The Future’s Opinion of Today.
I wonder how the people in the future will look back on how we were in the early 21st century. Will they have contempt for how stupidity and lack of organization to fight major world problems?
I wonder how strange it may seem to someone in 500 years that we used to eat meat, have homelessness, fight wars, and generally be unable to make decisions on major issues, especially when they are clear options.
One example I can think of is how many countries are actively shutting down nuclear power plants at the very time when we should be investing in a significant number of new standardized next-generation power plants. This is because of the emotional response to a handful of historical accidents and the perceived link to the atomic bomb. We put a significant amount of weight on the few deaths from nuclear accidents and ignore the millions of silent deaths that are caused by the emissions from traditional power plants that use fossil fuels.
There is a general tendency to look back and think that people in the past were inferior. I think that perhaps people might have been better, on average, than us now. But, they simply lacked knowledge of many things we know now, and also they were products of their time, that can hardly be helped with the exception of some very forward-thinking individuals.
Let’s try to be those individuals in our own time.
