What Are You Optimistic About?

vix86 writes "Last year's "World Question" from The Edge was "What is your Dangerous Idea?" So to kick off the off the new year: As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us! "

Comments

Last Year's

[quanminoan]

If you missed last year's discussion here on the most dangerous idea you should read through it. There were some pretty interesting ideas...

Re:Last Year's

[arun_s]

To me, the most interesting question by far in EDGE has been the one on 'What do you believe to be true even though you can't prove it?' There were some really cool answers that year, e.g. this hilarious (but equally insightful) one from Leonard Susskind.

Unsurprisingly

[Anonymous Coward]

about finally getting laid! YAY!

Energy

[Scareduck]

I am optimistic on several major points regarding energy over the long term:

1. That mankind will wean itself of fossil fuels. This means massive increases in renewables, energy transport, and improved nuclear fission reactors/processes (breeder reactors and thorium fuel cycles, and ultimately, fusion).
2. Part of this process will be radical improvements in efficiency. Examples include stored thermal heat exchanges (underground water tanks for summer cooling and winter heating), coal gasification instead of conventional coal-fired power plants, hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and so forth.
3. Industrial civilization with continue and even thrive as a result, even unto the "developing world" countries of India and China.
4. As a result, anthropogenic climate forcing will cease to be an issue.

Yes, I know, I'm off my meds this week.

The defeat of the Neo-Cons

[fishyfool]

Just thrills me to death. It makes me optimistic for the future of the United States and we the people.

Re:The defeat of the Neo-Cons

[Loco Moped]

Put in another way: the one-party monopoly is over,

I'm sorry, but how is it possible that someone smart enough to post on /. can't see that there IS ONLY ONE PARTY? It's been that way for years. It's a GAME, folks - you know, like football, where the teams pretend to hate each other, then go out for beers together after the game. Which playbook they follow depends upon what color jersey they're wearing today. THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME AGENDA, just different ways to reach the common goal.

And the loser is always the same (us peons, aka citizens, aka disposable interchangeable taxpayers).

Re:The defeat of the Neo-Cons

[yolto]

As opposed to the spend-and-spend "conservatives" we've had lately?

Is science that optimistic?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

The major drive of science in the last century was war. In this century it seems some of the most important science will be in trying to resolve the issues caused by our "optimistic" science of the past 100+ years. What I hope for the future is that we succeed in saving ourselves from ourselves. I'm not optimistic.