Every year Edge.org asks a variety of smart people a thought-provoking question and posts the brief essays they write in response. The question for 2007 is “What are you optimistic about and why?” You could browse for a long time through all the responses. A few of them stood out on first glance.
Some are optimistic about our political and environmental future. Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse) has used the phrase “cautiously optimistic” in several of his books, as I recall, and he uses it again in his essay about how “Good Choices Sometimes Prevail.” A few other people express optimism about our ability to make it through climate change and the upcoming oil crunch. Chris Dibona of Google is hopeful about the way freely available satellite images of Earth could help unveil political and environmental abuses and thus fuel informed protest of these abuses.
Others range through the inner space of human consciousness and the wider spaces of the universe. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller is optimistic that the accumulated knowledge of evolutionary psychology can teach us how to die well. MIT physicist Max Tegmark has some interesting thoughts on the rarity and significance of conscious life in the cosmos.
Some of the responders foresee good things for humankind’s social institutions. Biologist J. Craig Venter espouses what he calls “evidence-based decision making”, a fundamental element of scientific research, and is optimistic that it will spread beyond the scientific community; it surely sounds like a good idea to me. Anthropologist Helen Fisher is hopeful that marrying for love (rather than for reasons of power or property) might be gaining ground (although it seems to me like this is old news, at least in industrialized countries).
There are many more essays to browse through; these are just a few of the highlights. Happy reading, and best wishes for 2007!
