What Are You Optimistic About? 146
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!
"
That Vista will be a huge success (Score:1, Interesting)
Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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).
- 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.
- Industrial civilization with continue and even thrive as a result, even unto the "developing world" countries of India and China.
- As a result, anthropogenic climate forcing will cease to be an issue.
Yes, I know, I'm off my meds this week.Re:Last Year's (Score:5, Interesting)
Space (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm Optimistic the Edge will spell check in '07 (Score:2, Interesting)
bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Bigelow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The human race starts to decline (Score:3, Interesting)
That planet was Solaria and the novel was "The Naked Sun", the second Elijah Bailey / R Daneel Olivaw detective story. The premise in quite intriguing. A man is found murdered in his plantation.
It couldn't have been a human, since there is no contact between people, as the population is reproduced in vitro and every person is raised alone with his "army of robots", so the very thought of human contact is found repulsive in this culture, let alone violent contact. Out of the question.
Then again, it couldn't have been a robot, as they are bound by the Three Laws Of Robotics. Nuff' said on the matter.
So who did it?
Check it out, it's a good read.
I am optimistic about... (Score:3, Interesting)
1. The ever increasing number of people who are converting to the latest generation solar energy to heat their homes. The trendsetter in the United States is California, where these homes are not only self sufficient, but feed their excess production of electricity to the grid, thereby receiving a check from the energy companies. As more people convert, three things will go down: equipment costs, energy costs and environmental impact.
2. People like Richard Dawkins fighting to stem the tide of fundamentalism, finding that everywhere they go, there are many who were previously cowed into silence and are now ready to stand and speak up, even in the so-called bible belt.
3. The clear and shining example, or should I say beacon, set by a country like Ireland, who turned their country around in ten years and made it the most prosperous nation in Europe, a process that included implementing free education at all levels to its' citizens.
4. The swift kick in the pants to the complacent and increasingly irrelevant United States mass media, supplied by the new independent journalism of the blogosphere. The media should be about keeping transparency going, and now they are under a scrutiny they have only been used to applying and not receiving.
And finally:
5. The ever increasing cross-disciplinary dialogue in science, as exemplified by the fruits of NASA's Origins program, which is helping to create a coherent map of knowledge while not getting in the way of specialization in research.