Maybe one angle is clean vs. dirty? Ancient imagery brings to mind dust, rust, yellowing of paper and bleaching by the sun. If one looks at the future as the opposite of the past, we’d imagine it clean and bright.
Other future-as-inversion-of-past ideas:
The past was brutal and violent; the future is peaceful and harmonized (well, ignoring extraterrestrial space war)
The past was concerned with frivolity, the future is concerned with important things like science, technology, fairness, etc.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the past was information-poor: lossy, poorly preserved, easily lost documents in ambiguous old language vs. modern, lossless, high-fidelity recordings of knowledge en masse
Maybe one angle is clean vs. dirty? Ancient imagery brings to mind dust, rust, yellowing of paper and bleaching by the sun. If one looks at the future as the opposite of the past, we’d imagine it clean and bright.
Other future-as-inversion-of-past ideas:
The past was brutal and violent; the future is peaceful and harmonized (well, ignoring extraterrestrial space war)
The past was concerned with frivolity, the future is concerned with important things like science, technology, fairness, etc.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the past was information-poor: lossy, poorly preserved, easily lost documents in ambiguous old language vs. modern, lossless, high-fidelity recordings of knowledge en masse