World Famous Comics: What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
By: John Brockman Publisher: Harper Perennial Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Harper Perennial Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 400 Publication Date: November 01, 2007 Release Date: October 30, 2007
The nightly news and conventional wisdom tell us that things are bad and getting worse. Yet despite dire predictions, scientists see many good things on the horizon. John Brockman, publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), the influential online salon, recently asked more than 150 high-powered scientific thinkers to answer a vital question for our frequently pessimistic times: "What are you optimistic about?"
Spanning a wide range of topics—from string theory to education, from population growth to medicine, and even from global warming to the end of world—What Are You Optimistic About? is an impressive array of what world-class minds (including Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestselling authors, and Harvard professors, among others) have weighed in to offer carefully considered optimistic visions of tomorrow. Their provocative and controversial ideas may rouse skepticism, but they might possibly change our perceptions of humanity's future.
Big Waste of Time I make it a rule to always read through a book entirely before reviewing it. It seems only fair but in this case I'm breaking my rule having only made it through about half of "What Are You Optimistic About". I'm breaking my rule because I may well never finish the book.
The cover lists the name of six contributors as well as "many others". Let me tell you, there are many many many others. There are in fact one hundred and fifty three contributors. With three hundred and sixty one pages in the book that leaves each contributor less than two and a half pages. Brian Greene, for instance, has a mere one hundred and seventy one WORDS. Jared Diamond has even less. Combined they take up just slightly more than one page and they constitute over 30% of the writers prominent enough to get their names on the cover. The point is that each writer is only afforded a scant amount of space and there's nowhere near enough time to write anything more than some brief musings.
My second problem is that many of the authors optimism is related to the decline of religion. The author groups like subjects together and the anti-religious sentiments come near the start of the book. You wont find too many people more critical of organized religion than myself but I always hope to see science take the high ground. I encourage science to defend itself against spurious attacks such as the ones leveled at evolution and climate change but I cringe when science returns fire. Daniel C Dennett writes, `I'm so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion' while Geoffrey Miller refers to the `Gutless' talking heads of the extreme religious right. It's bad enough that the religious are extremely paranoid and xenophobic; I really don't think scientific scholars need to fuel their paranoia.
Each piece by the contributors is so brief it's hardly worthwhile and the book itself is very tedious. The book also feels rather lazy. John Brockman just asked hundred of thinkers what makes them optimistic and packed their responses into a book. I really can't recommend this book to anyone. It is intellectually and philosophically shallow and boring to boot. I recommend giving this one a big pass.
not as inspiring as I'd have liked I found I didn't care what a lot of the authors thought. Seems I can't read my way into optmism. It's an inside job.
OPTIMISTIC about optimism This is an excellent text: brief statements by a variety of top flight scientists, giving me much more to be optimistic about!
Enlightening and Sometimes Brilliant Here is the 2007 EDGE question, put by the editor to prominent scientists all over the world:
"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!"
I counted 153 essays. Naturally, with only a half-page to four pages each, they are not greatly detailed. Certain themes caught the attention of many contributors:
1. Organized violence is at an all time low. You wouldn't believe it by listening to the news, but the statistics are clear. In the future, live internet access to anywhere on earth by GPS will cause exploiters of all cloths to have to resort to "Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes."
2. We're on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. We will be able to make a self-replicating machine that will absorb energy through solar cells, eat rocks, and be working for humanity by the millions. We will figure out ways to harness solar energy and not need to use energy sources that pollute the environment.
3. Research in physics has been dominated by string theory in recent years which so far is untestable. New technologies will produce astounding insights very soon. The LHC (proton-proton collider) will advance the Standard Model and will find the Higgs boson or perhaps something unexpected. The new LIGO detectors may find gravitational waves. Arrays of wide-field telescopes on earth are being programmed to rapidly scan the universe. PLANCK is Europe's first space mission to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, cosmic microwave background radiation. The AUGER array in Argentina will collect and quantify this same radiation. The GLAST satellite will place a telescope in orbit in May, 2008 to study the extreme universe without having to deal with earth's atmosphere. All these projects involve multiple nations and are guaranteed to provide astronomers and physicists with a new plethora of evidence to glean over for years.
4. There are many mentions of religion, only a few of them sympathetic, all of them seeing a decrease in the conflict between science and religion: "The number of people who realize how much of religious belief is non-sensical will continue to grow...I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion...a final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions...we will learn to shed the unessential dogmas, rules, definitions, and prejudices that religions have built up over the centuries and millennia...people will begin to see science as a vehicle for mutual understanding and for respecting life. Science will teach people these lessons, instead of simply trying to rob them of their faith and offering nothing in return.
5. Climate change and its solutions draw much attention. The consensus is that technology exists now to reverse the trend with fairly simple engineering techniques. Unfortunately, getting the politicians to steer the world in the correct direction will be like herding cats. At the same time, the political winds are blowing the right way and if we don't pass a tipping point, we will solve the problem. Solar power capturing technologies of the future will eventually do away with the need for polluting fuels.
Every reader will undoubtedly find some articles that he/she thinks are too optimistic, too unrealistic, too uninteresting, or just wrong. However, most provide good food for thought and every third or fourth one provides a nice "aha!" The book covers such a wide range of topics, I have barely touched the surface in this review. Most anyone should find parts of it fascinating and I highly recommend it.
It is not always wise to be optimistic The 2007 Edge Symposium contains one- hundred sixty answers to the questions, "What are you optimistic about?' As many of the same respondents to previous Edge questions are present here, there is a great deal that in one way or another has been said before. There are also many interesting new ideas, and insights into what is presently happening now in academic, and most particularly, in scientific worlds. In the oft- heard of , and repeated ideas category star the super-brights, Dennett and Dawkins each in his own separate way is looking for a new Age of Enlightenment in which most of mankind will be `cured' of `religious faith'. Dawkins even goes farther and looks forward to the time when Humanity will be cured of itself, and our central interest will be in our successors in colonizing the universe. This answer is indicative of what I found to be a general failing in the work, a very skewed and mistaken view of the human situation, ignoring major problems, and exhibiting a lack of sensitivity to what is of ultimate value in human life and experience. It is true globalwarming is worried about. This more than any other problem features. One optimist tells us that while it will wipe out cities and cause millions of deaths the good news is that Mankind will survive. Thank you. Other optimists tell us that we will soon be harnessing the sun's energy and beating the fossil fuel, carbon- emissions cause of it all. Unfortunately those of us who have been hearing these promises for half - a - century now are perhaps a bit less optimistic that this is what is going to happen soon. Keep the sun and wind coming you guys in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and other enlightened points in the world. Keep the sun coming at thirty forty fifty sixty seven eighty ninety one - hundred two hundred dollars a barrel. Another of our great optimists, Ray Kurzweil of `Intelligent machine' fame does not preach this time about how we are all going to disappear into the Singularity by 2030. Instead he promises us one hundred year plus life- spans and disease-less lives. Apparently Kurzweil has not seen how wonderfully we have extended the lives of millions of chronically ill people whose continued existence weighs so heavily not only upon the health system but above all on their relatives and themselves. . In another area Paul Horgan and Steven Pinker look forward to the new era of Universal peace, no more war soon to be upon us. Pinker ignores the Holocaust, the Gulag, Mao's one -hundred million murders, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tells us that mankind overall is killing less people over time than we have ever before in our history. He hasn't apparently been reading another of the respondents Martin Rees who has been envisioning for some time now various ways our technically advanced civilization might find for making an end of all of us. No comet needed, just a few vicious nuts somewhere manufacturing a bit of biotech viral newness, and goodbye to us all. No global warming required just a few Ahmadinejads loaning a few nuclear weapons to one of the many creative terrorist organizations in the world. Well, we won't all be dead, just hundreds of millions of us. Another area of perhaps false Optimism has to do with the coming online in late May 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider Project in Geneva. This is going to provide in the sub- atomic realm the first significant hard- data in thirty years, and perhaps tell us whether the much sought after Higgs Boson is more than just a phantom of the Standard Model's imagination. However as one boldly honest respondent Martin Seiff points out that is occurring as American physicists are losing not simply their pre-eminence but their jobs. They are too, it would seem, losing the possibility of making the kind of brilliant individual contributions made the greats of twentieth- century physics. All those thousands of collaborators examining the statistical results of the sub- atomic collisions may well be only further evidence to confirm the idea that the really dynamic and significant area for achieving significant results today is the life- scientists and not the world of physics.
Finally I would have appreciated it had a few more of the respondents had something like the voice of William Faulkner when in his famous Nobel Speech he spoke about the enduring of the human voice and character. I simply find it hard to be tremendously enthusiastic about the great Future promised to Mind , Intelligence , Singularity, Cosmic Civilization etc. if along with this there should be no human beings left in the world.
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