In 500 years, what will we be condemned for?

Having disregard for the effect of business decisions on the Earth and on other human beings because it's just business.

will just think we were idiots altogether. They will miss our wasteful consumption habits, however.

What do you know about what happened in 1520, for example. I know virtually nothing about that history.

In 500 years, what happened in 2020 will not be of interest to anyone at all. Too many generations will have passed, and society will be very different than it is now, assuming that human society still exists. It probably will, but if you think about 1550 and what you know of that time period, it will be about the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1520

and he is a hot topic these days.

I think there was little controversy about Columbus (on whole, among the general US population) until recent decades. I think that in 1992 (500th anniversary) there was some controversy, but there were a lot of Columbus-positive events.

I guess it is also somewhat recent that Washington and Jefferson became controversial - I believe I learned in school that Washington owned slaves, but it was presented as just an ironic fact, and not a major fault in his character.

It will be know as the year of Covid-19. We still talk about the Spanish Flu and the Black Plague.

What will the immortal trillionaire cyborgs be thinking as they hunt any remaining, primitive humans for sport?

Or we could wonder about how the vast, hive-mind of the singularity consciousness that nobody can even being to imagine or understand will frame the past for archival purposes.

It is also highly unlikely that the cockroaches and various small organisms that live in the aftermath of total climate devastation will become intelligent enough to reflect on the past as they struggle to survive on a heavily polluted, chaotic, hot rock that is sputtering its last gasp of viability.

I see the potential for a legacy that is a total, global wasteland with continuous, violent and endless storms and extremely high winds, partially flooded continents, dead oceans and nobody there to see it or hear it.

Does the charred tree that falls in the burned-out forest make a sound if there is nobody there to hear it?

So many competing items. The last one is particularly apt. (See "The Overstory"

Factory farming will be appalling to Americans in a few generations. The pain and suffering billions of animals endure unnecessarily to corporations can be more profitable will be recognized as evil.

and I will be sure they should judge us for our bad behavior.

at the expense of others as part and parcel of A Way of Life will be something to be mocked.

I also hope humanity reaches the stage when we look back with absurdity at our reliance on the imaginary to order our lives. For example, red and blue lines on a map indicating the status of human existence; the daily (if not hourly) decisions of both impact and consequence based wholly on the imaginary constructs of economics and governance, etc.

eating meat

of ability to explore our physical (and mental) worlds. Our abilities to look deeper into the makeup of matter as well as understanding the depths and origins of space and time have increased incredibly in the last 10-20 years.

Many people are afraid of the new - what they don't know and perhaps can't try to learn.

My biggest fear is that these advances in science, medicine will be destroyed by a march back to the middle ages.

I am also excited the explosion in knowledge about DNA and how life works. I just wish (I think) I could live to see the culmination of it.

I agree the conspiracy theories (not just medicine but stuff like 5G) are disturbing.

of indigenous wisdom.

The true survivors.

Surpassed only in populousness - population numbers - and technology turned to genocidal purposes. Dominated and obliterated by the perversion of the message of a true anti-authoritarian, can I say, anti-fascist? - JC himself.

Brought us to this moment.

The great pacific garbage patch
Ignoring climate change despite the overwhelming evidence
Making people pay for basic healthcare
Making people spend their entire lives working
factory farming

School to prison pipeline, parole profiteering.

#1 - Ignoring climate change.
#2 - Ignoring over-population and the importance of sustainability.
#3 - Treating our fellow inhabitants on this planet like commodities, with total disregard and disdain for their well-being and their rightful place in our natural environment.
#4 - Creating economies based on consumerism and razing our planet's natural resources for cheap goods.
#5 - Treating our planet like a garbage can.

And it’ll be their world, so it doesn’t matter what we think.

EDIT: I wanna change my answer to CrispyQ’s. I was thinking way too small...lol.

We will be eating soylent green.

Too many things are pushed into the redline right now and waiting to break. I expect climate change will be what finally wrecks most of civilization as it will lead to the next world war as whole countries fight over resources/mass migrations.

maybe the next 50 years instead of 500 might be easier to answer.

due to the Columbus status controversy. I was looking for things for which we today think "that's just the way the world works" but in 500 years they would view us as evil bastards. It's hard to answer because we generally don't think we are evil bastards, but as shown by the Columbus statue (and other historical figures) standards change.

It will be inconceivable that anyone had miserable jobs that did not make the world a better place, and that so many people, most of the world in fact, lived in poverty without healthy food, safe comfortable shelter, and little or no access to appropriate medical care.

Nobody living in our time, wealthy or poor, will be memorialized. We will all be scorned for mindlessly destroying our natural world.

The heroes 500 years from now will be those who ended the churches and the banks.

This is one of my favorite DU threads ever, by undergroundpanther:



Imagine...