Future generations (persons who are not present today, not even born or conceived) are going to be affected, positively and negatively, by what present generations do.
Effects on future generations are often ignored when decisions about large-scale resource policies and about far-reaching technologies are made. Future discount rates used in economic planning effectively forbid planners from taking much notice of costs and benefits to be felt no more than thirty or fifty years in the future. This is now an anachronism, because it has become quite evident that technologies and environmental activities have reached a point where they have much more far-reaching effects on the future than before.