What Uncontroversial and Widely Accepted Ideas Today Will Seem Outrageous or Immoral 100 Years From Now?:
It's common to look back at the past and identify ideas that were widely held 100 or 200 years ago that seem shocking or barbaric today. When this happens, we pat ourselves on the back for being so much more enlightened than our ancestors. But it seems unlikely that we've somehow reached the end of this process: I would guess that in 100 years, folks will look back at us just like we look back at people 100 years ago.
So here's the question: What are the ideas or practices that are uncontroversial and widely accepted today — and that you personally find unobjectionable — that you think might be seen as barbaric or immoral one hundred years from now? To clarify, ideas or practices that you personally find barbaric or immoral today aren't eligible. You can't just predict that some day the world will realize you were right, and that your minority opinion will become majority opinion. Rather, the idea is to try to identify things that you actually don't find all that objectionable that you can imagine being seen as immoral or otherwise outrageous a century from now.
So here's the question: What are the ideas or practices that are uncontroversial and widely accepted today — and that you personally find unobjectionable — that you think might be seen as barbaric or immoral one hundred years from now? To clarify, ideas or practices that you personally find barbaric or immoral today aren't eligible. You can't just predict that some day the world will realize you were right, and that your minority opinion will become majority opinion. Rather, the idea is to try to identify things that you actually don't find all that objectionable that you can imagine being seen as immoral or otherwise outrageous a century from now.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Current Views that May be Seen as Unconscionable in the Future:
- What Uncontroversial and Widely Accepted Ideas Today Will Seem Outrageous or Immoral 100 Years From Now?:
Driving a car.
Once we have the technology to grow meat in vats is in the idea of raising animals for food will start to seem horrifying.
Morality tends to track necessity and convenience.
(2) Use of petrochemical combustion for personal transportation vehicles
(3) As medical treatments advance, modern chemotherapy might look to future physicians like the use of leeches looks to us. (It's like throwing a grenade into a room filled with terrorists and hostages and hoping that you kill most of the terrorists without killing too many hostages.) (I think Dr. McCoy on ST:TOS used to exemplify this attitude.)
More specifically, expecting the same behavior out of (and demanding the same treatment for) all adults without regard to context (particularly adult developmental stages of growth, but also genetic, environmental, and cultural context).
Seriously. In the future people will say "so, you used to ship books around the country instead of just downloading them. You'd cut down trees, build gigantic factories to print huge runs of them which were often extremely hard to predict and became pulped, and then burned fuel to have each one delivered to your door. If people were already online, how did this make any sense?"
And we'll say "shut up whippersnapper. When I was your age, we didn't have this fancy cut-and-paste on the iPhone 4g"
Female circumcision has already reached that point.
My guess is the right to bear arms.
- Going to a building to attend school.
- Mail delivered to your door (as opposed to having a central box in your subdivision or complex).
- Buying cheap off-the-rack clothing and reusing it (as opposed to fabbing it yourself from your computer). Why? Sanitary and health issues.
- Artificial sweeteners.
- Over-the-counter medication (liability issues).
- Dairy milk.
I was going to say "abortion" even though I don't really have a problem with it. But I guess it wouldn't qualify as "uncontroversial," even though it's widely accepted.
Maybe jokes about the French?
I also wouldn't be surprised if "string theory" were eventually seen as a bizarre superstition, along the lines of alchemy and astrology.
Of course, a century or two after that, the idea of controlling human behavior through chemical and genetic methods will seem immoral, too.
2)Arbitrage
3)Death
Obviously, there is the proposed U.N. mandate on this issue, as well as what Mark Steyn recently went through in Canada. In addition, I'm already seeing signs of pressure in this regard in the U.S. As Christopher Hitchens has recognized, in the case of Islam a lot of this is cowardice masquerading as cultural sensitivity.
People look back and think, "WTF? People did that."
Yet in a few hundred years our descendants will be likely be laughing at much of what we accept as fundamental now. New instruments will shed better light on mechanisms we don't know exist, and old theories will be subsumed into wider theories, as just one tiny and limited part of them.
In short, we will look like idiots.
2) Nationalism/"Patriotism"
3) Almost every reason anyone goes to war these days (though war will still exist for different reasons, for which people 100 years from THEN will find barbaric, and so on....)
But I question the premise of the post - if something is going to be considered barbaric in 100 years, its because either we're going to discover information that leads to such a finding, because people in 100 years are irrational, or because enough information is available to realize its barbaric now (thats why meat-eating is such an obvious answer, given all the information that's out there, in the netherworlds and in the ears of our vegetarian friends, about the immorality of it all).
As for what will be found objectionable, I agree with most of what's already been pointing out- more non-traditional family/marriage arrangements, religion and atheism, capital punishment, perhaps meat eating. On a similar note, we now think of many diseases as historic and associate them with primitive times- scurvy, polio, etc. No doubt in another century or two people will feel the same way about many diseases we struggle with.
(Equivalent to operating a car with no muffler.)
Appearing in public unarmed.
(As self-defense becomes a personal responsibility.)
Postmortem voting.
(Even in Chicago)
Bah. That's not fair, since most everyone I know thinks the idea is barbaric and inhumane.
--PtM
Even when women couldn't vote, people supported equality. So stuff like eating meat or not allowing gay marriage probably shouldn't qualify. Add also: Putting people into prison for drug use.
It's hard thinking of stuff people today take for granted. Like, 100 years ago: people didn't take baths more than once a week, and women didn't shave their legs.
So things we do today.... probably stuff like toilet habits will be viewed as totally gross/barbaric/outrageous.
I think maybe even eating will be gross. Will people really need to eat food in 100 years? Or will we all just ingest some super shakes?
Reading will be viewed as outrageous. We'll just have books uploaded into your brains.
That people ever went around with one limb will shock people. In 100 years, limbs will be regrown.
Using humans for prostitution will be bizarre. They'll be cyborgs by then that are better than women and do not transmit STDs.
Sex with other people might even been seen as totally disgusting.
I suggest this for the following reason. I believe I have read (and I very well might be wrong, and would be happy to be corrected) that a very great long term concern of Second Amendment activists is the decreasing size of the hunting population relative to the total population of the U.S. These people are the backbone of the NRA, etc. I've read that fewer and fewer children are following in their fathers' footsteps and becoming hunters.
The most common answer in the comments so far is "meat eating." There are lots of people who already believe that "meat is murder." Are only non-PETA members allowed to answer "meat-eating" to your question, since PETA members merely believe that someday the world will recognize their righteousness and agree with them that eating meat is immoral?
Scientific Illiteracy
Scheduled programming
Environmental alarmism and hysteria
Low Taxes
High Taxes
I think that education will become very personalized. Students will all work at their own pace and according to their interests and talents. Doing this in a facility designed to teach everyone the same thing at the same time at the same pace will be impossible.
Medical and pharmaceutical technology will become so advanced and complicated that laymen will no longer be considered competent to judge for themselves. The laymen themselves will no sooner prescribe for themselves than they would build their own car from off-the-shelf parts. The idea that we used to freely purchase medications on our own initiative will be seen as ridiculous and harmful.
He wants to state that he thinks polygamy won't be accepted per se... what will be accepted is family groups larger than nuclear families, groups that people can join and resign voluntarily for whatever reason seems good to them and their group. These groups may be geographically dispersed and culturally diverse.
He also thinks that people in 100 years will think our entertainment is utter trash. He links this to an increasing awareness that what you choose to see and hear affects your personality and psychology. In 100 years, he thinks that the value of human life will actually rise based on people's self-preservation instinct and the increased standard of living for the average person.
It's okay if *someone* thinks the practices are immoral. It just can't be you.
Not so much "meat eating" as "eating meat that came from a live animal", because we'll have the alternative of safer, less cruel, vat grown meat.
Burning fossil fuels, because we'll have controlled nuclear fusion and/or satellite power with much better batteries.
Abortion and unwanted kids, as we perfect and finish destigmatizing contraception.
Obesity, eating disorders, and similar issues, as we solve the mysteries of human metabolism.
Actually, the easiest way to make this prediction is to read Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" novels, look at Beta Colony, and figure out which technological marvels we'll plausibly have in 100 years.
2. Meat eating for sure
3. having children in utero
Aside from that, I'd suggest meat eating and the various forms of pollution, especially air pollution (from smoking to smokestacks).
Because of the birth trends in developed nations, we flatter ourselves that overpopulation is not going to be a problem. But at some point (1000 years from now? 10,000?), we should assume that evolution will reorient our reproductive instincts and get us to start having as many babies as we can again.
At that point we will either develop some legal (and maybe moral) framework that prohibits having as many babies as one feels like, or we will discard our current revulsion at letting people starve in the streets. The latter doesn't quite fit the paradigm, but the former does (having as many babies as possible is not controversial today / will be in future), and I assume one of the two will have to come about.
Eventually this will be seen to be the equivalent of littering on, and or vandalism of, a pristine, unspoiled environment.
2. DB
Allowing people to have as many children as they like.
Transplantation of animal organs such as heart valves. (This will be made obsolete.) Using animals to make vaccines. (We'll have other ways to do it.)
Flushing toilets with potable water.
I suspect, then, that the obvious examples suggested in this comment thread will all turn out to be incorrect, and that instead various shifts in patterns of accepted behavior will fairly suddenly appear as a result of specific, as yet unpredicted social, economic or technological developments. In other words, nobody now has a clue which currently acceptable behaviors will be shunned in a hundred year's time and which won't, because life simply isn't that boringly predictable.
Aside from things which are seen as barbaric because technological advances make them obsolete, the biggest category is things where people 100 years from now are going to be irrational. They're probably going to be spread by religions or movements, and it's literally impossible to predict them since they can be anything which is thought wrong by anyone to the slightest degree. For all I know there could be some pseudo-Jewish offshoot who spreads its teachings and 100 years from now everyone thinks it was barbaric to wear garments of mixed fibers.
Also I bet vasectomies will probably seem really, really weird. Male birth control pills/patches/implants (a time release medication thing) will probably take over.
Prohibitions on Pot.
Alcohol.
I have it on good authority that we will not need our teeth (or eyes either) by the year 4545.
Kingsley Amis wrote somewhere that in the 19th century the English lower classes drank gin, the upper classes brandy, sailors rum, the Irish and Scots their national whiskeys, the Welsh water, and no one in the U.K. except a few travelers had ever even seen someone drink vodka or tequila. Now we all try all of them and drink most of them as the mood inclines us, and much the same is true of foods. Why assume that this trend towards variety and adventure will not continue?
Even if cuisine gets more catholic, I doubt that we will be eating primates or people in 100 years. On the other hand, even cannibalism is conceivable, and I don't mean cases where the only alternative is starvation. After all, if someone is already dead, why not do the ultimate in recycling and get some use out of the carcass? I emphatically do not think that way, but it is conceivable that future humans (subhumans, if you prefer) will.
Horse racing and other animal sports
Private ownership of weapons
Drug prohibition
1. Compelling your children to go to church
2.Playing really loud music
Things that will be regarded as morally permissible:
1. Not recycling.
2. Pedophilia
That individuals have rights that the state must respect.
Eventually the personal will transfer into the economic, and people will wonder how anyone could have structured a society designed to shunt people's productive energies into channels society feels productive, and why in the world a rational state could possibly justify a legislative regime that actually tends to support this sort of shunting, rather doing everything it can to prevent discriminating against people based on their personal choice on the work-vs.-leisure continuum.
A little more automation and we might be able to abolish traditional work relationships, refute the conception of work and work relationships as social responsibilities, and treat them purely as a form of personal expression, just as the 21st century is doing with the family. This would go beyond merely challenging hierarchical vocational relationships; it would challenge the very idea of a society considering anyones work time and efforts as other than ones own personal self-expression as inherently immoral and barbaric.
Single-sex bathrooms?
Abstinence?
How about bilingual education? Won't this be seen as an intentional infliction of a handicap on children?
How about "sin" taxes? Will people in the future see these as regressive and punishing the poor?
As with food, I can easily see the use of leather going in exactly the opposite direction. Millions of unwanted dogs and cats are killed every year in the U.S. Why not (a) sell the meat to restaurants or individuals (as long as everyone knows what they're buying and eating), and (b) use the skins to make coats? The animals are just as dead either way, and (e.g.) a calico coat would be gorgeous. Of course, anyone who wore a calico coat today would soon be beaten to death by gangs of old ladies. However, I can easily imagine that wearing of the fur of any kind of animal might be much more socially acceptable in 2109 than it is now. It could go either way, and I don't pretend to know which way it will go.
Refusing to treat/ameliorate your own mental or physical defects?
Archaeology? ("Those monsters of the 20th century dug up millenia of cultural heritage and billions of years of fossil record - and lost 10% of it each decade!")
Yea, that and sex.
I think being a non-Muslim is likely to be the outrageous or immoral idea of 100 years from now.
Most of the commenters seem to have missed that.
Thanks, Judge Dredd... Demolition Man was a hilarious movie.
1. Athletic scholarships.
2. That Global Warming was ever a serious consideration.
3. Men and women are interchangeable and equal in every working environment.
4. An economy based on information exchange trumps one that provides material objects.
5. Burning food for fuel makes sense.
6. Bearing a child to term as opposed to birth from an incubator is barbaric.
7. An economy must be global rather than local or it's just not fair.
8. All races and peoples and beliefs are identically equal if we omit the words under god. And god must be omitted.
9. An information driven economy trumps one producing consumables. (When times are tough we will eat the lawyers.)
10. Monogamy? A centuries long aberration.
11. Childhood ends at 18? 21? Thirty one is the new age of majority.
12. A biological parent can override the state in matters of education and outlook. Not likely.
13. A two party system was somehow better than the one party state we enjoy today.
I could go on and on.
Future generations will, I hope, also be astonished by the contrast between the cultural horror at the legacy of Nazism, and the relative silence toward communism. This may not qualify as barbaric in itself, but future generations will be amazed that so few of us in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall regard communism as barbaric.
Oh ... computers. The personal computer will be considered a quaint artefact of the early 21st century.
Surgery? Might be seen as barbaric, like leeches or trepanning.
Cleaning your teeth with a brush and floss. My guess is we'll have some sort of nanotechnology-based chemical solution that you swill in your mouth twice a day and it takes everything off in one go.
Definitely driving cars. Not just about petrol. It's also about accidents. Cars will be automatically (robotically) controlled by the road surface. You just tell it where you want to go.
As for meat, I don't think it's meat per-se, but the inhumane treatment of animals and the wasteful land practices that often accompany it.
How about ... watching TV? Going to the movies?
On the other hand maybe we'll just like like dirty hippies in some iron age village and think that big cities represent everything that was evil about the 20th century.
Agreed. Maybe a bit better, since chemo at least deals with some of the problem in unpleasant ways. It follows scientific method as best is available now, but will in a century be seen as very primitive.
Best comparison would be 18th century treatments for syphilis: doses of toxic mercury compounds and overheating. Not ineffective, not very effective, either.
As to the rest, what will be seen as intolerant is anyone's guess. Those who try to be in advance of the future never know whether they will be seen as visionaries or lunatics.
Scientism as an intellectually viable world view.
Neither of those can be considered truly uncontroversial, though that's a rather stringent requirement.
Who are we kidding? In 1909 people would have told you that by 2009 slavery, dogma, the mistreatment of women, ignorance and illiteracy, caste and brutality, would all be regarded as barbaric and primitive, and what has actually happened, thanks to postmodernism and fashionable cultural relativism, is that these things are regarded as perfectly legitimate alternative cultural practices, and that the only people deserving condemnation are those who dare use words like "barbaric" and "primitive"!
Just to be clear, I do not think affirmative action is per se immoral/barbaric/illegal, but I think history will disapprove of my position on it.
Animal rights and meat-eating.
Lots of unnecessary waste like packaging, etc...
Combustion engines.
borders. MSRP. space travel.
hard reboots.
Certainly. We'd have a use already if Senator John Kerry and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary hadn't killed the Integral Fast Reactor project back in 1994.
Not taking your full course of antibiotics will be a crime.
Fundamentalism will be linked to terrorism.
You'll have to file a parenting financial plan before going off mandatory sterility implants (male and female).
Paying cash -- only criminals need to hide their transactions.
On the brighter side, keeping your period will be a free choice, but a barbaric one.
40-hour workweeks -- why make people work, when robots can produce all our material needs so much more effectively? That's the kind of crazy thinking that dislocated all those poor automobile workers and farmers in the 20th.
Pessimistic scenario: we keep going downhill into some kind of post-industrial warlordism, something like Atlas Shrugs or much of Africa today. In that case:
Making fun of the rich.
Intermarriage.
Atheism.
Hoarding.
Acting smart.
Being smart.
Being.
Not taking your full course ofantibiotics will be a crime.You'll have to file a
parenting[ethics,morality,diversity,risk management, and ] financial plan before going off mandatorysterility[gender renormative] implants (male and female).Intermarriage.Some speculation, maybe not in a hundred years, but eventually the pendulum will swing back. So some ideas that are mainstream today (and which I agree with) but maybe not so mainstream someday:
a. Freedom of religion.
b. Racial and sexual equality.
c. Democracy as the best form of government.
d. Decriminalization of homosexuality.
The idea that we dispensed drugs to patients based on studies of large groups, playing the odds and knowing that some individuals would react badly--even die--from them, will seem as ignorant and barbaric as trying to transfuse blood before we discovered blood typing.
... to have had women walk around in public not clad in a full burkha.
... to have studied anything other than the Koran for the source of all knowledge and laws.
Pregnancy. 90 percent of "pregnancies" will be a fetus floating in a tank in in the corner of the living room, like Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back.
Current dental procedures! Maybe we'll just keep growing sets of teeth, instead of stopping at two.
Working five days a week. FIVE DAYS!! That's CRAZY!
Standing in line. Literally wasting the precious stuff of life: time.
Panhandling. And letting crazy people roam the streets in general. The state will care for them.
Private health care. Health care will be understood to be the responsibility of the state.
Letting parents make their own decisions about what's best for the kids. There's a recipe for disaster right there. Again with the state.
In fact, let's just say the private sphere altogether. Hey, it's just a fact: People just want the government to do things for them.
- Alaska Jack
Hmmm.... let's add hen-pecking to the list on Speedwell's behalf
Paved roads as a primary infrastructure for transportation, are soooo 20th century. I'm not offended by them now, but I think they will become offensive.
Here's why: rainwater percolation, costs of construction and maintenance, safety, aesthetics, and maybe even convenience.
Paving any area reduces percolation to effectively zip, at least for the area paved. The water has to go somewhere, so storm drains and the like are needed. These create problems of their own, just dumping volumes of water into larger bodies instead of the water percolating through soil to underground aquifers. In some areas there are already regs that ban paving more than X% of the lot area. Think how much more area can be gained with water permeable roads.
Technology for surface transportation exists that doesn't require paving. For example, railroads. Other technology can be developed, along the lines of those fat wheeled all terrain vehicles popular as sport, but for more general travel and passenger comfort. Maybe even hovercraft will become feasible.
Roads can become like long fields of very hardy genetically engineered vegetation, sort of like Bermuda grass, only tougher to kill with traffic.
Safety would be enhanced simply by providing a softer surface to fall on if you crashed. Aesthetics is a no-brainer. Construction and maintenance costs could be made lower with genetic engineering as well. And what could be more convenient than parking anywhere you please on your front lawn?
Just watch out for grazing unicorns.
1) Leeches have medical uses today (draining excess blood from damaged tissue).
2) Suggested items should not be things that are controversial now, such as meat-eating.
3) Gestation in utero is an excellent example. Even religious traditionalists will embrace in vitro gestation when it becomes clear that it largely eliminates non-congenital birth defects, and also (I predict) homosexuality.
4) Sexuality is a possibility. If conception (and gestation) become technical processes, people may decide that the occasional orgasm is not worth having one's mind jerked around by one's gonads. For instance: how many successful enduring marriages are based on the mutual sexual attraction of the partners. compared to the number where the partners no longer bother with sex? How many mismatched marriages are made because of the partners' temporary sexual infatuation? And how many otherwise stable marriages are broken up by one partner's sexual infatuation with an outsider? In another century, allowing sexual attraction or the lack of it to control household formation may be seen as barbaric folly.
Meet is an essential part of the human diet. Probably not in the quantities that modern people eat. In fact much of human evolution, including the development of human societies, can be attributed to the need to form groups to hunt animals to acquire meat. People will come to see the eating of meat as natural. Dietary habits in general may shift to be based on scientific evidence of what humans were designed to eat.
**
"Sex with other people might even been seen as totally disgusting and hot"
Fixed that for you.
**
I think "driving a car" would have to be very high on the list, not for environmental reasons, but because of safety. We already have technology sufficient to automate individual motorized transportation, yet we let millions of accidents occur each year, resulting in millions of injuries and tens of thousands of deaths.
1) surgery with a scalpel
2) clipping fingernails
3) all things involving airline travel
4) all forms of physical currency
5) The BCS system as used to determine the national champion in college football.
Immigration will be free and unrestricted and the fact that all (most?) modern major countries of today restricted it will be viewed as barbaric.
Most of our current medicines and medical procedures will probably also be viewed as barbaric -- akin to leeching.
Condoms will be abandoned the moment medical advance makes them unnecessary for the control of STDs, for comfort, sensation and convenience. To see how the future will view our condoms, just take a look at pre-latex leather condoms.
But the Pill will be regarded as truly horrific. So to stop getting pregnant you pumped your body with massive overdoses of hormones?? And you wondered why women were getting cancer?
Someone above wrote that vasectomies will be regarded as barbaric. My guess is that safe and reliably reversible male and female surgical sterilisation (together with cures/preventions for STDs) will make drug-based contraception seem barbaric.
Others:
1.) Banning stem cell research.
2.) Various chemical / prescription therapies.
3.) Everyday people hunting wild game. Meat will still be consumed, however. No way kids born today (who may live to be 100+) will give that up.
1) environmentalism in its current form. Manmade global warming, CO2 as a pollutant, carbon footprints. All bullshit with no scientific backing and no long-term staying power. Consensus comes and goes, the facts are here to stay.
2) gun control. Although this is a change that I eagerly anticipate, I don't think it is any less correct. All signs point to continued expansion of the RKBA and the continued erosion of gun control. People are becoming less and less frightened of firearms, especially the younger generation.
3) drug prohibition in its current form. We put on a war on drugs panel discussion last spring and even the career drug prosecutor pretty much refused to defend marijuna prohibition. I don't think anyone really believes in the war on drugs anymore. We've had 3 presidents in a row (counting Obama) that probably smoked weed and 2 presidents in a row that did coke. Winners apparently do drugs and I think everyone has figured it out by now.
4) I'm gonna take a risk here and guess that marriage as a legal institution is essentially going to be gone in 100 years. Sure, some people will still observe the old traditions, but the concept of marriage as a legal institution is only going to get more and more diluted as it expands into new areas, the tax and financial benefits will continue to erode and the legal landscape will continue to be unfavorable for lasting marriage. In 100 years, it will basically be about as meaningful as having a roommate.
Well, that really limits it! A lot of the answers above appear to include things that folks think are at least a little problematic or at least can conceive that they might be. Sticking by that rule is difficult. I'm not sure we can remove ourselves from the equation.
We can, I think, assume that some of these "changes" will be good and some will be not so good. If you consider things that you hope might be different in the future, then you risk breaking the rule. It needs to be something that you see as perfectly fine and should not change.
If it's going to go from fine to barbaric in 100 years, then the change or seeds of change are already underway. Looking at things that are already vulnerable, I'd consider:
Family,
First Amendment, particularly the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech,
The concept of endowed, unalienable rights,
Property rights (physical and intellectual).
1) abortion. You'll have about as much luck outlawing appendectomies at this point. The current religious stampede to get rid of abortion may succeed in overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion, but I think it is way more entrenched at the state and local level than most people realize, even in flyover country.
2) meat eating. Sorry fags, meat eating is here to stay. If the Chinese can have over a billion population and still manage to raise enough meat, anyone can. Fur also, is here to stay.
3) tax and government bureaucracies. There's something in human nature that makes us keep coming back to this. That being said, I hope the taxes are low and the bureaucracies distant and non-interfering.
How is this different than any of the ethnic and politcal genocides that have occurred in the last century?
Modern medicine &psychiatry. I can't guess if drugs or tech tools will do more, but a few advances in proportion to antibiotics and minimally-invasive surgery will leave the modern state looking like patent remedies and blood-letting.
Have to disagree on some of the technical issues. Internal combustion will be with us for more than 100 years. GM's Volt, even as propogandized, is still an internal combustion powered vehicle. Fuel cells are not in use in stationary engineering applications to any appreciable degree, let alone in mobile equipment. Too expensive. Battery technology isn't there now, particularly the quick charge required, so int comb is required. No, we'll see internal combustion 100 years from now, in some form, and likely broad form.
And roads will be required... paved roads. Surface water storm runoff from land has been regulated (or settled at gunpoint) for centuries now. Your county drain commissioner likely regulates at a max. runoff rate of 0.15 cu ft/s/Ac, if he's like many. Pave and roof-over all you want, but you can't exceed that rate. Roads have to shed water, however, and some massive leap in technology would have to take place in order to nullify that requirement. But like current vehicle powertrain technology, I don't see widespread change from our current status quo in a measly 100 years..
As for my own predictions, corporations will change drastically. Either eliminated, or stripped of much of their "status". This will be bad news for you, counselors!
And what, you and your sweetie don't talk for hours about social, political, and economic issues? What do you do while eating dinner, watch sitcoms?
(And, yes, my two kids are both vaxxed)
As the incidence of food allergies rise, eating meat will be more, not less, popular. You can be a very healthy vegetarian if you don't have allergies, but it you're allergic to wheat, milk, and soy (three rather common allergens), then it's impossible to eat a balanced diet without meat.
On that vein: putting peanuts in food will seem to be barbaric in 100 years, when a lot of people will have deadly allergies to it.
Deficits don't matter.
I'm going to go the other way from a lot of people and say that it's the idea of Freedom of Religion that will be seen as outrageously misguided, with the modern level of tolerance for (to name a pair) Islamic and Christian Scientist believer's behavior being viewed by them as indistinguisable from allowing human sacrifice under color of religion.
The idea that most humans are genetically predisposed towards heterosexuality, and that most of the remainder are genetically predisposed towards homosexuality.
- Monogamy (esp. if the current trend of lower male birth rates continues)
- reading an actual book made out of paper
- anti-cloning laws (could be an acceptable way to have children if you have fertility issues)
- root canals (all the progress with surgeries, and we still have no better way to fix a tooth than the drill down and tear out the nerve?)
But the big issue to me is the way we have criminalized adolescent sexuality under various "abuse" laws. Today a huge percentage of American teens qualify as "sex offenders" and the State, if they are caught, will punish them for the rest of their life. The whole "sex offender" hysteria will eventually be seen as a barbaric witch hunt where we expanded the defintion of "offender" beyond all reasonable limits and imposed penalties that cause more harm than they do good.
People won't confuse the inability to predict future price movements with the efficiency of securities prices at any particular point in time.
"To clarify, ideas or practices that you personally find barbaric or immoral today aren't eligible."
I think the big ones are:
1) Nationalism.
2) That we are better off without a world government
Note I think that I hold both these views.
And another vote for any kind of invasive surgery.
And I think that 100 years is a _very_ long time. So, going out pretty far on the transhumanism limb: Death by aging.
Mike&: Absolutely - that's what the shells are for.
(But I'm still looking forward to the shells.)
And I am for human sacrifice of death-row inmates to Odin if this is how they want to repay their debt to society....
(1) Abortion seems necessary to us in the same way that slavery seemed necessary to the plantation owner,. i.e., it isn't really but it's more comfortable to believe that it is. But the economics (broadly speaking) of birth control will change similarly to the way the economics of cotton growing did. Changing technology made slavery increasingly irrelevant. Someday birth control will be convenient, comfortable, and cheap, with reproductive potential switched off at puberty and switched on when desired. Just as we look back and say that slave owners should have paid free people to pick the cotton, while they would argue that that was financially impossible, 100 years from now our great-great-grandchildren will be arguing from the comfort of their reproductively safe world that abortion wasn't necessary--we should have worn the condom, taken the pills, or just not had sex.
(2) And once birth control has made abortion fully unnecessary, we will note: How different really is the argument that a black man isn't fully human from the argument that a fetus isn't really human? The "not really human" argument is one contrived to make us feel better about something we believe is necessary. Once the necessity is gone, will the moral argument hold water?
Non-edible landscaping (water and fertilizer will be needed for food, not grass).
Golf. (A gross waste of land, water, and fertilizer. Virtual golf may survive.)
You may have a strong point. I have generally noted that the use of infanticide by the Norse, Greeks, Romans, and even medieval Christians for family planning purposes was largely a result of a lack of effective contraception. Today we think of this as horribly barbaric, including the idea that infants are not fully human until named on the ninth night after birth (as was held by the Norse)....
Of course, if there is no suitable wild habitat left for some of these animals 100 years from now, keeping them captive may not be objectionable. Making them perform, though, still might.
"To clarify, ideas or practices that you personally find barbaric or immoral today aren't eligible."
auto accident injuries/deaths
living with cancer
addiction and compulsive behavior in general
communicable diseases - being able to rid the body of a virus
unplanned pregnancies (male contraceptives)
two ton steel boxes to move a 160 pound human
proportion of cities which is transportation infrastructure (1/4 now?)
urban no-go crime zones
consumerism/materialism as a primary status seeking behavior
Also, I think the concept of a "political class" or career politician will be seen as offensive, as they are today, but they'll actually do something effective to prevent the creation of such.
That one is pretty easy: lobotomies, eugenics and forced sterilization.
My guesses? Tasers. Compulsory education. Child actors.
Oh, sure, there will still be some throwbacks that wolf down their meals of asparagus, tomatoes, and parsley, but enlightened humans will be rightfully aghast at the barbaric smell of roasted plant flesh and the sight of vegetable carnage.
"Am I allowed to hope, religion?"
Allowed to hope? I'm sorry your experiences with religion have evidently been so warped. It's not the boss of you.
My prediction: meat-eating and abortion will go out at the same time (rights expansion to animals and ultrasound people, respectively), and both sooner than we think. Whether we liberals will have the power to make that stick is another question.