There is absolutely nothing in human history which gives me any grounds for optimism

Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, ake.

100 years ago your life expectancy would have been around 60 instead of around 80. Your ability to communicate readily with others of your kind would have numbered in the tens, with a lag of hours or days; today you speak to hundreds in milliseconds.

Your loved ones are going to live longer, communicate more and learn more in this lifetime than any generation before them.

You will see sights from the Hubble imagery transmissions that the wisest man in pre-Columbian Europe could only fantasize about.

You can be saved in minutes or days from things that would have killed your great-great-grandfather.

You have access to encyclopedic collections of insights and images and math and experience in every field of human endeavour, at your fingertips -- the kind of knowledge ancient scholars sacrificed their whole lives to find, and gathered only a tiny fraction thereof.

I submit that even balanced against the serious issues of global warming and environmental impact, we have PLENTY to be hopeful about.

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