For 2007 they are asking various thinkers, scientists and writers, 'What are you optimistic about'
Susan Blackmore: Our Civilisation Will Survive the Coming Climate Catastrophe (great 'optimism' Susan)
Simon Baron-Cohen: An enhanced role for autistic people.
Rudy Rucker: Endless free energy will flow from the subdimensions, also we will all be at one with everything (now that's what I call optimism)
Greg Benford: We can Save the Arctic
Richard Dawkins: Scientists discover a theory of everything
Brian Eno: The Market is discredited
What am I optimistic about? That there will be a future of some kind, and we don't know what it will be. I was reading Ulysses (the poem by Tennyson not the book) yesterday and this is the kind of optimism I believe in:
These are just extracts, it's worth reading in full
Ulysses
I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...
I am become a name
For always roaming with an hungry heart
Much have I seen and known...
And I am part of all that I have met
Yet, all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things ...
this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
What are you optimistic about?