Everything you're saying now is obvious, which is why I asked why you're bothering to make this point. It seems like you're just being argumentative for no reason.
For one, yeah, "what if" we had these kind of views for the streets of London in 1900? I doubt many would care, same as not many care for 1900 music, 1900 books, 1900 photographs and such. Some scholars maybe.
Second, what the parent said goes beyond that. Essentially he says, the people of 2200 could have the streets of 2100 fully 3D imaged, but empty of life, with people of 2100 mostly staying at home and merely doing VR walks.
Now this might sound far-fetched and implausible, but not much more than telling 1900 people that in 100 years there would be cities were people rarely walk in public to go about their business but mostly go around with their cars.