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[Damon Bennet]

I feel there are a lot of things that are bound to happen. Things that are still normal today, but wont be in the future. For example: slavery was once normal and accepted by society, but society improved and slavery was abolished. People back then standing up for their rights and the rights of their peers were obviously on the right side of history.


So.. what are things you expect to change in the future? Here are my choices:

1) Mass-Livestock Meatproduction. Everything about that is wrong. Its bad for farmers, its incredibly incredibly bad for the environment - and its horrible for the animals. Its the most obvious thing to get rid of.

2) Marijuana: Legalize it. You can already see it in the states and other countries: people are slowly but steadily changing their mind about marijuana. In a couple of years, most countries will loosen their prohibitions.

3) Cars running on fossil fuels: it has already begun with the diesel-scandal. And German car-makers are still hesitant to innovate with electric engines. But Volvo and other companies already follow Teslas lead - in 20 years, nobody will by a car that runs on fuel.

 

[JCHandsom]

Global Warming is going to end civilization before any of that stuff happens tbh.

 

[yanipheonu]

Whose history are we talking about?

 

[Adam_Vania]

slavery was not abolished just outsourced and given a suicide net

 

[Goofalo]

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.

 

[Funyarinpa]

Not the impact of religion on the societies of the world.

Bigots will still rule most but not all.

I can't think of anything changing for the better.

 

[frothystout]

Slavery is still rampant across the world. We've got a long ways to go before we can actually say we've conquered any of humanity's shortcomings. Probably never will as long as money drives it all.

 

[teruterubozu]

I don't like that phrase "right side of history". It just sounds super naive. History is unfeeling and not an upward trajectory towards utopia. Shit goes bad and shit goes good over and over. Yes we have to fight for what we feel is right at the moment, but history doesn't give two fucks.

 

[Billy_Pilgrim]

There was a time when Lobotomy was a cutting edge science lauded by the most progressive individuals on the planet. You don't know whether you're on the right side of history until the other lot are on the wrong side of it.

 

[shockthrill]

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

 

[Boney]

I'm right there with you an all three.

 

[Bony Manifesto]

Doesn't everyone think every single one of their beliefs is going to be on the 'right side of history'?

 

[jstripes]

1) Mass-Livestock Meatproduction. Everything about that is wrong. Its bad for farmers, its incredibly incredibly bad for the environment - and its horrible for the animals. Its the most obvious thing to get rid of.

This one's a bit loaded, because it sort of implies the extinction of our domesticated farm animals.

 

[PSqueak]

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

I believe that might have been due to the war? Like why Einstein was so celebrated at the time?

 

[kswiston]

Global Warming is going to end civilization before any of that stuff happens tbh.

This is as bad as the people who say global warming doesn't exist. Not only are you equally wrong, but it absolves you from doing anything about it.

 

[Desperado]

Trans rights and acceptance.

 

[SolarMystic]

This is as bad as the people who day global earming doesn't exist. Not only are you equally wrong, but it absolves you from doing anything about it.

Thank you

 

[JCHandsom]

This is as bad as the people who day global earming doesn't exist. Not only are you equally wrong, but it absolves you from doing anything about it.

Sorry, forgot the /s

 

[Abilidebob]

Kinda hard for all that to be the "right side of history" when Americans elected an Orangething as their president, and that mutant with small hands is saying what is right and wrong.

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

Those are terrible comparisons lol

People knew full well that owning people and breeding them, working them to death, etc was wrong

People aren't going to stop eating meat, weed being illegal is largely about racism and hypocrisy, and yeah fossil fuels suck and that whole thing is about lobbyists and cash

 

[kswiston]

Sorry, forgot the /s

Ah. It's hard to tell. In the past 10 months, I have read that same opinion from dozens of GAF members without the sarcasm.

Those are terrible comparisons lol

People knew full well that owning people and breeding them, working them to death, etc was wrong

I'd say that a lot of them were actually pretty good at rationalizing that sort of thing away. Especially when they were the owners of a plantation on the other side of the world.

 

[sflufan]

I don't like that phrase "right side of history". It just sounds super naive. History is unfeeling and not an upward trajectory towards utopia. Shit goes bad and shit goes good over and over. Yes we have to fight for what we feel is right at the moment, but history doesn't give two fucks.

Thank you very much! It always struck me as a self-congratulatory banality that history's "winners" tell themselves to say "See? We were right all along!"

 

[Damon Bennet]

Those are terrible comparisons lol

People knew full well that owning people and breeding them, working them to death, etc was wrong

And people know that their daily steak is made of suffering, to be dramatic. They still have it.

Thank you very much! It always struck me as a self-congratulatory banality that history's "winners" tell themselves to say "See? We were right all along!"

"changes in society that you think are necessary and bound to happen" was a bit clunky as a tilte.

 

[Sunster]

electing a president who said he would ban all muslims.

 

[JCHandsom]

Ah. It's hard to tell. In the past 10 months, I have read that same opinion from dozens of GAF members without the sarcasm.

It's okay, if anything the knowledge of what trials lay ahead makes me more motivated to take care of the shit we have going on right now.

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

And people know that their daily steak is made of suffering, to be dramatic. They still have it.



"changes in society that you think are necessary and bound to happen" was a bit clunky as a tilte.

I can't seriously humor someone who compares meat production to slavery. There's no way you're black lol

 

[hiredhand]

Getting rid of cars running on fossil fuel is going to happen or in a way is already happening. As or the other two I don't see them happening any time soon globally.

I can totally see mass-livestock meatproduction just ramping up when the Chinese become wealthier and start consuming more meat.

In my country (Finland) we are much closer to banning tobacco than allowing (non-medical) marijuana. I really can't see marijuana becoming legal while tobacco is illegal.

 

[Gotchaye]

I have a hard time seeing marijuana prohibition and fossil fuel use as the sorts of things that are going to be looked back on as grave moral errors of the sort that we want to avoid by being on "the right side of history". We use this kind of language to try to shame people out of a position that they'll be remembered poorly for or for encouraging people to do something that they'll be remembered well for.

Nobody thinks about Prohibition this way. We think of it as dumb, but it's not like when we think about 1920s America we start judging them for banning alcohol.

Fossil fuel use is going to be a very hard thing for future students of history to really wrap their heads around, unless we go postapocalyptic. It's really hard to tell a simple story here. Industrialization was a really good thing. Yeah, that had downsides, such as world wars and global warming, but it's hard for future people to look back and wish it hadn't happened. And so they'd need to be making this distinction between people polluting an excusable amount given the value of industrialization and their lack of knowledge of the consequences and people polluting an inexcusable amount because they should have known better and there were sufficiently cheap alternatives that this was not a great hardship.

Meat production, sure. That strikes me as the top candidate for why people 200 years from now are going to look back and think that we were all monsters.

 

[JohnDoe]

I can't seriously humor someone who compares meat production to slavery. There's no way you're black lol

It's not the same but to be fair...

http://www.jta.org/2016/10/06/news-...treatment-of-farm-animals-to-modern-day-shoah

Spoiler

I agree that it's unnecessary and none of white people's business to draw that comparison though.

 

[gohepcat]

1) Mass-Livestock Meatproduction. Everything about that is wrong. Its bad for farmers, its incredibly incredibly bad for the environment - and its horrible for the animals. Its the most obvious thing to get rid of.

I'm not sure I understand this.

Do you think another, cost effective way to create a dense source of calories will replace livestock? Like some sort of genetically engineered meat source without the capacity for pain? (frankly, this seems like an obvious solution, but a very hard sell)

OR do you think people will just stop eating steaks.... Because eating a steak is one of the most pleasurable things in the world to me and I would guess most people. It would be great if it came without any pain or suffering of an animal, but people are still going to want to eat meat.

 

[the-pi-guy]

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

Eh, there were lots of brilliant people back then that weren't as celebrated as Einstein.
Neumann was by all reports freakishly intelligent and has a huge list of accomplishments. Yet very few people know about him, despite being a peer of Einstein.

Einstein was also lucky not just smart. He was there to pick the "easy apples from the tree". Not that his accomplishments weren't huge, they just were less abstract than a lot of physics today. Einstein is famous because his accomplishments affected a lot more than Ed Witten did.

Unfortunately with every scientific discovery, it becomes harder to make more. You can only invent Calculus once.

I believe that might have been due to the war? Like why Einstein was so celebrated

Einstein was very celebrated because his very "weird" ideas had actual real world applications, and explained a lot of mysteries.

Those are terrible comparisons lol

People knew full well that owning people and breeding them, working them to death, etc was wrong

That's why they worked so hard to convince themselves that they weren't people.

I remember reading that the Nazi's did things like branding people, among a ton of other horrific things, to dehumanize them. A big reason for doing this is because it psychologically made it easier for the Nazis to kill people.

It was a disturbing read, but it seems to make sense.

 

[Crimson_Echidna]

.

 

[Alienous]

Religion will be looked at as superstition as technology and education spreads throughout the world.

Gender roles will dissolve. The idea of doing something "because you're a man/woman" will seem antiquated.

 

[Raiden]

I can totally see a future with mandatory self driving carq. Giving any human that passes some tests the keys to a metal speeding vehicle is pretty insane.

 

[KHarvey16]

The meat production thing just isn't going to happen in anything approaching a near-future. Your kids and their kids and their kids and their kids will all eat (or have the option to eat) dead animals.

 

[SuperOrez]

The right side of history is decided by the winners.

 

[JJMorris]

I'm not sure I understand this.

Do you think another, cost effective way to create a dense source of calories will replace livestock? Like some sort of genetically engineered meat source without the capacity for pain? (frankly, this seems like an obvious solution, but a very hard sell)

OR do you think people will just stop eating steaks.... Because eating a steak is one of the most pleasurable things in the world to me and I would guess most people. It would be great if it came without any pain or suffering of an animal, but people are still going to want to eat meat.

-40% of food is wasted by Americans. (http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/22/40-of-u-s-food-wasted-report-says/)
-Americans eat too much meat. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...utritional-panel-says/?utm_term=.057229f548a7)
-Amazon rainforest destroyed for cattle, a meat humans don't need. (https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-trade-brazil-greenpeace-amazon-deforestation)
-Amazon is destroyed for soy farms, where 80% of it is used to feed livestock. (http://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/soy)

Humans directly eating the soy would result better. Less product and energy used as a whole. I don't expect everyone to stop eating meat, but gluttony and wastefulness should be taxed.

 

[KHarvey16]

-40% of food is wasted by Americans. (http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/22/40-of-u-s-food-wasted-report-says/)
-Americans eat too much meat. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...utritional-panel-says/?utm_term=.057229f548a7)
-Amazon rainforest destroyed for cattle, a meat humans don't need. (https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-trade-brazil-greenpeace-amazon-deforestation)
-Amazon is destroyed for soy farms, where 80% of it is used to feed livestock. (http://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/soy)

Humans directly eating the soy would result better. Less product and energy used as a whole.

The problem is nearly everyone really likes meat. Those who don't are almost a rounding error in most societies.

 

[JJMorris]

The problem is nearly everyone really likes meat. Those who don't are almost a rounding error in most societies.

Yes, it's true, I just made an edit to reflect that. But people's unnecessary dietary habits need to be curbed or fined with taxation, and governments should not be subsidizing industries that have negative impacts to the environment. If someone wants the most proper, least harmful meat, then they should pay more.

 

[jstripes]

Religion will be looked at as superstition as technology and education spreads throughout the world.

You underestimate the ability of religions to adapt technology to spread their faith.

 

[Jisgsaw]

3) Cars running on fossil fuels: it has already begun with the diesel-scandal. And German car-makers are still hesitant to innovate with electric engines. But Volvo and other companies already follow Teslas lead - in 20 years, nobody will by a car that runs on fuel.

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.

 

[jetjevons]

The meat production thing just isn't going to happen in anything approaching a near-future. Your kids and their kids and their kids and their kids will all eat (or have the option to eat) dead animals.

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."

 

[jtb]

There is no right side of history.

 

[Airola]

Surely it could be said that people who have fought for science and all the advances it brings have been in the right side of history.

But then again it has also been the reason for overpopulation, global warming and all that shit. Science has led into mass industrialisation. So who knows if the people in future will actually think advocaters from progress in science were actually in the wrong side of history all along. I mean, sure, some of us have it easier because of all the things that make life less agonizing. But for the rest of the world and all that live in this planet our convenience has been their inconvenience. Maybe the ecosystems would be in better health if we wouldn't have gone the science route. Some of the more extreme people even say that even the invention of a hammer was too much.

Being in the right side of history is something we just can't claim to be in. We don't know how things change in the future.

 

[Razorback]

Doesn't everyone think every single one of their beliefs is going to be on the 'right side of history'?

That's probably true most of the time, but I'm aware I'm on the wrong side of history when it comes to eating meat.

Guess I'll live with the cognitive dissonance for now while it's still considered acceptable behavior.

 

[KHarvey16]

Yes, it's true, I just made an edit to reflect that. But people's unnecessary dietary habits need to be curbed or fined with taxation, and governments should not be subsidizing industries that have negative impacts to the environment. If someone wants the most proper, least harmful meat, then they should pay more.

I'm all for representative carbon credit like taxes. As long as they apply to everything.

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."

I don't think that's going to happen, honestly. If anything ever causes us to go away from meat the environmental argument is much more persuasive, and even that is way in the future.

 

[Airola]

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."

But then again who knows if the people in the future think that consciousness is an illusion and that we and the rest of the life in the planet are basically just computers and that there is no use in caring for what someone in some other form of life feels. Maybe they will think that we were very efficient with our ways to produce food.

It's not 100% sure that people in future would be enlightened humanists with deep caring for other animals.

 

[zeemumu]

People in the future will probably look back on marijuana legalization with the same reactions that we look back on the end of prohibition with.

So basically "yep."

 

[18-Volt]

1) Mass-Livestock Meatproduction. Everything about that is wrong. Its bad for farmers, its incredibly incredibly bad for the environment - and its horrible for the animals. Its the most obvious thing to get rid of.

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.

 

[jetjevons]

But then again who knows if the people in the future think that consciousness is an illusion and that we and the rest of the life in the planet are basically just computers and that there is no use in caring for what someone in some other form of life feels. Maybe they will think that we were very efficient with our ways to produce food.

It's not 100% sure that people in future would be enlightened humanists with deep caring for other animals.

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