# What will future generations despise us for? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 6, 2014, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529 "2014-10-06T08:55:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/41 "2014-10-07T04:10:32Z")
> [@Ethilrist](#): > > Radioactive waste. If we have living descendants who carry on any sort of historical understanding of the past, they’ve got power, so how we get our power now won’t bother people 10 generations from now, but leaving a bunch of rusting, corroded containers of radioactive waste in bunkers is probably gonna annoy people thousands of years from now, particularly if nobody can read the markings on them any more. Get a clue regarding nuclear waste will you. It’s not being left around in paint cans in the back yard FFS. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/42 "2014-10-07T04:26:55Z")
I think they’ll be surprised at how completely inaccurate our predictions of global warming turned out to be. 200 years from now the Earth will still be essentially the same. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/43 "2014-10-07T04:34:50Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > I think they’ll be surprised at how completely inaccurate our predictions of global warming turned out to be. 200 years from now the Earth will still be essentially the same. :sigh: In the 70’s, in the middle of a slowdown and significant cooling most experts predicted that warming was coming anyhow. (And they did that with less accurate instruments than the ones of today). They were correct, and now with better instruments and data I do not think that it is safe to claim that a current “pause” shows that the climate scientists are wrong. It is less likely that they are wrong when they report that more warming is coming thanks to human emissions of global warming gases. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/44 "2014-10-07T05:16:11Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > No. I’m reading a lot concerning global warming, same-sex marriage, mass extinction, etc. Most of us have extrapolated our world into the future, as if the same issues will be important to our descendants. That’s quite a supposition. How do you know future people will even care about these issues? How do I _know_? I don’t know. You can’t know, and that’s the point of the discussion. You’re theorizing. I think my guesses are pretty safe, though. Climate change is already having major effects on the world, and that’s only going to increase because the planet will keep heating up and we’ll have several billion more humans taxing the planet. It could really affect our ability to feed ourselves, find enough water to drink, and avoid disease. There was an opportunity to avoid the worst of this and we’ve already blown it, so now it’s a question of how bad the worst of it will be. It’s not hard to imagine future generations shaking their heads about that. And it seems like every generation tries (and fails) to fix the disasters that stem from previous generation’s interference in the Middle East. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/45 "2014-10-07T05:47:34Z")
I agree with the future disapproving of our consumption of live meat, our damage to the environment, our massive consumption of irreplaceable resources, our opposition to same sex marriage. I suspect there will be a lot of disapproval of modern religion, although exactly how it’s disapproved of will depend on how the future goes. The old monotheisms don’t seem to be very stable at this point in history; the question is whether they’ll collapse into secularism, or be replaced by religions better adapted to a modern civilization. Or manage to brainwash everyone with futuretech so the future is basically _The Handmaid’s Tale_ with mind control implants, and if they are allowed to be aware of us at all the people of the future despise us because we’re all guilty of the sin of having unapproved thoughts. > [@Malden\_Capell](#): > > Slight derail, but I’m also curious what later generations will venerate about us. Like how people right now are favouring steampunk, or 1950s ‘chap’ culture, or the romance of the flapper generation. Probably not much, we’re not a very fun or stylish culture. We’re repressed and seem to have a compulsion to make everything we build look like a monochrome box. > [@chappachula](#): > > Well, not exactly [del]godwin[/del] Hitler, but more like the classic book Brave New World. > > My point is that most of the posts here assume that our modern notion of personal,individual freedom is the ultimate good. It’s the final result of eliminating evils: first slavery, then racial discrimination, then discrimination against women, and now discrimination against gay–all in order to let each individual live his life in freedom. > > For our generation, freedom is the best way, of course. But I wonder if in the future, it will seem incomprehensible, just as how I can’t comprehend slavery. > > The technology we live with shapes our social attitudes. When you had no farm technology, and needed masses of workers in the cotton fields, you could believe in slavery, for example. > > And in the future-- when medical technology changes , and we fully understand the limitations of each person’s brain-- our social attitudes will change, too. In such a future our descendents will likely _have no_ opinions about our time, either because they are programmed puppets who don’t even know our time existed, or because they were all exterminated as superfluous. Simply asking the question “what will our descendents think of us” is built on the assumption that people will be capable of having an opinion; and is the society you are hypothesizing they won’t be able to have any such thing. And slavery was _always_ a bad idea. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/46 "2014-10-07T09:30:24Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > How do you know future people will even care about these issues? Oh, they’ll care about global warming when they have to drink their own recycled piss on their catamaran… ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/47 "2014-10-07T10:36:00Z")
Our worship of cars as well as the selfishness and the fetishism that go with it. I hope they’ll despise our willful dependence on these scraps of metal. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/48 "2014-10-07T13:07:47Z")
Letting Disco die. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/49 "2014-10-07T13:14:21Z")
> [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](#): > > Our worship of cars as well as the selfishness and the fetishism that go with it. I hope they’ll despise our willful dependence on these scraps of metal. Metal? What do you drive? ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Panda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@Darth\_Panda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Panda)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/50 "2014-10-07T13:16:34Z")
Faing to colonize mars in time… Now, it’s too late. ---
**Author:** ![GoodOmens](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/d26b3c/32.png) [@GoodOmens](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GoodOmens)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/51 "2014-10-07T13:28:50Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I think “despise” is a pretty strong term. I think it’ll ultimately be viewed overall more along the lines of the way we view medicine practiced prior to the germ theory of disease. Barbaric, ignorant and harmful, but the best we had at the time. > > I mean, we do have alternatives, but none of them, with the exception of nuclear fission, have the potential to replace the fossil fuel energy we currently use. Plus, the electric vehicles we do have are severely limited due to battery capacity issues. The difference is that, pre-germ-theory, they really didn’t know any better. We do. We have alternate energy sources which are perfectly viable, they just have problems with scaling and efficiency (quite considerable problems, to be sure). In other words, we know about solutions to the problem, we are collectively not putting in the necessary effort to make them come to being. THAT’S how we’ll be viewed, not as ignorant, but as willfully ignorant. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/52 "2014-10-07T13:51:22Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > Metal? What do you drive? I don’t drive, didn’t you guess? By the way, what are cars made of, if not metal (at least in part) :o ? ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/53 "2014-10-07T14:48:34Z")
> [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](#): > > By the way, what are cars made of, if not metal (at least in part) :o ? [Less and less metal, more plastic.](http://www.livescience.com/5449-chemistry-life-plastic-cars.html) > [@](#): > > For domestic cars, the percentage of weight in steel and iron has dropped from 75 percent in 1977 to 63 percent in 2004, according to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/54 "2014-10-07T15:04:02Z")
Ah OK, thanks. But for a minute there, I thought that my suggesting that cars were made of metal was as silly as thinking the moon was made of cheese. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/55 "2014-10-07T15:36:01Z")
“It was a benighted time, when horses were enslaved and women free . . .” ---
**Author:** ![MOIDALIZE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e274bd/32.png) [@MOIDALIZE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MOIDALIZE)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/56 "2014-10-07T16:30:31Z")
Not creating a subforum for game threads. ---
**Author:** ![Algher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Algher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Algher)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/57 "2014-10-07T16:49:40Z")
We don’t look down on whaling for light sources today, we merely comment on it. Same with cutting wood for making charcoal. Merely a footnote in most history textbooks today as they discuss Titusville, etc. Assuming a superior replacement power source for coal and oil is developed, I will extrapolate a similar level of commentary for 100 years from now. I think we might see similar commentary on population density and housing. Perhaps in 100 years the suburban experiment will be gone, as population growth forces more townhouse, then condo style development combined with better mass transit options. Then again, if rechargeable electric type transportation continues to improve - that might not be as critical. Instead, we all get into self-driving Teslas and their competition. Better management of public space to ensure clean air, including a reduced demand for live meat is possible. With reduced population growth among the educated classes, and with the desire to educate more - we might see a leveling off of population growth - which will throw a lot of assumptions out the door. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/58 "2014-10-07T17:33:39Z")
> [@Darth\_Panda](#): > > Faing to colonize mars in time… > > Now, it’s too late. Damn the Martians for fortifying their borders with spore colonies! ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/59 "2014-10-07T18:47:47Z")
Allowing the Designated Hitter experiment to continue past the first year. > [@billfish678](#): > > Letting Disco die. 😕 That’s weird; I _already_ despise the people of the disco era for not killing it sooner. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529/60 "2014-10-07T20:07:36Z")
> [@Darth\_Panda](#): > > Faing to colonize mars in time… > > Now, it’s too late. I kinda think the opposite. I suspect they will despise us for spending an inordinate amount of resources on baubles in space, versus addressing the core problems that are causing people to look to space as a refuge from the problems we have created. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-future-generations-despise-us-for/700529.md?page=4)