I often find myself wondering what we as a generation do that our descendents will be amazed that we found acceptable. In the past, it was ok for women not to vote, to take cocaine in soft drinks, to give babies alcohol to make them sleep, to have people lose their lives at work, to discriminate against black people etc etc - but we find none of these things even close to acceptable today. What do you think that we still do that they will shake their heads at?

Building from the "Where are the snow" threads yesterday.....somebody said "I'm no defender of Global Warming", it made me think that this may be our biggest failing. They will look back on us and say - Why did they do nothing? Why did they put their head in the sand and pretend they could carry on? How could they argue it wasn't happening when the glacier that 30 years ago came to the edge of Grindelwald now takes an hour to walk to?

The UK - for example - generates 800 000 tonnes of carbon every year from the average 12 devices that each household keeps on standby. When my son is my age.....I think he will find that we thought it better to screw up the climate rather than get off our fat asses to switch on the TV unbelievable!

What else do we do that will be just unpalatable to the coming generations?

Accept stringent store opening hours.

Becoming as anti-social as we have..

Shopping from our computers instead of popping down to the local store to catch up on gossip while getting milk.

Nose stuck to your galaxy II while in the tram, instead of striking up a conversation with the person next to you, and learning something that you never even considered before.

In the future however, healing bones and muscle by cutting them open and putting pins in, will astound people- instead of sending a laser through them to realign and heal them, like they will be doing.

Also, drugs with side effects. In the future all drugs will only do what they are supposed to do.

Glasses! Corrective eye "surgery"/alignment will be done in pre-school in the future

Lots of things are different and will be different.

Good post! I was thinking about that too a while ago, thinking back on how people lived in the past and wondering what things we do now that our future generations will look at and cringe or think boy they were dumb. LOL! I think some people's attitude towards their health like how and what they eat today will be unacceptable to future generations. Already right now I see a lot of people changing or have changed their attitude towards unhealthy food, eating less salt, sugar, drinking less sodas. I see more and more people now who have lost large amounts of weight. A couple of generations ago people guzzled down sodas, and sugar and salt and unhealthy fattening thngs and took the whole ideal lightly. Now I see more and more people changing their attitude towards how they eat.

Along the same lines as climate change, just the amount of food that is wasted these days. And the fact that some farmers are paid NOT to grow crops. All the while people in some places are starving. Our ancestors are rolling in their graves and as you said our grand children and their kids are going to want to reach back in time and seriously b!tchslap us. Probably quite rightly so too.

P.S. I'm no tree-hugger but I am really starting to see their point.

Toilet paper (as in "Demolition man")

I reckon they'll be amazed that anyone could vote, that cocaine was ever illegal at all, that parents didn't give their kids alcohol to help them sleep and feel wram, that people had employment protection at work, that people in the tribe next door were treated equally, that so much fuss was made over global warming... as they sit in their caves, listening to the sound of the approaching glaciers, in a world devastated by an asteroid hit

If mankind wants long term survival, stuff AGW, restart the space program and spread out into the universe.

Compared to what the universe can throw at us, when it comes to devastating the planet and mass extinctions, we're rank amateurs. Even with nuclear devices to help.

I think they'd be pretty amazed that we've invented devices to travel back in time.

The fact we brought them back to life?

Note to self....don't post before waking up properly!

Thanks, and corrected in the post. maybe a nice mod can change the title and spare my blushes

Naw.. life is more interesting when we are all a little confused

Penicillin wouldn't have been discovered without a little botch-up.

Do you think it is usual/normal to have glaciers or do you think they are the last remnants of the last Ice Age that will eventually disappear?

Just asking!

I think that even if it is a natural cycle, we are accelerating it

The question then is, are we accelerating it so much that it will "overshoot" and burn a massive percentage of life from the planet, possibly including most of humanity?

Oh, they will look back on our times in amazement. It’s always the new epoch that gets smug and arrogant and professes to have answered all the questions, as we do now.
There will be a paradigm shift; it’s inevitable, as history shows.
And they will find our technology hilarious.

True but as it is a natural cycle are we not better to invest in learning to live with the change & cope with the change instead of investing in trying to reduce the rate of acceleration?
The change will happen anyway so our descendants will probably see our efforts as tilting at windmills!

As far as CO2 is concerned, they will most likely laugh about us and our so-called "climate science" which tries to make us believe that a highly complex (yet barely understood!) system like the Earth's climate could be seriously damaged by minuscule changes in the concentration of a gas which (unlike many other man-made emissions) is not only non-toxic but which many lifeforms actually depend and thrive on.

On the other hand I'm sure that they'll shake their heads in disbelief about how we could employ nuclear power plants which are not only inherently unstable and have the potential to make huge areas uninhabitable for centuries in case of serious accidents but also produce tons and tons of waste which will stay highly radioactive for thousands or even millions of years.

Well excluding the fact that the US National Climatic Data Center shows global temperatures flat for the last 14 years; see blue trend line in the attached graph.
We are talking about an overall rise of 1C degree in the last 100 years; see same graph. Eve if we manage to double that to 2C in the next century then so what? Where I live the temperatures usually vary between -5C & 30C ; a change of 35C within the year - so what if the daily temps very between -3C & 32C?
I do not see how a couple more C will burn a massive percentage of life from the planet?

Ok, besides the entire climate change discussion:

there is no doubt that we

- used and frankly wasted a HUGE amount of the worlds natural resources. Logic dictates that even if we find other energy sources will they become more expensive than energy is still today. So future people will shake their heads that people would drive around in a massive car burning a lot of petrol, usually not even using half of the seats and often driving around without any important reason to do so.

- are currently screwing up large parts of nature. Mainly in the seas where people don't immediately see it. I think our future generations will have little sympathy for us screwing up food chains for example by rotting out most sharks (90% gone in the last three decades GLOBALLY). They will also not understand how stupid we are to fish in so radical and unsustainable ways as we currently do.

Wasting our time posting on anonymous forums to a bunch of strangers?

And that tobacco companies haven't been made illegal yet.