I think society will eventually turn against how prisons are run. Yes, some people do horrible things, but the general state of prisons are abhorrent. While there’s always a segment of people that need to be kept away from the rest of society for good, there’s a whole lot of regular criminals who can and should be rehabilitated. Prison doesn’t usually help that
And I believe that difference between people such as sexual orientation, race, and religion will seem much more banal when confronted with the thousand-armed menace of the Trifidians
Back in 2014, the environment wasn’t toxic. It was safe to go outside without a PAPR respirator. People could actually swim in lakes and oceans safely. Even though people could safely spend a whole day outside, they didn’t. They lived in climate controlled buildings, walked as short a distance as possible to their climate controlled personal transport vehicles, and complained if they had to spend more than two or three minutes walking to their vehicle. They took for granted all of these things that we’ll never be able to partake in and looked on blindly as the environment was destroyed.
Health care was a shambles, with many people lacking access to even the most basic health care and even more lacking dental care.
Even though the people of 2014 prided themselves as being non-prejudiced, minorities were still deprived of their rights. Gay people were not allowed to marry in some states, black people were subject to arrest and conviction more than white people, and brown people were subject to random stops and questioning and required to show that they were in the US legally.
Overwhelmingly, the people of 2014 buried their heads in the sand, refusing to see both social injustices and environmental destruction.
I agree climate change and mass extinction will be on the list. I also think they will look back with puzzlement on how religious we are - they will learn that most of the conflicts of our time are rooted in religious differences. They will probably wonder why we kept the burden of faith as long as we did. I would not go as far as saying they will “despise” us for religion, but many of the things they will despise us for may start there.
Foolish ancestors, believing that skin color had any relationship to one’s merit or worth in the eyes of the eyesSky Lords, when everyone know that its the ratio between the length of one’s index and ring fingers. Long life to Overlord Mufasa Chen and may you forever dance in a straight line, earth brother!
Its interesting, though, that the people of the future so strongly support the things the posters support and oppose the things the posters oppose. How in tune with future trends we must be.
Failing to do much of anything about climate change despite piles and piles of scientific evidence, America’s aggressive foreign policy misadventures in the Middle East, letting near-extinct diseases return through anti-vax nonsense, and maybe a failure to give enough help to developing countries that are going to go through a population explosion.
You guys are attributing today’s values onto our descendants. In fact, we have no idea what values they’ll have.
Having babies the “natural” way. Women keeping a fetus in their wombs and allowing it to develop to term, rather than combining clones of its parent(s) in a lab. Demanding that each offspring has two parents.
Wasting time trying to fight “global warming” and the practices that created it. They have no idea how adaptable we can become.
Segregating “criminals” from the rest of the population, rather than curing their mental diseases.
Allowing children to live, despite obvious defects.
Valuing a political system called “Democracy,” although many of the people who voted knew nothing of the issues involved.
People will be frustrated because our shows and movies are on low resolution proprietary formats that no one makes or supports anymore. Or they won’t care since there will be even more media being produced, but ya know, for anyone who’s curious to go back and check out the golden oldies.
Pretty sure I know what people won’t care about: partisan politics of a country that may not even be relevant anymore. The idea that future peoples will be blaming Republicans for global warming is too rich. Because the Dems are just champing at the bit to swoop in and remake society? Because America controls worldwide industrialization? Heck, for all you know “Americans” will be appropriated for future high school sports mascots. “The Americans! They were like, badass killers, or something? They wore jeans and sunglasses I think.”
In the short term, say 1 to 2 generations from now, Gay marriage bans will be looked at with as much disgust as interracial marriage was a generation or so after Loving.
In the longer term, say 3 to 5 generations from now, people will be aghast at how long it took to accept the science behind climate change and how desperately deniers held onto their beliefs.
During this period, I think we will also see a lessening of outsized influence over the federal government and legislation by Christian groups and a “why the Hell did we ever allow this to happen” epiphany.
Future generations will study how the state was covered in an ideological veil with the rise of representative democracy. They will be disturbed how in this era, the state, and its court intellectuals, successfully tricked its taxed and coerced into believing it was taxing and coercing for their own good. Special attention will be devoted to a study of the devastating monetary interventions into the economy that caused misallocation and consumption of productive capital on a scale so immense that thousands died annually as a result of decreased productive capacity.
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?
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.
Point being that it seems that you are going for the idea that a lot of the problems that are being identified now will not be important in the future, it seems to me that** that is the assumption with no good support** and it may be so that there are items that we are missing but as Asimov can tell you, everything that isn’t perfectly and completely known is not likely to be completely wrong in the future.
Thing is that overpopulation, mass extinction and global warming can be deal with, but the issue will not go away or get better in the future, and I can think that is likely for the simple reason that there are powerful groups that currently deny and advises us to not do anything or next to nothing about them.