History is worth billions, but not for those who make it

We visited some interesting sites over the new year (and had some wonderful Japanese cooking with it - thanks to my wonderful wife for arranging it - and sorry for making you mad this morning). Of those sites, one was a (reconstructed) castle, the rest were actual historical sites (temples a tousand years old in Yamadera). I loved it, and that got me thinking:
* Of all the tourist sites you have ever visited, how many have not been associated with history of some kind? (Disneyland, Dubai, other theme parks....)
* Why do we consider historical monuments to be more interesting than - for instance - natural wonders?
* The people who starved and froze, what did they get out of it (and believe you me, it must have been cold in those temples, with no chance of central heating)?

Answering the second question myself, I think that it has to do with the human tendency to add signifiers to objects. Now I am being biosemioticistic, but humans like things to have meaning, and may add meaning to things even if there is no intrinsic one. Our theory of mind also ascribes human motivations to other beings, even when we are wrong doing so (anthropomorphing our cats is a good example - they are beasts of prey, not pets, by nature).
This means that we will attach more significance to places which have a meaning to other humans. And so it will accumulate over time, until history feeds on itself. And it is only for humans that the activity of other humans adds value, and this is why more people go to battlefields than waterfalls.
Nobody at the time thought about becoming a tourist attraction. The people who built Yamadera hardly thought about their descendants making their living off tourists coming on the train. Nobody at Gettysburg can have imagined themselves being just a few hundred meters from a visitors center.
Of course, there had to be a seed at some point, and the people who starved and froze (and up until some 70 years or so, very few people were exempt from starvation or freezing) didn't do it to show off to future generations, they did it to glorify an idea. It is only in our time that we have started to think that we should build monuments with no other purpose than showing our views to future generations (see, for instance, the clock of the long now). How do you build a visitors center which lasts for ten thousand years? These guys already thought about it. It is not only Disneyland which is artificial.
The question is, of course: Is there more value in Yamadera than Disneyland? Discount the value of the visitors over time, and it quickly adds up. Just the train tickets over the hundred years there has been train service will have created more value than Disneyland. The surrounding economic environment also plays a role. The shops are not owned by Disney, so how do you measure their value? The guy in the street who was selling noodles and candies, making his childhood dream come true, he was getting infinite value out of it. But he could not have done it in Disneyland. Open source will add more value, but it will always be harder to measure - so it will not win in the end.
And the next question: In a thousand years, will our childrens children many times removed go to admire the home of the mouse? Will they go to Yamadera?

By the way, I used Google more times than I did Word today. Interesting. I wonder if I would have paid for it, or if I would use Word if Microsoft put ads in their applications.

//Johan