Goofalo said:

I think factory livestock production is going to take a long time to go away. Like, I'll give it a century after marijuana is legalized and fossil fuel use is virtually eliminated before factory livestock processing goes away.

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Valhelm said:

Capitalism can't last forever and we're going to need a better system to lest we all die horribly. A socialist future (probably more Star Trek than Stalinist) is going to happen whether the rich like it or not. This will have really interesting implications on how our descendants perceive today's politics.

If I had to guess, beloved imperial figures like Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy will no longer be seen as heroes. At the same time, future historians will probably remember autocratic left-wing societies like Mao's China a little too fondly, focusing more on their upending of the feudal order and less on their abuses of supposed counterrevolutionaries.

Today's reactionaries are going to be universally reviled. I'm certain that future media will make no distinction between the French aristocrats who drank champagne while peasants were starving and the Republican politicians who tried to steal people's healthcare just to lower their tax rate. Free market advocates like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman will be laughed at as short-sighted idealists, far too enamored with the ruling class to see the forest for the trees.

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18-Volt said:

Once we perfect the synthetic nutrition, both livestock and agricultural industry will be obsolete. Agriculture means deforestation, hard manual labour and clean water use and it needs to go. Synthetic foods needs to be in out future and anyone who perfects it will be the savior of the people.

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jetjevons said:

It's like you didn't even watch the future documentary that is Spielberg's A.I.

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shockthrill said:

we don't celebrate science as we used to now a days


Why isn't there a scientist as celebrated as Einstein now a days. The man was a celebrity when he came to America


Ed Witten, arguably the smartest man in the world. He is a brilliant physicist, and the only physicist to wins the field medal

but i bet hardly anyone has heard of him

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Spieler Eins said:

We celebrate "tech people" like Gates, Steve Jobs, and so forth. These people will be known later as the James Watt of the digital revolution.

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jetjevons said:

Doesn't mean some day humanity won't look back and think, "Damn, now we know these animals had some form of evolving sentient consciousness and a sense of emotional family connection or any other traits that were similar to early, early humans, the worst thing wasn't even that we killed and ate them, but the WAY we did it on such a ridiculous scale of industrial efficiency with total disregard for the animals' wellbeing, that compared to anything else in human history... boy, did we ever get THAT ONE wrong."

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Jisgsaw said:

Ehm what? The garmans are following roughly at the same pace as other manufacturers. Heck, Daimler invested billions in a new electric car factory recently, and they will all bring out top of the line electric cars before 2020. BMW also already plans its last diesel engine for 2026 (that was a couple years ago, maybe they cut it even shorter in the meantime).
And Volvo's announcement was almost only PR: they themselves confirmed most of their model won't even be full plug-in hybrids, though it's still a step in the right direction.

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