2007 : WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?

Benjamin Franklin: I wish it were possible... to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But... in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.
—Letter to Jacques Dubourg, April 1773

Eternal life may come within our reach once we understand enough about how our knowledge and mental processes are embodied in our brains. For then we should be able to duplicate that information — and then into more robust machinery. This might be possible late in this century, in view of how much we are learning about how human brains work — and the growth of computer capacities.

However, this could have been possible long ago if the progress of science had not succumbed to the spread of monotheistic religions. For as early as 250 BCE, Archimedes was well on the way toward modern physics and calculus. So in an alternate version of history (in which the pursuit of science did not decline) just a few more centuries could have allowed the likes of Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, and Pasteur to anticipate our present state of knowledge about physics, mathematics, and biology. Thenperhaps by 300 AD we could have learned so much about the mechanics of minds that citizens could decide on the lengths of their lives.

I'm sure that not all scholars would agree that religion retarded the progress of science. However, the above scenario seems to suggest that Pascal was wrong when he concluded that only faith could offer salvation. For if science had not lost those millennia, we might be already be able to transfer our minds into our machines. If so, then you could rightly complain that religions have deprived you of the option of having an afterlife!

Do we really want to lengthen our lives?

Woody Allen: I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

In discussing this prospect with various groups, I was surprised to find that the idea of extending one's lifetime to thousands of years was often seen as a dismal suggestion. The response to my several informal polls included such objections as these: "Why would anyone want to live for a thousand hundred years? What if you outlived all your friends? What would you do with all that time? Wouldn't one's life become terribly boring?"

What can one conclude from this? Perhaps some of those persons lived with a sense that they did not deserve to live so long. Perhaps others did not regard themselves as having worthy long term goals. In any case, I find it worrisome that so many of our citizens are resigned to die. A planetful of people who feel that they do not have much to lose: surely this could be dangerous. (I neglected to ask the religious ones why perpetual heaven would be less boring.)

However, my scientist friends showed few such concerns: "There are countless things that I want to find out, and so many problems I want to solve, that I could use many centuries." I'll grant that religious beliefs can bring mental relief and emotional peace—but I question whether these, alone, should be seen as commendable long-term goals.

The quality of extended lives

Anatole France: The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Certainly, immortality would seem unattractive if it meant endless infirmity, debility, and dependency upon others—but here we'll assume a state of perfect health. A somewhat sounder concern might be that the old ones should die to make room for young ones with newer ideas. However, this leaves out the likelihood that are many important ideas that no human person could reach in, say, less than a few hundred well focused years. If so, then a limited lifespan might deprive us of great oceans of wisdom that no one can grasp.

In any case, such objections are shortsighted because, once we embody our minds in machines, we'll find ways to expand their capacities. You'll be able to edit your former mind, or merge it with parts of other minds — or develop completely new ways to think. Furthermore, our future technologies will no longer constrain us to think at the crawling pace of "real time." The events in our computers already proceed a millions times faster than those in our brain. To such beings, a minute might seem as long as a human year.

How could we download a human mind?

Today we are only beginning to understand the machinery of our human brains, but we already have many different theories about how those organs embody the processes that we call our minds. We often hear arguments about which of those different theories are right — but those often are the wrong questions to ask, because we know that every brain has hundreds of different specialized regions that work in different ways. I have suggested a dozen different ways in which our brains might represent our skill and memories. It could be many years before we know which structures and functions we'll need to reproduce.

(No such copies can yet be made today, so if you want immortality, your only present option is to have your brain preserved by a Cryonics company. However, improving this field still needs further research — but there is not enough funding for this today — although the same research is also needed for advancing the field of transplanting organs.)

Some writers have even suggested that, to make a working copy of a mind, one might have to include many small details about the connections among all the cells of a brain; if so, it would require an immense amount of machinery to simulate all those cells' chemistry. However, I suspect we'll need far less than that, because our nervous systems must have evolved to be insensitive to lower-level details; otherwise, our brains would rarely work.

Fortunately, we won't need to solve all those problems at once. For long before we are able to make complete "backups" of our personalities, this field of research will produce a great flood of ideas for adding new features and accessories to our existing brains. Then this may lead, through smaller steps, to replacing all parts of our bodies and brains — and thus repairing all the defects and flaws that make presently our lives so brief. And the more we learn about how our brains work, the more ways we will find to provide them with new abilities that never evolved in biology.

The Power of Educated People to Make Important Innovations

It is interesting that pessimism seems to be the conventional wisdom — i.e. that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and things are getting worse. In the short run pessimism is an easy bet. The news media, for example, would be a terrible business if there was only good news — shocking bad news sells more newspapers (or generates more Neilson ratings, or internet clicks). Yet they need not worry about there being a dearth of bad news — its only a matter a time before some more bad news comes in.

However, I think that the focus on pessimism is hugely misleading. The pattern of the last five decades is that by and large the most important factors in human life have improved immensely. By and large there is no better time to be alive than today, and any rational estimate is that we will continue to be in a phase of continued improvement.

Perhaps the biggest reason I am optimistic is that I am a huge believer in the power of educated people to make important innovations. The trends in China and India and elsewhere toward educating literally millions of people with scientific, engineering and technical degrees is tremendously positive. It is trendy in some US-centric circles to bemoan the fact that China and India are graduating more engineers than the US — indeed the developing has the potential to graduate more engineers than the US has people. I view that with tremendous optimism — at least on the whole. There will be negative consequences to be sure, and some naysayer will whine about them. History is clear that the negatives of bringing high levels of education to heretofore under educated people are more than outweighed by the tremendous positives.

The Energy Challenge

A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century? I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 percent chance that civilisation would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist. I stand by this optimism.

There are indeed powerful grounds for being a techno-optimist. . For most people in most nations, there's never been a better time to be alive. The innovations that will drive economic advance —information technology, biotech and nanotech—can boost the developing as well as the developed world. We're becoming embedded in a cyberspace that can link anyone, anywhere, to all the world's information and culture—and to every other person on the planet. Creativity in science and the arts is open to hugely more than in the past. 21st century technologies will offer lifestyles that are environmentally benign—involving lower demands on energy or resources than what we'd consider a good life today. And we could readily raise the funds - were there the political will—to lift the world's two billion most deprived people from their extreme poverty.

Later in this century, mind-enhancing drugs, genetics, and 'cyberg' techniques may change human beings themselves. That's something qualitatively new in recorded history—and it will pose novel ethical conundrums. Our species could be transformed and diversified (here on Earth and perhaps beyond) within just a few centuries.

The benefits of earlier technology weren't achieved without taking risks—we owe modern aviation, and modern surgery, to many martyrs. But, though plane crashes, boiler explosions and the like were horrible, there was a limit to just how horrible —a limit to their scale. In our ever more interconnected world, where technology empowers us more than ever, we're vulnerable to scary new risks—events of such catastrophic global consequences that it's imprudent to ignore them even if their probabililty seems low.

One set of risks stems from humanity's collective impact. Our actions are transforming, even ravaging, the entire biosphere —perhaps irreversibly—through global warming and loss of biodiversity. Remedial action may come too late to prevent 'runaway' climatic or environmental devastation.

But we also face vulnerabilities of a quite different kind, stemming from unintended consequences (or intended misuse) of ever more empowering bio and cyber technology. The global village will have its village idiots.

The risks are real. But, by making the right collective choices we can alleviate all these hazards.

Among such choices, my number-one priority would be much-expanded R and D into a whole raft of techniques for storing energy and generating it by 'clean' or low-carbon methods. The stakes are high—the world spends nearly 3 trillion dollars per year on energy and its infrastructure. This effort can engage not just those in privileged technical envonments in advanced countries, but a far wider talent pool Even if we discount climate change completely, the quest for clean energy is worthwhile on grounds of energy security, diversity and efficiency.

This goal deserve a priority and commitment from governments akin to that accorded to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing. It should appeal to the idealistic young—indeed I can't think of anything that could do more to attract the brightest and best of them into science than a strongly proclaimed commitment, from all technologically-developed nations, to take a lead in providing clean and sustainable energy for the developing and the developed world.

Reforming Scientific and Medical Publishing Via the Internet

I am optimistic that the ascendance of open access postings of articles to the internet will transform scientific and medical publishing; and that a number of profound problems—some particular to medical publishing—will be assuaged as a result.

Currently, it can be impossible to gauge the true balance of risks and benefits of medical treatments from a reading of the literature. Frighteningly, this is true too for those doctors who ground their clinical decisions upon a reading of it. I will review some aspects of the problem; and then relay grounds for possible optimism.

First, as is probably true in all fields, bias occurs in favor of existing orthodoxy. This is arguably more troubling in medicine since the orthodoxy is in turn influenced, as has been learned, by the profusion of articles favorable to their products that are ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry, or by the for-profit MECCs (Medical Education and Communication Companies) that industry hires for this purpose. These companies in turn pay physicians and pharmacists—including favorably disposed "thought leaders" whom they seek to succor —to be the listed authors, extinguishing any appearance of connection to industry for the favorable views propounded. This provides the appearance that many independent parties are in agreement in their favorable representations of the evidence. Crisply said, advertising is published as though it were science.

These problems are exacerbated by bias arising from direct conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is endemic in medical research; and articles about a class of drug have been shown to be dramatically more likely to be favorable when authored by persons with ties to industry than when authored by persons without such conflicts. Conflicts for authors thus appear to foster submission of industry-favorable articles. Conflicts for reviewers may also foster rejection of industry-unfavorable ones. (As elsewhere, reviewers are drawn from the pool of authors.) Moreover, reviewers are seldom tasked to disclose conflicts, and they remain anonymous, precluding repercussions for biased reviews.

These factors are aggravated, possibly dwarfed, by pharmaceutical company influence on medical publishing—further aligning medical publishing with medical advertising. Medical journals are not the independent arbiters of article quality one might wish. They are businesses and derive their revenue from pharmaceutical company advertising, and from sales to industry of glossy reprints of industry-favorable articles, at inflated prices. For some medical journals, profits reportedly number in the millions, providing high stakes.

At least three former Editors in Chief of major US and British medical journals have penned books decrying the inimical impact of industry influence on medicine. One has to ask why, in medical journals, advertising is accepted (just because it is available for the taking); and whether the journal's bottom line is a proper consideration in dictating what is published, in settings where lives are on the line.

So, whence the optimism? One means to propel optimism is to suggest a tactic that might enable its fruition. Briefly, I suggest that papers be published on the Internet, reviews be submitted by named reviewers; and that others rate (and review) the reviews. Both papers and reviewers receive ratings that are updated on an ongoing basis. While this won't protect against biased submissions, it will protect against biased rejections—and at least enable a voice for original or contrary perspectives.

It is probable that more bad science will be released. However the system provides a means for improving poor quality work; and avoiding having to view what remains substandard.

More importantly, more good science may be published—and perhaps, more great science. As Nobelist Sydney Brenner (who famously authored an article entitled "Moron peer review") has observed, many of his co-Nobelists' prize winning work was initially rejected through the review process.

Transformative work by its nature may defy conventional wisdom. One might be drawn to wonder: is there other work that would have revolutionized science and merited a Prize, that languishes unpublished? And that does so because authors at some point ceased to persevere in submission efforts after some number of rejections, or finally deemed the effort to publish futile?

Hark back to the many great discoveries of which we have heard that were initially ridiculed: H. pylori as a contributor to ulcers; handwashing as a means to reduce puerperal fever; the sun as the center around which the earth revolves, to name a few. What might this imply for the possibility that major discoveries may be pilloried into nonpublication by peer review? There is no means to estimate the fraction of Nobel-caliber efforts that achieve publication, as the denominator remains unknowable.

Indeed, the benefits of a new, Internet-based approach may be particularly great for the most important work: work that challenges existing orthodoxy; work that defines a new field and fits no existing journal; work that crosses boundaries to other disciplines—with their own often arbitrary conventions and in-groups; or that demands knowledge from two or more disciplines; science that is ahead of its time, that entails many advances at once or that founds new work on an understanding of relevant material that others do not yet have. Or, too, work that runs counter to vested interest groups—particularly but hardly exclusively in the arena of medicine, where the potent impact of industry influence on information has been the subject of increasing alarm—and where disparities between literature and truth may cost patients' lives.

An instance from mathematics supports the premise that current convention, requiring articles to be published in peer-reviewed journal venues, may inhibit promulgation of at least some of the very most important work. The Poincaré conjecture—a holy grail in mathematics—was recently proved by a Russian mathematician who posted his work on the Internet but refused the bother of submitting his work to a journal. Other cases can be adduced favoring the proposition that some among persons capable of propelling major advances—which often entails rejecting conventions in science—are also constitutionally inclined to reject the conventions, petty obstacles and distractions that attend the current model of scientific publishing. And perhaps they do so with justifiable contempt.

Surely many will defend the current system—not least those who fare well within it, and who benefit disproportionately from it. And surely there will be problems to overcome in the new system. Orthodoxy, in-groups, and interest groups will continue to influence the literature. Those who serve these masters will likely submit negative reviews of articles (and of reviewers) who do not toe the respective party lines. But at least now the contrarian positions will achieve release, reviewers can be held accountable for biased reviews, and unacknowledged conflicts can be exposed in instances when others know of them.

In short, I am optimistic that online publishing, with a review-the-reviewer system akin to that proposed here, will provide more voice and venue for science that may now have the highest need—and the lowest prospect—of being aired.

Bullish on Cosmology

I am optimistic that there will be a historic breakthrough in our understanding of the universe in the next five years that will be remembered as one of the most significant of the millennium. I would also give better-than-even odds that there will be more than one discovery of this magnitude.

My optimism is sparked by a remarkable coincidence: the simultaneous maturing of several unrelated technologies, each of which could open a new window on the cosmos. Historically, every new technology is a harbinger of great discovery. Consider, then, that at least a handful of major advances will occur within just five years:

• Directly detecting of dark matter:

After decades of gradual progress, physicists will finally build the first detectors sensitive enough to detect dark matter particles directly, if they consist of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), as many physicists suspect. 

• Discovering the nature of dark energy:

Although their names sound similar, the only quality dark matter and dark energy have in common is that they are both invisible. Dark matter consists of massive particles that gravitationally attract one another and clump into clouds that seed the formation of galaxies.

Dark energy is gravitationally self-repulsive, so it tends to smooth itself out. When it is the dominant form of energy, as it is today, dark energy causes the expansion of the universe to speed up.The composition of dark energy is one of the great mysteries of science, with profound implications for both fundamental physics and cosmology. 

Over the next five years, arrays of novel wide-field telescopes will be constructed that are programmed to rapidly scan large fractions of the sky to search for astronomical phenomena that vary rapidly with time. The arrays will be used to search for distant supernovae (exploding stars), whose brightness and colors can be used to judge the distance and recessional speed of their host galaxies. From these measurements, astronomers can measure precisely the accelerated expansion of the universe, a primary means of distinguishing different theories of dark energy.

At the same time, in the laboratory, physicists will be trying to detect changes in the gravitational force when masses are placed at close proximity or tiny changes in the strength of the electromagnetic force with time, other effects predicted by some theories of dark energy. These measurements will significantly narrow the candidates for dark energy, perhaps identifying a unique possibility.

• Exploring the big bang and the origin of the large-scale structure of the universe:

The conventional wisdom is that the universe sprang into existence 14 billion years ago in a big bang and that a period of exponentially rapid inflationary expansion accounts for its large-scale structure. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of alternative possibilities, such as the cyclic model of the universe. 

In the cyclic model, the big bang is not the beginning but, rather, an event that has been repeating every trillion years, extending far into the past. Borrowing ideas from string theory, the cyclic model proposes that each bang is a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world along an extra spatial dimension. Each bang creates new hot matter and radiation that begins a new perio of expansion, cooling, galaxy formation and life, but space and time exist before and after the bang.

The large-scale structure of the universe and the pattern of galaxies are set by events that occurred about a cycle ago, before the bang, just as events occurring today are setting the structure for the cycle to come. Although the inflationary and cyclic pictures predict distributions of galaxies, matter and radiation that are indistinguishable, their predictions for the production of gravitational waves in the early universe are exponentially different.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space produced during inflation or near the beginning of a new cycle that propagate through the universe and distort space like undulations traveling through jello. These cosmic gravitational waves are too weak to be detected directly, but experimental cosmologists throughout the world are mounting ground- and balloon-based experiments to search for their imprint on the polarization pattern of cosmic microwave background radiation produced in the first 380,000 years after the bang. 

The results will not only affect our view of our cosmic origin, but our future as well. The conventional big bang inflationary theory predicts our universe is headed towards the cold oblivion of eternal expansion—a whimper—but the cyclic model predicts a new hot big bang.

• Direct detecting gravitational waves:

The first window on the universe using something other than electromagnetic waves could be open within the next five years. After decades of developments, the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), with one detector in Livingston, Louisiana, and one in Hanford, Washington, has a plausible chance of directly detecting gravitational waves, beginning a new era in astronomy. 

The observatory is designed to detect stronger gravitational waves than those produced in the early universe, such as waves generated by the violent collision of neutron stars and black holes in our own galaxy. However, this frontier is so fresh and unexplored that there could well be unanticipated cosmic sources of strong gravitational waves to be discovered that could cause us to reassess our understanding of the universe. 

• Breakthroughs in fundamental physics and direct production of dark matter: 

The Large Hadron Collider at the Center for European Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, is set to begin operation this year. This facility consists of a powerful particle accelerator that will reproduce collisions of the type that occurred within the first pico-second after the big bang, carrying the investigation of fundamental physics over an important energy threshold where new phenomena are anticipated. For example, physicists hope to discover a spectrum of new "supersymmetric" particles, confirming a key prediction of string theory, and also WIMPs that may comprise the dark matter.  

The impact will  be profound.  As we enter 2007, we understand the composition of less than five percent of the universe; we do not understand how space, time, matter and energy were created; and we cannot predict where the universe is headed. In the next five years, we may witness the historic resolution of one or more of these issues. I have my personal bet on what the individual outcomes will be; but the only prediction I will reveal here is that, with the opening of so many new windows on the cosmos, we are sure to discover something unanticipated and astonishing.

With The Right Sort Of Priorities And Human Engineering (Whatever That Phrase Means), We Can Be Biased Towards Making Us/Them Dichotomies Far More Benign

A truly discouraging thing to me is how easily humans see the world as dichotomized between Us and Them. This comes through in all sorts of ways —social anthropology, lord of the flies, prison experiments, linguistics (all those cultures where the word for the members of that culture translates into "People," thus making a contrast with the non-people living in the next valley).

As a neurobiologist, I'm particularly impressed with and discouraged by one finding relevant to this. There's a part of the brain called the amygdala that has lots to do with fear and anxiety and aggression. Functional brain imaging studies of humans show that the amygdala becomes metabolically active when we look at a scary face (even when the face is flashed up so quickly that we aren't consciously aware of seeing it). And some recent work—solid, done by top people, independently replicated — suggests that the amygdala can become activated when we view the face of someone from another race. The Them as scary, and the Them being someone whose skin color is real different from our own.

Damn, that's an upsetting finding.

But right on the heels of those studies are follow-ups showing that the picture is more complicated. The "Other skin color = scared activated amygdala = the Other" can be modified by experience. "Experience," can be how diverse of a world you grew up in. More diversity, and the amygdala is likely to become activated in that circumstance. And also, "experience," can be whether, shortly before your amygdala is put through the brain imaging paces, you are subtly biased to think about people categorically or as individuals. If you're cued towards individuating, your amygdala doesn't light up.

Thus, it seems quite plausible to me that we are hard-wired towards making Us/Them distinctions and not being all that nice to the Them. But what is anything but hard-wired is who counts as an Us and as a Them —we are so easily manipulated into changing those categories.

So, I'm optimistic that with the right sort of priorities and human engineering (whatever that phrase means), we can be biased towards making Us/Them dichotomies far more benign than they tend to be now. Say, by making all of us collectively feel like an Us with Them being the space aliens that may attack us some day. Or making the Them to be mean, shitty, intolerant people without compassion.

But, I'm sure not optimistic that we'll soon be having political, religious or cultural leaders likely to move us effectively in that direction. Just to deflate that optimism.

The Women of the 110th Congress

I am optimistic about the record number of women who will come to Washington in January 2007 as members of the 110th Congress —16 Senators and 71 Representatives. Only 20 years ago, there were just two female Senators and 23 Representatives. Now, the Speaker of the House is a woman, second in the line of succession to the Presidency. Why do I think this Ascent of Women is cause for optimism? Because I believe we need a lot more social smarts—particularly empathy—in the corridors of power and the brains of our political leaders; and current evidence indicates that, in general, the female brain is intrinsically a more proficient empathizing device.

One example. About a year ago, Tania Singer (then at University College London, now at the University of Zurich) published a study on the neural processes underlying empathy. As one rather lurid headline described the work: "Revenge Replaces Empathy in Male Brain. Watching bad guys suffer lights up the mind's reward centers for men." The experiment involved imaging the brains of a group of male and female volunteers while they played a monetary investment game based on trust. A few of the players were actors, planted to play fairly or unfairly.

Subsequently, the actors were zapped with a mild electric shock, while the other players watched. When an actor who had played fair was shocked, both female and male volunteers felt their pain: fMRI images showed empathic activation of pain-related areas of their brains—specifically in the insular and anterior cingulate cortices. But when the unfair actor was shocked, the sexes reacted differently. The females still showed a surge of empathy; the males didn't. Instead, their reward areas lit up. The German word for this feeling—schadenfreude—roughly translates as taking pleasure in the misery of others. The researchers' conclusion, based on the scanning and on the comments from post-experiment questionnaires, was that "men expressed a stronger desire for revenge than women".

Twenty years ago, in a PBS program called The Sexual Brain, I explored male-female differences. It was quite clear then (and has since become even more evident) that anatomically, chemically and functionally the brains of men and women have some significant differences. To what extent these variations drive or map on to differences in cognition and behavior remains controversial (ask Larry Summers). But we know, for example, that men have a proportionally larger amygdala than women  and women have a proportionally larger prefrontal cortex.

There's evidence, too, that women have a proportionally larger anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula than men. From quite recent brain imaging studies, we now know that these areas are important components of the circuitry that underpins our ability to process complex social emotions, ‘read' the faces and minds of the people we encounter as we navigate through social space, understand and predict their behavior, make moral judgments and empathize. (Of course, everything I am saying should have the usual scientific safety net of caveats—the differences exist at the level of populations, not individuals; cultural factors play an important role; etc.)

So what does this have to do with my optimism about the women of the 110th Congress? Would women govern differently than men?

That's exactly the question that Geneva Overholser posed in The New York Times in 1987 just after Margaret Thatcher won a new term as British Prime Minister. Overholser noted that Thatcher —like the few other women who were national leaders—operated in a male-dominated political arena and basically behaved no differently in office from men.

"Would that be true," Overholser asked, "if the number of women in high office better reflected their share of the population? Would they then govern differently, feeling more comfortable and secure as women?" She turned to the example of Norway, where the Prime Minister—Gro Harlem Brundtland—was a woman (and, incidentally, a physician). Of 17 Cabinet ministers, seven were women. And the consequences were dramatic. One example: Despite huge spending cuts, the Norwegian government actually increased child care subsidies and paid parental leave. In Norway's case, the answer to Overholser's question was: "Probably, if enough came to power."

In The Sexual Brain, I asked: "Is it wise for males to confront each other across an arms control negotiating table? Is global security enhanced in an atmosphere charged with testosterone?" Today, more women have had seats at that negotiating table—think of Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice in the United States, Margaret Beckett (first female Foreign Secretary) in the United Kingdom, Angela Merkel (first female Chancellor and, incidentally, a physicist) in Germany. But the questions remain. Is it inherently bad that males experience schadenfreude—or is a taste for revenge a valuable prerequisite for dispensing justice?  Is it admirable that females have more empathy for a cheater in pain  —or a regrettable sign of weakness? Kinder maybe. Gentler maybe. But the best way to run a country?

I am optimistic that the answer to questions like these will eventually emerge from the synergy of science and society. Our relatively recent ability to image activity inside the human brain is a giant step forward and will allow us to better understand individual differences. I view a science of empathy as a realistic prospect: data will replace simplistic slogans (like Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus) as a basis for making social decisions. And I am optimistic that the social sophistication that a larger number of female legislators can bring to the 110th US Congress can help create "a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquility and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity".

Corrective Goggles for Our Conceptual Myopia

Broadly speaking, I am optimistic that the world's current crises look terrifyingly large mainly because of our conceptual myopia. It is practically a truism to say that every era tends to regard its troubles as uniquely daunting, but I think that accelerating news cycles make the current generation particularly prone to this error of judgment. Making my best attempt to put on corrective goggles and take the longer view, I see a half-dozen areas where we are on the verge of major advances in our ability to expand our control over our environment and ourselves, in way that will be largely or entirely beneficial.

• I am optimistic that technology will soon show practical ways to eradicate the twin problems of carbon emissions and fossil-fuel scarcity. In the nearer term, carbon dioxide will follow the path of CFCs, acid-rain-causing sulfur oxides, and nearly all automobile tailpipe emissions. Nay-sayers warned that all of these would be difficult and economically disruptive to tackle; in every case, the nay-sayers were roundly proven wrong. Carbon sequestration is the most obvious technology for offsetting carbon emissions. Here's a firm prediction: If the world's leading economies set tough emissions standards for CO2, or establish a serious carbon tax, industry will find astonishingly inexpensive ways to comply within a few years.

• Farther ahead, new energy sources will begin to make serious contributions to the world economy long before fossil fuels run out. My bet is still on fusion energy, despite its perfect, five-decade record of never fulfilling any of its promises. I seriously doubt, though, that commercially viable fusion energy will look anything like the huge and hideously expensive magnetic-confinement test machines (like ITER) now being built or planned. More likely it will take the shape of a compact, laser- or radio-driven linear accelerator using exotic nuclear reactions that spit out protons, not neutrons; send the protons flying through a copper coil and you have direct electricity conversion, with no boiler, no steam, no turbine, no dynamo. 

• I am optimistic that we are on the verge of developing the tools to program biological systems as effortlessly as we program digital ones. Synthetic biology, a field spearheaded by George Church, Drew Endy, and Jay Keasling, will be key to attaining this goal—and it is now in transition from theory to reality. Rather than snipping genes from one creature and clumsily inserting them into another, future biotechnicians will consult a master database of DNA sequences and specify the traits they want, whether to insert into an existing organism or to create in a brand-new one designed from the ground up. (A corollary is that these tools will finally allow effective stem-cell therapy, which leads to a related prediction: Thirty years from now, the current agonies over the ethics of stem-cell therapy will look as quaint as the hand-wringing over "test tube babies" in the 1970s.) Synthetic biology in its fully realized form will also be a dangerous weapon. A related part of my optimism is that it—like electricity, like radio, like all genetic research so far—will prove far more useful for positive applications than for negative ones.

• I am optimistic that young adults today will, on average, live to 120 and will remain healthy and vigorous until their final years. Researchers like Leonard Guarente, David Sinclair, and Cynthia Kenyon are zeroing in on the chemical and genetic basis of aging. Immortality is a long way off, but drugs and genetic therapies that hold back age-related diseases are coming soon. Treatments that slow the aging process as a whole will follow closely behind. Ultimately these will lead to a wholesale reordering of the pace of life and the social structures based around certain biological milestones.The child-bearing years may extend into the 60s; people may routinely continue working into their 80s or beyond. With this expanded timeline will come all kinds of new possibilities, including vastly expanded periods of intellectual creativity and a softening of the irrational behaviors that arise from the universal fear of death. 

• I am optimistic that the longer life of the body will be accompanied by enhanced powers of the brain. We already live in world where it is getting harder and harder to forget. A simple Google search often revives long-lost trivia, historical experiences, even the names of long-dead relatives. What we have today is but a tiny taste of what lies ahead. Computing power is now so cheap, and wireless communication so effortless, that a person could easily wear a microphone (or even a low-res video camera) at all times and compile a digital database of every word he or she uttered.

In the future, many people will choose to do so; we will all have personalized, searchable databases at our commands. Rapid advances in brain prostheses mean that soon we will be able to access those databases simply by the power of thought. Within a couple decades, the information will be beamed back in a form the brain can interpret—we will be able to hear the playback in much the manner that deaf people can now hear the world with cochlear implants. Vision is slightly more difficult but it too will be reverse engineered. That will undoubtedly give space exploration a tremendous boost. Earthbound scientists will be able to "inhabit" robotic explorers on other worlds, and any interested participant will be able to log on passively to experience the adventure. Humans will venture into space physically as well but at first that will happen primarily for sport, I expect.

• I am optimistic that researchers, aided by longer careers and computer assistance, will crack the great twin mysteries of physics: the nature of gravity and the possibility of other dimensions. Here I'm talking not just about theoretical advances, as may occur at the Large Hadron Collider after it revs up in late '07, that could bolster the theory that gravity, unlike the other forces, has the ability to transmit out of the three dimensions of human experience. I am also talking about a kookier optimism that our discoveries will have practical consequences. It may be possible to build instruments that can sense universes lying outside of our dimensions. It may be possible to manipulate gravity, turning it down where convenient (to launch a rocket, for instance) and cranking it up where desired. It may even be possible to create a new universe as a laboratory experiment—the ultimate empirical investigation of the Big Bang that started our universe.

• Finally, I am optimistic that with all of these intellectual and material achievements will come a science-based spiritual awakening. Back in the 1930s Albert Einstein spoke of a "cosmic religious feeling" and tried to convince the public (with painfully little success) that scientists are every bit as spiritual as are the world's religious leaders. It may not look that way now, but I think Einstein will soon be vindicated. Longer, more connected lives will eat away at the religion of fear, the rudimentary form of faith rooted in anxiety about loneliness and the apparent absoluteness of death.

More important, the next round of scientific discoveries promise a powerful new sense of our connection to the rest of the universe, and even to universes beyond our own. One of the most potent knocks on science is that it, unlike religion, offers no sense of purpose. That has never been true—what greater purpose is there than intellectual exploration, the key trait distinguishing us from the other animals—but now more than ever science has a chance to make its case. It needs to develop more of a communal structure. It needs to develop a humane language, expressing its findings explicitly as triumphs of human achievement. It needs to celebrate our ever-expanding dominion over nature while articulating a humble appreciation that nature is, indeed, where we all came from.

Above all, science needs a face, a representative (or representatives) as charismatic as Pope Benedict XVI or, er, Tom Cruise, who can get rid of all those "it"s in the pervious sentences. Right now, the faces of science are selected by book sales, television specials, and pure self-promotion; its elected leaders, like the heads of scientific societies, rarely function as public figures. Surely there is a better way. Any suggestions?

Poincaré, Radiodurans and Teletransportation

As science journalist and supporter, surely I will be optimistic for 2007: among others, there are three main reasons which happened during 2006 which strengthen my convictions.

First, the quantum teletransportation between light and matter, experienced in Copenhagen last October. This is not the first time so particular a phenomenon is proved to be real but the experiment, held at the Niels Bohr Institutet, opens new and fascinating perspectives in the field of quantum computation: through the entanglement’s process is now possible to stock quantum data; with this discovery, the short future might be even more intriguing.

Second, a bacterium called “Deinococcus Radiodurans” could lengthen our own lives. This tiny form of life is able to survive unthinkable conditions, like a strong desiccation or a nuclear explosion: the reasons why all that could be possible were a real scientific puzzle, until Miroslav Radman and his French team have found a convincing explanation. Studies have to continue but adding other years to the human race’s average is no longer a dream.

At last, a Fields medal has been assigned for the solution of the so-called Poincaré conjecture: an unsolved enigma for more than a century has been revealed and that makes me think the next years will be a good period for mathematics.

Hence, if you need some optimism, you should just take a look at science: I am certain that this new century will overtake the former one.

The Power of Our Creative and Analytic Abilities

As I help raise my two year old son, I witness a basic truth familiar to parents through the ages and across the continents — we begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever-growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe. While we evolved to survive, once we have the luxury of taking such survival for granted, the ability of our species to unravel mysteries grand and deep is awe inspiring. I'm optimistic that the world will increasingly value the power of such rational thought and will increasingly rely on its insights in making the most critical decisions.

The Future of Human Mating

Each one of us has descended from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who mated successfully. They all found love or at least a liaison. Evolution has forged a motivation to mate so powerful that it propels us to surmount impressive, daunting, and demoralizing obstacles. The first problem is prioritizing conflicting mate preferences, compromising on some to attain others. Searchers must then sift through hundreds of options, limiting pursuit to potentials within shouting distance of attainability. Desirable mates bring out determined rivals, forcing fierce competition. Complex and subtle attraction tactics must succeed in unlocking minds and melting hearts. After making it through these mine fields, there is no rest for the weary. Post-mating, sexual conflicts erupt, undermining months or years of effort. Mate poachers abound, threatening to lure our lovers.

Infidelity diverts precious resources to interlopers and rips families apart.
Treachery runs rampant, spurned lovers rage, and divorce rates rise. The modern world compounds these problems, from discerning deception in internet dating to bridging cultural gaps created by cross-continental mating. Despite the obstacles, both ancient and novel, I remain optimistic that humans in every generation will continue to succeed gloriously.

Computers Will Let Data Tell More Of Their Own Story

I am optimistic that the rapid growth in computing power will let measured data tell more of their own story—rather than tell the story of the "model" that someone imposes on the data. The slow but steady movement away from classical model-based science tracks the growth in computers and digital processors.

Almost all traditional science and engineering has been model-based. Equations define the simplest models or functional relationships among input and output variables. Usually some super-smart thinker first makes an inspired guess at the model equations. The grand examples are Newton's guess at the inverse-square law of gravity and then Einstein's later and even bolder guess at the non-Euclidean geometry of the spacetime continuum.
Most models have lesser scope and far humbler origins. The modeler often guesses at a linear or quadratic or other simple relationship between the inputs and outputs even though the world itself appears to be quite nonlinear in general and often nonstationary as well. A standard modeling trick is to let a random noise term account for the difference between the nonlinear and largely unknown world and the far simpler model. Thus the humble noise or nuisance term carries much of the model's explanatory burden. Then the modeler compares the model to some data and looks for a pattern match to some degree. Other models can compete with the first model based on their pattern matches with the data.
          
Model-based science has produced most of our technological achievements. And it will likely always be at the core of the science curriculum. But it does rely on an arcane ability to guess at nature with symbolic mathematics. It is hard to see a direct evolutionary basis for such refined symbol manipulation although there may be several indirect bases that involve language skills and spatial reasoning.

A more immediate issue is that we tend to over-teach models in the science and engineering curriculum. One reason for this is that it is easy to teach closed-form equations and related technical theorems. Just state and derive the model result and apply it to examples based on numbers or on other equations. Equations make for wonderful homework problems. And it is especially easy to test on model equations and their consequences. It is not so easy to teach or test on data-intensive problems that can involve large tables of numerical data.

Another reason for over-teaching models is that so many of our textbooks in science and engineering have their roots in the pre-computing era surrounding World War II. That was the Shannon era of great analytical minds and authors such as probabilist Joseph Doob and chemist Linus Pauling and economist Paul Samuelson and many others. Students performed computations with slide rulers and then later with pocket calculators. Science and engineering textbooks today still largely build on those earlier texts from the pre-computer age where so often mathematical assumptions trumped raw data.

Rising computer power led to the first large break with the math-model approach in various species of artificial intelligence. Computer scientists programmed expert-system search trees directly from words. Some put uncertainty math models on the trees but the tree structure itself used words or text strings. The non-numerical structure let experts directly encode their expertise in verbal rules. That removed the old math models but still left the problem of literally doing only what the expert or modeler said to do.
Adaptive fuzzy rule-based systems allowed experts to state rules in words while the fuzzy system itself remained numeric. Data could in principle overcome modeler bias by adapting the rule structure in new directions as the data poured in. That reduced expert or modeler input to little more than giving initial conditions and occasional updates to the inference structure. Still all these AI tree-based knowledge systems suffer from the curse of dimensionality in some form of combinatorial rule explosion.

Feedforward neural networks further reduced the expert to a supervisor who gives the network preferred input-output pairs to train its synaptic throughput structure. But this comes at the expense of having no logical audit trail in the network's innards that can explain what patterns the network encodes or what patterns it partly or wholly forgets when it learns new input-output patterns. Unsupervised neural networks tend to be less powerful but omit more modeler bias because the user does not give the network preferred outputs or teaching signals. All these AI systems are model-free in the sense that the user does not need to state a math model of the process at hand. But each still has some form of a functional math model that converts inputs to outputs.

Statistics has arguably been the real leader in the shift from models to data --even though classical linear regression has been imposing lines and planes on the world for over two centuries. Neural and fuzzy learning systems turn out ultimately to have the structure of nonlinear but still statistical approximators. Closed-form statistics also produced Bayesian models as a type of equation-based expert system where the expert can inject his favorite probability curve on the problem at hand. These models have the adaptive benefit that successive data often washes away the expert's initial math guesses just as happens in an adaptive fuzzy system. The AI systems are Bayesian in this sense of letting experts encode expertise directly into a knowledge structure—but again the knowledge structure itself is a model of sorts and thus an imposition on the data.

The hero of data-based reasoning is the bootstrap resample. The bootstrap has produced a revolution of sorts in statistics since statistician Bradley Efron introduced it in 1979 when personal computers were becoming more available. The bootstrap in effect puts the data set in a bingo hopper and lets the user sample from the data set over and over again just so long as the user puts the data back in the hopper after drawing and recording it. Computers easily let one turn an initial set of 100 data points into tens of thousands of resampled sets of 100 points each. Efron and many others showed that these virtual samples contain further information about the original data set. This gives a statistical free lunch except for the extensive computation involved—but that grows a little less expensive each day. A glance at most multi-edition textbook on statistics will show the growing influence of the bootstrap and related resampling techniques in the later editions.

Consider the model-based baggage that goes into the standard 95% confidence interval for a population mean. Such confidence intervals appear expressly in most medical studies and reports and appear implicitly in media poll results as well as appearing throughout science and engineering. The big assumption is that the data come reasonably close to a bell curve even if it has thick tails. A similar assumption occurs when instructors grade on a "curve" even the student grades often deviate substantially from a bell curve (such as clusters of good and poor grades). Sometimes one or more statistical tests will justify the bell-curve assumption to varying degrees — and some of the tests themselves make assumptions about the data. The simplest bootstrap confidence interval makes no such assumption. The user computes a sample mean for each of the thousands of virtual data sets. Then the user rank-orders these thousands of computed sample means from smallest to largest and picks the appropriate percentile estimates. Suppose there were a 1000 virtual sample sets and thus 1000 computed sample means. The bootstrap interval picks the 25th — largest sample mean for the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval and picks the 975th — largest sample mean for the upper bound. Done.

Bootstrap intervals tend to give similar results as model-based intervals for test cases where the user generates the original data from a normal bell curve or the like. The same holds for bootstrap hypothesis tests. But in the real world we do not know the "true" distribution that generated the observed data. So why not avoid the clear potential for modeler bias and just use the bootstrap estimate in the first place?

Bootstrap resampling has started to invade almost every type of statistical decision making. Statisticians have even shown how to apply it in complex cases of time-series and dependent data. It still tends to appear in statistics texts as a special topic after the student learns the traditional model-based methods. And there may be no easy way to give student scientists and engineers an in-class exam on bootstrap resampling with real data.

Still the trend is toward ever more data-based methods in science and engineering — and thus towards letting the data tell more of their own story (if there is a story to tell). Math models have tradition and human psychology on their side. But our math models grow at an approximate linear rate while data processing grows exponentially.

Computing power will out.

Sunshine State

I am not, by default, optimistic; it is an attribute that I take on as a duty more than out of temperament. Left to myself I do not look out at the world and see a hopeful place—and did not do so even when the geopolitical state we are in was not so dreadful. But I have been convinced over the years that an outlook that gives play to hopefulness is by and large a better tool with which to help improve the future than the alternatives. You are more likely to find solutions if you believe they are there than not. The trick for those of us without the sunny state of mind naturally suited to such an outlook is to find objects for our optimism that make the duty feel less dutiful.

My current optimism is for solar energy. The simple facts of the matter are that the sun provides more energy to the earth in an hour than humanity makes use of in a year. Of the non-fossil-fuel energy sources, all the big players that are not nuclear—biomass, hydroelectric, wind—are ultimately driven by the sun. I am optimistic that direct solar conversion—photovoltaic cells and their future analogues—will come to take its place among and then surpass these more established technologies a lot more quickly than most people outside the area currently imagine. I'am hoping for at least a terawatt of solar by 2025, two if we're lucky, and dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as a result.

The locus for this optimism is California. A history of generous and far-sighted subsidy has built up the silicon-based Japanese and German solar industries over the past decades. Something similar now looks to be happening on the West Coast, where newer technologies are poised to benefit. There couldn't be a better suited place: California, and in particular the Bay area, boasts a near-unique concentration of world class research universities and national laboratories and a large number of people well versed in the solid-state trades who are ready and able to move from semiconductors that deal with information to those that deal with energy. It is also very well endowed with business angels and venture capitalists, many of whom combine their desire to make money with an urge to change the world. They largely share a network-first, build-from-the-periphery, revolutionise-the-whole-shebang mindset well suited to (and shaped by) the development of the Internet, an attitude which ports itself easily to the idea of decentralised solar power generation. The optimism to which I need to psych myself up seems to come naturally to such people in such places.

New materials and new material-processing techniques should allow the cost of installed photovoltaic capacity to be halved in the next few years, and there is room for considerable further improvement after that: while wind power, nuclear power and dams are not going to become radically cheaper to install, solar power capacity is. It is also going to become more flexible, both physically and metaphorically, with new applications on new surfaces, from windows to clothing. Some of these applications may well be gimmicky and unsustainable, but one of the great advantages of the coming solar power boom is that it offers the possibility for a wide range of technologies both to compete for the main prize—cheap domestic and light industrial electricity in developed and developing countries alike—and also to find and to create new niches.

The boom will not just be a matter of lower cost manufacture or better efficiency. System-wide solutions need to be found—new ways of accommodating solar materials architecturally, new technologies for storing energy, smart approaches to the electric grid, new financial arrangements and instruments that will allow people to get the benefits of solar electricity without necessarily taking on the capital costs of installation themselves. The sort of imagination that gets such things happening is far from unique to California—but it is abundant there, and can be put to use.

California is not essential to an acceleration in the already exponential growth of installed solar capacity. The big breakthroughs may come in Germany or Texas or China, and they will certainly have to be used in China and India if they are to have the dramatic effect on carbon emissions they could have. But it is in California that we see the most striking collocation of public interest, political support, research capacity, technological exuberance, entrepreneurial flair, a supportive business ethos, smart capital—and, crucially, sunshine.

Going Beyond Our Darwinian Roots

I am optimistic about the adaptability of the human brain to answer questions that evolution could not have designed it for. A brain that can rewire itself to visualize 4 dimensions, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, is clearly going way beyond the things that natural selection could have wired it for. It makes me optimistic that we may be able to go beyond our Darwinian roots in other ways.

Metcalfe's Law of Minds

Our species is unique in its ability to use communications to spread learning across populations, allowing us to get smarter and more capable far more quickly than evolution alone would allow. What makes me continually hopeful is that those tools of communications continue to get so much better, so much faster. Anyone who can explore Wikipedia and not be both humbled and filled with confidence in the collective potential in the people all around us is a cynic indeed. And we've only just scratched the surface of such networked intelligence.

Metcalfe's Law says that value of a networks grows with the square of the number of nodes. Today's Web, which is as much about contributing as it is consuming — two-way links, as opposed to the old one-way networks of broadcast and traditional media — allows the same to apply to people. Connecting minds allows our collective intelligence to grow with each person who joins the global conversation. This information propagation process, which was once found in just a few cultures of shared knowledge, such as academic science, is now seen online in everything from hobbies to history. The result, I think, will be the fastest increasing in human knowledge in history.

This morning I was explaining to a nine-year-old about Moore's Law and the magical power of the continuous learning curve. "Will it ever end?" he asked. "I don't see why it should," I answered. That's optimism for you.

Physics Will Not Achieve a Theory of Everything

I'm optimistic that physics will not achieve a Theory of Everything.

That might seem an odd thing to be optimistic about. Many of my colleagues in physics are inspired by the prospect of achieving a Theory of Everything. Some even claim that they've already got it. (Acknowledging, to be sure, that perhaps a few i's remain to be dotted or a few t's to be crossed.) My advice, dear colleagues: Be careful what you wish for. If you reflect for a moment on what the words actually mean, a Theory of Everything may not appear so attractive. It would imply that the world could no longer surprise us, and had no more to teach us.

I don't buy it. I'm optimistic that the world will continue to surprise us in fascinating and fundamental ways.  

Simply writing down the laws or equations is a long way from being able to anticipate their consequences. Few physicists—and no sober ones—seriously expect future work in fundamental physics to exhaust, for example, neuroscience. 

A less literal reading of "Theory of Everything" is closer to what physicists who use it mean by it. It's supposed to be a theory, not really of everything, but of "everything fundamental". And here "fundamental" is also being used in an unusual, technical sense. A more precise word here might be "basic" or "irreducible". That is, the physicists' Theory of Everything is supposed to provide all the laws that can't be derived logically, even in principle, from other laws. The structure of DNA surely emerges—in principle—from the equations of the standard model, and I strongly suspect that the possibility of Mind does too. So those phenomena, while they are vastly important and clearly fundamental in the usual sense, aren't fundamental in the technical sense, and elucidating them is not part of a Theory of Everything. 

I think we're about to enter a new Golden Age in fundamental physics. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which should begin to operate at CERN, near Geneva, starting in summer 2007, will probe the behavior of matter at energies higher than ever accessed before. There is no consensus about what we'll find there. I'm still fond of a calculation that Savas Dimopoulos, Stuart Raby and I did in 1981. We found—speaking roughly—that we could unify the description of fundamental interactions (gauge unification) only within an expanded version of relativity, which includes transformations of spin (supersymmetry). To make that dual unification we had to bring in new particles, which were too heavy to be observed at the time, but ought to be coming into range at the LHC. If they do exist we'll have a new world of phenomena to discover and explore. The astronomical riddle of dark matter could well be found there. Several competing ideas are in play, as well. The point is that whatever happens, experimenters will be making fundamental discoveries that take us by surprise. That would be impossible, if we had a Theory of Everything in the sense just described—that is, of everything fundamental.

In recent months a different, much weaker notion of what a "Theory of Everything" might accomplish has gained ground, largely inspired by developments in string theory. In this concept, the Theory provides a unique set of equations, but those equations that have many solutions, which are realized in different parts of the Universe. One speaks instead of a multiverse, composed of many domains, each forming a universe in itself, each with its own distinctive laws. Now even the fundamental—i.e., basic, irreducible—laws are beyond the power of the Theory to supply, since they vary from universe to universe. At this point the contrast between the grandeur of the words "Theory of Everything" and the meager information delivered becomes grotesque.

The glamour of the quest for a Theory of Everything, or a Final Theory, harks back Einstein's long quest for his version, a Unified Field Theory. Lest we forget, that quest was fruitless. During his great creative period, Einstein produced marvelous theories of particular things: Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, the electrodynamics of moving bodies, the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. I take inspiration from the early Einstein, the creative opportunist who consulted Nature, rather than the later "all-or-nothing" romantic who tried (and failed) to dictate to Her. I'm optimistic that She'll continue to surprise me, and my successors, for a long time.

Unraveling Beliefs

If I were an average white woman living in the United States in 1850, I would already have been dead for 10 years. Not an ideal position from which to contemplate optimism about the future, you say. But consider this:  In the snap of 150 years, the life expectancy of this very group catapulted from a dismal 40 to a respectable 80 years. Given my own privileges, this means that I will write 30 more responses to the yearly Edge question. Yippee.

How can life expectancy, seemingly so determined by biology and the conditions of life, double so fast? Advances in science and technology are no doubt the drivers of the rapid changes in nutrition, medical care, and standards of living that account for this doubling. But such advances were themselves possible, even imagined, because of something else: changes in mental states we call beliefs—beliefs about the worth of a life, beliefs about what it means to be happy, beliefs about health and prosperity including about who deserves it and who does not.

Many others in this volume will speak about specific human accomplishments that are legitimate grounds for optimism. I am inclined to focus on an aspect of the mind because it, I believe, is the font of the many possibilities that give us optimism.

I am bullish about the mind's ability to unravel the beliefs contained within it—including beliefs about its own nature (and I am bullish on this in a year when the CEO of Goldman Sachs took home 53.4 million as a bonus).

What gives me particular optimism about the future is the ability of humans everywhere to go against the grain of their own beliefs that are familiar, that feel natural and right, and that appear to be fundamentally true. What makes me optimistic is the possibility that we can (and do) unravel the contents of traditional beliefs and even the process by which they were constructed.    

We've done this sort of unraveling many times before, whether it is about the relationship of the sun to the earth, or the relationship of other species to us. We've put aside what seemed natural, what felt right, and what came easily in favor of the opposite. I am optimistic that we are now ready to do the same with questions about the nature of our own minds. From the work of pioneers such as Herb Simon, Amos Tversky, and Danny Kahneman we know that the beliefs about our own minds that come naturally, feel right, and are easy to accept aren't necessarily true. That the bounds on rationality keep us from making decisions that are in our own interest, in the interest of those we love, in the long-term interest of our societies, even the planet, even perhaps the universe, with which we will surely have greater opportunity to interact in this century.

Here are some examples of what seems natural, feels right, and is easy to believe in—even though it isn't rational or true.

We irrationally anchor:  ask people to generate their social security number and then the number of doctors in their city and the correlation between the two numbers will be significantly positive, when in fact it ought to be zero—there's no relation between the two variables. That's because we can't put the first one aside as we generate the second.

We irrationally endow:  give somebody a cheap mug, and once it's "my mug" through ownership (and nothing else) it becomes, in our minds, a somewhat less cheap mug. Endowed with higher value, we are likely to demand a higher price for it than it is worth or is in our interest to demand.

We irrationally see patterns where non exist: Try to persuade a basketball player, fan, or statistician that there isn't anything to the idea of streak shooting;  that chance is lumpy and that that's all there is to Michael Jordan's "hot hand".

As natural as it is to anchor, endow, and imagine patterns, it isn't accurate, it isn't in our interest, and it may not even be fair. Likewise, research on the implicit beliefs and preferences we hold has shown that such "mind bugs" extend to the beliefs and preferences we have about ourselves, members of our own social groups, and those who sit farther away on a scale of social distance.

We don't intend to discriminate or treat unfairly, but we do. Such unintended consequences come from aspects of our mind that seem natural (helping somebody close to us like a neighbor or a nephew rather than somebody more distant) and feels right (fearing somebody who looks physically different from us strange). Such responses are natural and feel right because they evolved in a world where such responses may have been useful.  And yet, they continue to operate even through the best person for the job isn't one's family member or friend, where in the strangeness of other cultures lie the most lucrative business opportunities.

Becoming aware of the buggy aspects of our minds is the first step toward unraveling them. How we discover what needs unraveling, how we do it, and how successful we are at it are complex issues. But the fact that we do it is impressive. One of the stories to come out of the 2006 election is that representatives who were successful at bringing home earmarks to their states didn't necessarily win because the electorate cared about something larger than their own backyard.  The ability to think about one's own long range interest, to self-regulate and delay gratification, to consider the well-being of the collective, especially to view the collective as unbounded by religion, language, or nationality requires a mental leap that isn't natural or easy. And yet each new generation seems to be able to do it more successfully than the previous one. The standards for how we treat ourselves and others get higher, we examine our beliefs with more and more powerful lenses, and we turn our minds inside out and shake out the rot.

Why do we do this? I'll argue that we do this for at least three reasons. First of all, because newer laws demand it (we work next to gay co-workers because it is the law and soon minds are changed). Second, old beliefs come unraveled because such unraveling is in our self-interest (India is cool because India generates revenue and soon even Bollywood is spoken about positively).

Most importantly though, we unravel existing beliefs and preferences because we wish them to be in line with our intentions and aspirations and recognize that they are not. I see evidence of this everywhere—small acts to be the person one wishes to be rather than the person one is—and it is the constant attempt at this alignment that gives me optimism.

Geomorphic Evidence for Life on Mars

There are three geomorphic forms on Mars I have identified: the filling of old, deeply eroded craters with uneroded domes, some only partly burying eroded original true resurgent domes; channels hundreds of km long filled with similar dome-like material that are arched in crossection, the arches rising two and more km above their margins; and vast areas of Mars between latitudes 25 to 60 degrees covered with mat-like material approximately one km thick in many places which buries completely Noachian age impact craters 5 km in diameter and smaller.

The organic material composing these geomorphic forms is almost certainly cyanobacteria combined with calcium carbonate. Stromatolites on Earth, growing today and going back 3.4 Gyr but on a comparatively miniscule scale, are my model.

I believe that the growth of these gigantic stromatolitic forms gradually decreased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars leading to progressive cooling and finally freezing conditions that ended the growth of the three geomorphic forms and the mostly warm, wet Noachian era. The following cold, dry Hesperian and Amazonian eras for the next 3 plus Gyr to the present time have none of these geomorphic forms, proving they needed water for their formation, but water with some other essential materials to cause their growth.

As several types of meteorites from Mars have been identified here on Earth, it is likely that Mars has received meteorites from the bombardment of Earth as well. The question is, which one seeded the other? We probably are not going to find the prokaryotic progenitors of the eukaryotic cyanobacteria here on Earth, but we have a good chance of finding the progenitors on Mars if they ever existed there, thus telling us which planet seeded the other.

The Long View of Demographics

I am optimistic about humankind's ability to reach a sustainable balance with other life on earth, in part because the number of humans on earth will soon start to decrease. This doesn't mean that I think we should ignore our environmental problem—just the opposite: I think we should fight hard now with the confidence that we can win a complete and lasting victory.

We are so accustomed to watching the explosion of human growth and development that it is easy to imagine that this is normal. It is not. We are the first generation in history that has watched the human population double in our own lifetime, and no future generation is likely to see it again. All of those blights of growth that we have come to accept—crowded cites, jammed roads, expanding suburbs, fish-depleted oceans, and tree-stripped forests—are all symptoms of a one-of-a-kind surge in human expansion. Soon they will be just memories.

There are currently over six billion people in the world. There will probably never be more than ten. Population forecasts vary, but they all agree that human population growth is slowing. As people become more prosperous, they have smaller families. In every country where women are allowed free access to education and health care, rates of population growth are going down. Sometimes the trends are hidden by the delays of demographics, but the real population growth rates are already negative in Europe, China, and, if we subtract immigration, in the United States. The total human population is still growing, but not as fast as it once was. Assuming that these trends continue, the total population of the world will be shrinking well before end of this century.

This long view of demographics allows me to be optimistic even though almost every other measure of environmental health is deteriorating. We are suffering from our binge of growth, and the parts of our world that are the last to binge are suffering the most. The binge is not just in size of population, but also in the level of consumption. Yet, here too there is reason for optimism. We are so wasteful in our use of resources that there are huge opportunities for improvement. With more efficient technologies, our fundamental requirements for food, materials, and energy should be well within the carrying capacity of our planet. We should be able to support the peak of human population at a higher standard of living than the richest nations have today.

There is no doubt that the environmental challenges of the next decades are daunting, and they will require all the power of human striving and creativity to overcome them. Yet, I have no doubt that we will succeed. Innovation, good will, and determined effort will be enough to handle the next few billion people. Then as populations shrink, demands on resources will be reduced. Nature will begin to repair itself, reclaiming what we have so hastily taken. I hope we manage to keep the gorillas, elephants and rhinoceroses alive. By the end of the century, they will have room to roam.

Things will—er—get better

I'm hugely optimistic that things will be better in 2007 than they have been in 2006. What things, you might ask. Well, lots of things. Let's take a couple of things that are on the minds of many scientists—climate change and stem cells. In both cases, the imperative for action on the basis of scientific evidence is clear. But in both cases, other forces have intervened to frustrate progress.

For climate change, the obstacles are short-sighted commercial interests and short-term political interests—let's call them myopeconomics and myopolitics. Many businessmen still judge that their own fortunes and those of their shareholders are best served by ignoring the doom-mongers and pumping out the carbon dioxide to make money. A few politicians—one in particular—still think that their own political standing, and their place in history, are favoured by denying the growingly obvious. But the consequences of climate change are accruing non-linearly. A point must come at which the impact of change will fall within the near-point of those refractory industrialists and politicians. When that happens, the rules will suddenly reverse. Both business and politics will be better served by response than denial. I predict that the tipping point will come in 2007. Political skeptics will become passionate converts, eager to claim the historical credit for recognising the inevitable. The burners will become preservers.

I should make it clear that what I am optimistic about here is the likelihood of a change in attitude; not, alas, about the probability of rapid success in the monstrous task of reversing the effects of a century of profligacy. We are going to have to live with the consequences of our parents' actions, and our children with the consequences of ours. The issue is whether our children's children will inherit a world worth living in.

For stem cells—or, to be more specific, human embryonic stem cells—the barriers to progress are not economic but moral. On the one hand, biomedical science offers the hope of cellular immortality—the prospect of repairing a damaged brain, heart or pancreas, just as grazed skin or a bitten tongue already mends itself. On the other hand, a substantial cohort of politicians and religious leaders (more exactly Catholic and fundamental Protestant leaders), especially in the United States and some European countries, fiercely oppose the taking of life in the interests of other lives. Although the balance of arguments seems quite different from that for climate change, interestingly, the crux of the problem is again the power of intuition over the cold rationality of science. I have heard a ‘pro-life' lobbyist describe the collection of stem cells from 10-day-old embryos, surplus to the requirements of in-vitro fertilization, as "the evisceration of little babies". Life, it is argued, begins at the moment of conception.

Most scientists would surely argue that a pre-implantation embryo, smaller than the point of a needle, without a single nerve cell, let alone any viscera, cannot possibly be considered a person. Defining the starting point of life is not a matter of dogma but of social consensus. As my friend, Nobel Laureate, Eric Kandel put it: "Life begins when the kids are all through College and the dog dies"!

Then, given these absolutist arguments, why should I be optimistic about a change in attitude to stem cell research in 2007? Because morality is, for all but the most stubbornly impervious to practical evidence, a matter of utilitarian dialectic. Yesterday's moral outrage has a way of becoming today's necessary evil and tomorrow's common good. Just as with climate change, what will cause a swing of attitude is the turning point of a mathematical function; in this case the shifting ratio of perceived benefit to theoretical cost.

Just a few weeks ago, a team of scientists from the Institute of Ophthalmology, the Institute of Child Health and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London (supported, I'm delighted to say, by the Medical Research Council) reported that they had restored sight to considerably more than Three Blind Mice, by transplanting into their eyes immature photoreceptor cells (midway between stem cells and fully formed rods and cones). Rats that have suffered strokes have been vastly improved by the transplantation of nerve-making cells into their brains. The first attempts will soon begin at repairing severed human spinal cords with the help of transplanted stem cells. The evidence of likely benefit is growing fast. No miracles yet, but a trickle of hope, which is likely to become a steady stream in 2007. I predict that the immorality of not helping the undeniably-living sick will soon outweigh the good of protecting the never-to-be-born. Just as with climate change, the angels might switch in 2007.

There we are. That's what I'm optimistic about. The problem is that I'm by nature an optimist. I see the world through those legendary rose-tinted spectacles. My glass is forever half-full. Interesting, isn't it, how many clichés there are for being optimistic. Doesn't that suggest that optimism-pessimism is as much a fundamental dimension of human nature as extraversion-introversion, happiness-sadness, energy-slothfulness?  Being optimistic about a particular eventuality is more a comment on the believer than the belief. So, what I'm really optimistic about is that that I won't be devastated even if my predictions are less than perfect.

The Situational Focus

When trying to understand human behavior that violates our expectations about how people are supposed to act, there is a learned tendency to "rush to the dispositional." We seek to explain behavior in terms of personal qualities of the actor, or agent of the action in question. In individualistic cultures this means searching for genetic, personality, or pathological characteristics that can be reasonably linked as explanatory constructs. It also has come to mean ignoring or giving insufficient weight to aspects of the behavioral context—situational variables—that may in fact be significant contributors to that action. Dramatists, philosophers, and historians, as well as clergy and physicians, all tend toward the dispositional and away from the situational in their views of human nature.

Social psychologists have been struggling to modify this bias toward inner determinants of behavior by creating in a large body of research highlighting the importance of outer determinants of behavior. Roles, rules, responsibility, anonymity, role-playing, group dynamics, authority pressures, and more have been shown to have a dramatic impact on individual behavior across a variety of settings.

Milgram's classic demonstration of blind obedience to authority established that the majority of ordinary American citizens would follow the path laid down by an authority even if it led to severely harming an innocent person. My Stanford Prison Experiment extended this notion of situational power to reveal how institutional settings, like prisons or schools or businesses, could exert unimaginably strong influences over human behavior. Nevertheless, the general public and even intellectuals from many fields still buy the dispositional and sell short the situational as merely minimal mitigating circumstances.

I am optimistic that this mental bias will get a rebalancing in the coming year as new research findings will demonstrate how the situational focus is to an enhanced public health model as the dispositional is to the old medical model when trying to understand and change behavior of people in communities. The focus of public health on identifying vectors of disease can be extended to systemic vectors of health and success, in place of individual ambition and personal failure and success.

This analysis will be important in meeting the challenges posed by international terrorism through new efforts to build community resilience rather than focusing on individual coping. It will also change the blame game of those in charge of various institutions and systems from identifying the"few bad apples" to actively trying to understand how their barrel had soured and was corrupting even good apples. I have shown how this dispositional thinking operated in analyzing the causes of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison by the military and civilian chains of command. It is no different than the search for evil by developing a Witch Identification and Destruction program during the Inquisition.

Although the foundations of dispositional thinking run deep and wide in most of us, I am optimistic that we will start to seep into that biased thinking to construct a more balanced perspective on how good people may turn evil, and how bad people can be guided to turn good.

And Now the Good News

Things change for the better either because something went wrong or because something went right. Recently we've seen an example of the former, and this failures fill me with optimism.

The acceptance of the reality of global warming has, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern in his report on climate change to the British government, shown us 'the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen'.

The currency of conservatism for the last century has been that markets are smarter than governments: and this creed has reinforced the conservative resistance to anything resembling binding international agreements. The suggestion that global warming represents a failure of the market is therefore important. Technical solutions will hopefully be found, but the process will need to be primed and stoked and enforced by legislation that would be regarded as big government socialism in the present climate. The future may be a bit more like Sweden and a bit less like America.

If a single first instance of global governance proves successful, it will strengthen its appeal as a way of addressing other problems —such as weapons control, energy management, money-laundering, conflict resolution, people-trafficking, slavery, and poverty. It will become increasingly difficult for countries to stay outside of future treaties like Kyoto—partly because of international pressure but increasingly because of pressure from their own populations.

Which brings me to my main reason for optimism: the ever-accelerating empowerment of people. The world is on the move, communicating and connecting and coalescing into influential blocks which will move power away from national governments with their short time horizons and out into vaguer, more global consensual groups. Something like real democracy (and a fair amount of interim chaos) could be on the horizon.

The Internet is catalyzing knowledge, innovation and social change, and, in manifestations such as Wikipedia, proving that there are other models of social and cultural evolution: that you don't need centralised top-down control to produce intelligent results.

The bottom-up lesson of Darwinism, so difficult for previous generations, comes more naturally to the current generation. There is a real revolution in thinking going on at all cultural levels: people comfortably cooperate to play games for which the rules have not yet been written with people they've never met, listen to music and look at art which is emergent, not predetermined, and accept the wiki model of the open-source evolution of knowledge.

All these represent dramatic and promising changes in the way people are thinking about how things work, how things come into being and how they evolve.

That the Debate or, Should I Say, War, Between Science and Religion Will See New Light

I'm optimistic that the debate or, should I say, war, between science and religion will see new light. Right now, the fracturing seems to be worsening, as further entrenchment occurs on both sides. Books from Edge colleagues trashing religion as collective hallucination or delusion, or, better still, as idiotic superstition, carry a simple message to people outside the sciences: we are as radical as the religious extremists, as inflexible and intolerant as the movements we seek to exterminate by our oh-so-crystal-clear-and-irresistibly-compelling rationalizations.

Although I'm also an atheist, I do not forget what is behind the power of religious thought. Quite simply: hope. Life is though, people suffer, and, rightly or wrongly, religion offers something for people to hold on to. Yes, it's wild to believe in supernatural influences in the world, yes it's crazy to devote your life to a God that seems to have vanished from the world for, under conservative estimates, "at least" 2000 years. But scientists cannot forget that most people need some sort of spiritual guidance, a kind of guidance science, at least as is taught today, cannot offer. Science has shown, and keeps showing, that we live in a cold, hard universe, completely indifferent to us and to life. And yet, people love, die, connect, fight, and must come to some sort of inner peace, of acceptance. What can science offer these people?

It is futile and naive to simply dismiss the real need people have for spirituality.

My hope is that people will begin to see science as a vehicle for mutual understanding and for respecting life. The more we study life and its mechanisms, the more we realize how rare it is, how precious it is. Sure, there may be life elsewhere, and it may even be intelligent. However, even if this is the case, odds are we are still going to be stuck with ourselves, in this planet or our solar neighborhood, for quite some time. Either we learn that science teaches us humility and respect for life and the environment, or we exterminate this most precious cosmic jewel. I am optimistic that scientists will teach people these lessons, instead of simply try to rob them of their faith and offering nothing in return.

We Are Asking And Answering

I am optimistic for the simple reason that given the incredible odds against the existence of brains that can ask such questions, of laptops on which to answer them, and so on — here we are, asking and answering!

The Ozone Hole

As a climate scientist, seeking optimism is like a scavenger hunt — have to look in some strange places.

As an example, take the ozone hole that opened up 20 years ago and nearly instantly (in a few years, which is really fast in international treaty terms) created positive action: the Montreal Protocol to ban ozone depleting substances. So that is a good example of optimism, my students often suggest—right? Well, maybe, because we knew about the likelihood of ozone depletion for 15 years before the ozone hole was proved to be caused largely by human emissions.

So what happened since the early 1970s?: the chemical industries denied it, took out character assassination adds in major media to cast doubt on the scientists doing the work, and hired attack dog lobbyists to block action in Washington.

Where is the optimism in this little piece of scientific history? There was some: unbeknownst to most of us, the chemical industry actually believed the science was about right, preliminary as it was, and despite political posturing to the contrary had been working on substitutes for ozone-depleting CFCs, so that one day, when the scientific evidence and politics aligned for ozone action, they were ready to put on a green cloak — and by the way, take over market share by selling the world their newly designed greener "ozone friendly" chemicals. So was the ozone glass half empty or half full — one could legitimately see it either way: (optimists) we acted when we had to; versus (pessimists) why did it take a catastrophe in the making to get action we should have taken a decade before on likely science.

Any lessons from the ozone affair for climate change policy?

First, what would constitute a "climate hole"? Perhaps, the 2003 Euro heat waves that killed some 35,000 well-heeled Europeans? Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans — connected to recent evidence that global warming should statistically increase top intensity tropical cyclones? Amazingly enough, despite all the pessimistic talk from environmental types about bio-geophysical "tipping points" in the climate system (e.g., shut down to the Gulf Stream, collapse of Greenland Ice sheet etc,), my optimistic half brain thinks the only clearly demonstrable "tipping phenomena" are psychological-political: the symbolic events of climate impacts just mentioned and the advent of a popular movie combined with a big change in attitudes about inventing our way out of global warming by some large corporations no longer lobbying to prevent policy — these include GE, BP, PG&E, Duke Energy, Wal-Mart and many others.

These events actually are cause for optimism. But, lest the O overtake the P a bit too fast, what has been proposed as climate policy so far is only a palliative that will stop less than half the projected warming — the really dangerous events occur after a few degrees of warming and we are still squarely on that pathway, even if making some optimistic sounds and a few small moves to change direction.

So in the optimism-pessimism derby, optimism has staged a comeback in the back stretch and is gaining on the more apocalyptic favorite. That is the good news. But without widespread acceptance of the need to reconfigure our energy systems — and put our overweight cars on a diet — the troubling favorite is still a few lengths ahead as we enter the home stretch. But optimism is quite legitimate still: attitudes are changing fast. Scientists still need to keep explaining credibly the consequences of all actions — and inactions — so we have a good chance to avert the highest climate change risks that business as usual is steaming us toward. It is still doable to steer the big ship toward safer waters, but the window of opportunity — and optimism — diminishes the longer we delay implementing sea changing actions.

Perhaps the most optimistic aspect for me is that the young scientists I work with understand the dilemmas and are dedicated to credibly explain the situation to all who will engage.

A Core Decency in People that Even the Worst Machinations of Governments Can't Entirely Hold Down

I'm optimistic because there's a core decency in people that even the worst machinations of governments can't entirely hold down. The Evelina hospital is the first new children's hospital that's been built in London in a century. There's a giant atrium in the middle, and the contract with the company doing the cleaning says that the window cleaners need to dress up as superheroes. The children in bed—many with grave illnesses—delight in seeing Superman and Spiderman dangling just inches away from them, on the outside of the glass; apparently for the cleaners it's one of the best part of their week.

The government has wasted a fortune on consultants, bureaucracy and reorganizations of the NHS. It's always defended in cold management-speak. This simple arrangement with the window cleaners cuts through all that. Everyone I've mentioned it to recognizes that—and in that recognition, lies our hope.

Metacognition For Kids

We can use the discoveries of cognitive science to improve the quality of education in the US and abroad. To do this, however, we need to radically rethink how our schools work. Going back to the Industrial Revolution, the main emphasis as been on memorization, force-feeding our children with bite-sized morsels that are easily memorize—and quickly forgotten. (Recall the words of Dickens' stern schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind, "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts... Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.") I am not sure it ever served a purpose for children to memorize the capitals of all 50 states (as I failed to do in junior high school), but in the age of Google, continued emphasis on memorization is surely largely a waste of time.

Five decades of cognitive science have taught us that humans are not particularly good memorizers—but also that we as a species have bigger fish to fry. Hamlet famously marveled that humans were "noble in reason", "infinite in faculty", but experimental psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky have shown that humans are actually often poor reasoners, easily fooled. The average person tends to have a shaky grasp on logic, to believe a lot of what he (or she) hears unreflectively, and to be overly confident in his (or her) own beliefs. We tend to be easily fooled by vivid examples, and to notice data that support our theories—whilst forgetting about or ignoring data that go against our theories. Yet I cannot recall a single high school class on informal arguments, how to spot fallacies, or how to interpret statistics; it wasn't until college that anybody explained to me the relation between causation and correlation. In the age of the internet, our problem is not that children can't find information, but that they can't evaluate it.

What children of today need is not so much a large stock of readily Googleable information as a mental toolkit for parsing what they hear and read. As the old saying goes, it is better to teach a man how to fish than to simply give him fish; the current curriculum largely gives children fish, without teaching them a thing about how to fish for themselves.

How to teach children to fish for themselves? I would start with a course in what cognitive scientists call metacognition, knowing about knowing, call it The Human Mind: A User's Guide, aimed at say, seventh-graders.. Instead of emphasizing facts, I'd expose students to the architecture of the mind, what it does well, and what it doesn't. And most important, how to cope with its limitations, to consider evidence in a more balanced way, to be sensitive to biases in our reasoning, and to make choices in ways that better suit our own long-term goals. Nobody ever taught me about these things in middle school (or even high school), but there's no reason why they couldn't be taught; in time, I expect they will.

The Immeasurables

An eight-year-old sits braiding the hair on the tail of her My Little Pony doll, completely absorbed in the job. The shining plasticized hair is long and resilient; she plays with it for hours. 

She starts by taking the tail and dividing it into three pieces that she braids together. Then, she undoes that braid and begins to nest layers of  braids. She divides the tail into nine pieces and braids each group of three until she has three braids, and then takes these three braids and braids them together. After a while, the girl is starting with twenty-seven pieces, braiding them first into nine, then into three, then into one. The girl is playing with My Little Pony but she is thinking about recursion.

The eight-year-old is one of my MIT students, telling a story of her childhood. For the past thirty years, I have begun each class at MIT by asking my students to write about an object that was important to them on their path toward science. What they have had to say testifies to the importance of objects in the development of a love for science—a truth that is simple, intuitive, and easily overlooked. And it is cause for optimism because it offers a hopeful note as we face our national crisis in science education.

As we argue about testing and standards, about the virtues of digital tools, about whether or not to move to online courseware, we have a tendency—as in any emergency—to look for salvation in the next new thing or things.  In this case, these next new things are testing, measurement, and the computer itself as a way to provide educational solutions. But we can also look to the last things that worked. And one of the things that has always worked in getting young people interested in science has been object passions. From my very first days at MIT in 1976, I met students and colleagues who spoke about how as children they were drawn to science by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio, by the physics of sand castles, by playing with marbles, by childhood explorations of air-conditioning units.

Certain trends are apparent as I look at the objects that have drawn children to science over the past thirty years. One is an interest in "transparency." Through the mid-1980s, MIT students wrote about being drawn to science by radios, vacuum cleaners, wooden blocks, and broken telephones. These are things to take apart and put back together again. By the end of the 1980s, the emphasis shifts to objects that are investigated through the manipulation of program and code. Yet even with the passage from mechanical to electronic, and from analog to digital, students express a desire to get close to the inner workings of their machines. Even with machines that are increasingly opaque—with a printed circuit board one can no longer "open the hood and look inside"—young people with a scientific bent continue to search for at least a metaphorical understanding of the mechanism behind the magic. And they find it.

Beyond seeking a way to make any object transparent, students extol the pleasure of materials, of texture, what one might call the resistance of the "real." For one, geology became real through her childhood experience of baking a chocolate meringue: "Basic ingredients, heated, separated, and cooled equals planet." A thirteen-year-old looks up at the motion of his fly line while fishing with his father and is reminded of drawings of long, continuous, flowing lines he had made in algebra class. "I realized that the motion of my hand had a very direct effect on the movement of the line, much in the same way that the input to a function produced a given output. Without any formal understanding of the physics involved, I was able to see the fly rod as representing a given function for which I was the input... From this point on, the fly rod was my metaphor for understanding function in mathematics."

Young scientists are encouraged by a personal experience with an object they can understand and with which they can tinker. Playing with objects in their own way leads children to build a personal scientific style. There has been no simple migration to a new digital world. Children grow up in many worlds—they are seduced by the virtual, but always brought back to the physical, to the analog, and of course, to nature.

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that often attaches to the world of objects much as the artist attaches to his paints, the poet to his words. Putting children in a rich object world is essential to giving science a chance. At a time when science education is in crisis, giving science its best chance means guiding children to objects they can love. Children will make intimate connections, connections they need to construct on their own.

One of the things that keeps educators and parents from valuing children's object passions is the fear that children will become trapped in objects, the fear that children will prefer the company of objects to that of other children. But even if the objects in the life of a young scientist do begin as objects of reassurance for a lonely child, these objects—from the periodic table of the elements (because it offers an image of perfect and reassuring organization) to Lego blocks (because they offer a way to create perfect and reassuring symmetries) can become points of entry to larger, transformative experiences of understanding and confidence, very often at the point they are shared.

It seems wise to attend to young scientists' romance with objects. If we do so, we are encouraged to make children comfortable with the idea that falling in love with things is part of what we expect of them. We are encouraged to introduce the periodic table as poetry and LEGOs as a form of art.

In Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert writes of falling in  love with the gears of a toy car that his father gave him when he was two. Fascination with those gears led to fascination with others. He played with gears in his mind and mathematics began to come alive for him. He fell in love with the gears and he fell in love with science, all at the same time. Papert makes the point that if anyone had tried to measure what was happening to him as this inner explosion of affect and cognition was occurring, they would have found nothing to measure.

I am made optimistic because a conversation about objects reminds us that just because we can't take a measurement doesn't mean that something important is not occurring. Too often when we can't test, we end the conversation. My students' voices make me optimistic because they serve as a reminder that the limit of testing is not the limit of inquiry. It can mark the moment where we turn directly to the child, where we put our deeper intelligence to work.  We can learn what motivates and what inspires..

From a practical point of view, we cannot know in advance whether we stand before a child who will use objects as a path to science. If we insist on one-kind-fits-all curricular programming that takes children away from the idiosyncratic objects they are drawn to, we could miss a child who makes Cs and Ds in math and science but goes on to develop an abiding love for designing complex systems because he has connected with LEGOs and a personal computer. We could miss a child who doesn't think of herself as a science student even as she silently absorbs everything she can learn from chemistry experiments that create purple smoke. We might not count as learning the lessons that come with braiding a pony's tail, casting a fly rod, or baking a meringue.

I am reminded daily of these object passions in the students I teach;  I am optimistic as I begin to sense the political and philanthropic will that could enable these passions to find their voice in education.

How Technology Is Saving the World

I was going to be modest about it, but the congratulatory messages have been slow to arrive, so I will have to toot my own horn. The exciting news is that I have been named Time Magazine’s 2007 Person of the Year. It is true that this is an honor that I share with every other user of technology, but I share well, and I hope that you are as flattered as I am with this well-deserved recognition. In past years, Time Magazine has bestowed this honor on such well-known luminaries as Bill and Melinda Gates, George W. Bush, Rudolph Giuliani, and Ayatollah Khomeini, so we are in good company. All users of technology received this (unfortunately) nonmonetary award as an acknowledgement of the work we have done to change the world in dramatic and unexpected ways. It would be difficult to imagine a more diverse group of award winners. I am writing this article from London, where the Queen just announced that her annual Christmas message, which according to official Royal sources is anticipated by millions (I did not independently verify these data), will be available via pod cast for downloading onto I-Pods and other MP3 devices. In fact, all of her past Christmas messages are now available in multiple viewing formats. Although the Queen refused to respond to questions about whether she personally owned such a device, the younger Royals were quick to add that they did. As illustrated in this momentous news, which is just one example of the radical changes in how we are communicating, there is ample evidence that users of technology are changing the world.

In just the last year, bloggers destroyed some political careers (e.g., Mark Foley) and launched others (e.g., Barack Obama). Technology has changed the way we get information, compute and pay our taxes, keep diaries, do homework, stay in touch, read books, learn almost anything, conduct research, make purchases, compose music, find mates, run businesses, diagnose diseases, and more. At the click of a mouse, I can listen to rap music from Poland or find an organ donor. Technology has enabled all of this and more. I believe that it will also profoundly change how we think about each other and that, for the most part, the change will be for the good.

There are many possible doomsday scenarios in which technology depersonalizes our relationships and makes war more efficient and propaganda more believable. But I am a teacher, and teaching is, at its heart, an act of optimism. If you scrape the crusty veneer off even the curmudgeonliest of professors (yes, "curmudgeonliest" is a real word), you will find a core (sometimes it will be a small core) of optimism. Optimism is a way of viewing possible futures with the belief that you can affect it for the better.

A colleague recently lamented that there are no unexplored places left on earth.  As our daily lives have become increasingly international, there are also fewer strange foods to be tasted, exotic locations to visit, or social customs that are entirely foreign. One reason for the loss of opportunities for adventures into the unknown is that international foods can be found in every city and people from every region of the globe are shopping, eating, studying, and working in even small Midwestern towns in the United States and their equivalent in many countries around the world. Although most of us are still far too uniformed about the lives of people in other regions of the world or in other neighborhoods in our own city, it is also true that we now know more about each other than at any other time in history. Like the other users of technology, I have come to know much more about the lives of others who are "not like me" than I would have even a half generation ago. We are not even close to obtaining global citizenship, but it is at least an idea that people can comprehend and debate.

Along the billion or so other award winners, I can and do communicate with people all over the world at cable speed. Consider for example, the international gaming community that plays together on line and, at the same time, shares their political views and professional and personal lives. They engage in a prolonged social intercourse that spans continents. Their heroes are the gaming experts who come from many countries and backgrounds. The strangeness of "foreigners" that used to define the relationship between people of different religions, customs, races, and regions of the world is disappearing as the rapidly increasing numbers of users of technology connect over time and space in ways that were only available to members of the same clan or village a few decades ago.

Social and political psychologists study "in group" favoritism, which has been a root cause of most conflicts throughout time. The term refers to the tendency to believe that members of one’s own group are more deserving than members of other or "out-groups." Those undeserving others, whom we perceive as being more similar to each other than members of our own group are (they all look and think alike), pose a threat to our own group’s right to whatever is scarce and valued—land, good jobs, clean water, and so on. Think of any conflict, past or present. Whether it is the Bloods and the Crips, Shiites and Sunnis, Tutsis and Hutus, African-Americans and Hispanics, or the hundreds of years of the Crusades with Catholics against Muslims, these are all examples of "us against them" or in-group—out-group conflicts. Pessimists will readily point out that these conflicts have existed since the dawn of time and only a pie-eyed optimistic could believe that intergroup conflict could be reduced by making "the other" seem more like "us." But, there is evidence that we can.

Psychologists in Northern Ireland found that when people in divided societies come into contact in nonthreatening ways, they are in a better position to understand the other group's perspective, and come to regard "them" as equally as human as members of their own group. This contact can lead to greater intergroup trust and even a measure of intergroup forgiveness for past wrongs. Similar approaches are being used by Turkish psychologists who believe that the "Turkish-Armenian conflict has been suffering from a lack of real relational space." They are approaching this long-running conflict by finding ways that members of these two cultures can relate to each other, and the virtual world may be the safest place for these meetings. Psychologists in Israel and Palestine have been assisting teachers and students from both sides of this divide to write joint history books that incorporate narratives from the lives of all of the people who are living contemporary Israeli-Palestinian history. It is the ability to "come together" that is forcing each side to recognize the humanity of "the other." Although these projects are a mix of face-to-face and technology assisted meetings, the role of technology can be used to expand these peace-waging efforts.

Technology is bringing people from diverse backgrounds together, with most of the meetings are taking place in the virtual world. The challenge is to bring in those who are still excluded from the technology revolution, which includes the poor of the world and those whose governments are engaged in futile efforts to restrict access to information from the rest of the world. There will always be "in" and "out" groups, but these categories are becoming more fluid as we identify with a variety of different groups instead of defining ourselves along traditional demographic variables.

Allegiances now extend beyond national borders. I feel as distressed about the loss of the innocent lives of Iraqi citizens as I do about the loss of the innocent lives of the women and men in the U.S. military. I can view the suffering of each any time, night or day, by logging onto the "local" news in any part of the world. I can read the uncensored thoughts of anyone who wishes to share them on their personal blogs and watch the home videos they upload to YouTube and other public video sites. Government censorship is virtually impossible and the ability to hear directly from ordinary people around the world has caused me to see our connectedness. We have only just begun to realize the profound ways that technology is altering our view of the "other people" who share our planet. The use of technology to make the strange familiar will have an overall positive effect on how we think about others in our shrinking world. We are becoming more similar and connected in our basic "humanness." And, that is a good thing.

Science on the Agenda

I am optimistic that science is recapturing the attention and imagination of world leaders.

Witness, for example, the agendas of the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, or the African Union Summit; science has made a well-timed transition from a topic of peripheral interest to the leaders of the world to one inextricably tied to issues of development, global health, innovation, competitiveness, and energy. At a time when science is spurring markets, arts and ideas, it is now making its way into our halls of power with considerable momentum.

The critical challenge is for our understanding of science to keep up with our growing interest in science. Our new global science culture demands a new level of science literacy, for general populations and indeed for the leaders that govern them. What constitutes a science literate citizen in the 21st century is one of the most important questions we need to collectively address today.

We can certainly imagine that it is no simple task to convince a continent struggling with clear and present threats that it should think about its future, let alone take action. But across the developing world, science literacy is emerging as a primary focus of its leadership. The argument goes as follows: move away from dependence on short-term relief and toward the development of a long-term scientific infrastructure that generates its own solutions. This fundamentally entails an investment in people who will shape their own sustainable science culture.

This month's African Union Summit in Addis Ababa will focus almost exclusively on this very topic. This comes on the heels of a consensus by the continent’s education ministers that science “is the most important tool available for addressing challenges to development and poverty eradication, and participating in the global economy.” China, for the first time, has made raising science literacy an official part of its development strategy. It is worth noting that China’s plan calls for science literacy to extend across demographics — from urban workers to rural communities to government officials — each for different reasons but all for a common goal.

This past year we have heard about the potential for the West to generate intellectual ROI from its aid to the developing world — new insight into disease for example. It is exciting to imagine how this cross-continental laboratory may pioneer new approaches to science literacy with global consequence.

Science solves problems. And this should be its consistent tagline in the developing world. In the developed world, however, science will spark more than solutions. It can spark a renaissance.

It is simple to tie science to money and military, drugs and technologies, present and future. It will be those leaders in the developed world who embrace science's blue sky potential, its ability to inspire us and change us long-term, who will most significantly affect their nations and the world. Now is the time for courageous science leadership.

In Europe, the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest science experiment of our time and herald of a new era of Big Science, will go online next year, corralling the collective imagination of (at least) a continent. Tony Blair has reaffirmed that Britain's "future prosperity rests more than ever before on the hard work and genius of our scientists." And Germany's newly elected physical chemist-turned-Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has made science one of the priorities for Germany's upcoming EU presidency.

In 1969, Robert Wilson, then the director of Fermilab, testified before the US Congress in support of his multi-million dollar particle accelerator. He said: "It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending."

It will take inspired, informed, and heroic leaders to drive our global science culture forward — toward the development of Africa, the emergence of a renaissance or an outcome we have yet to imagine. After an all-too-long period where it felt like science and scientists had lost their seat at the table, I am optimistic we're about to witness a new era of science-savvy.

A One-Way Ticket To Mars

Some time before the end of the century there will be a human colony on Mars. It will happen when people finally wake up to the fact that two-way trips to the red planet are unnecessary. By cutting out the return journey huge savings can be made, and the way will then be open to establishing a permanent human presence on another world.

A one-way ticket to Mars is not an invitation for a suicide mission. Adequate supplies and a nuclear power supply can be sent on ahead, and every two years more supplies, and more astronauts, will be dispatched to the new colony. Mars is relatively inhospitable, but it is far more congenial than outer space. It has all the raw materials needed for a colony to eventually become self-sufficient. To be sure, life would be cramped and uncomfortable for the trail-blazers, but so it was for Antarctic explorers a century ago.

What about the risks of leaving people stranded on Mars? Most of the danger of space flight lies in the launches and landings, as the two shuttle disasters horrifically demonstrated. Eliminating the trip home would therefore slash the overall risk of accidents. The harsh Martian environment would undoubtedly reduce the life expectancy of the colonists, but astronauts on a round-trip would be exposed to comparable health hazards from months of space radiation and zero gravity.

Why would people go to Mars, never to return? Many reasons—an innate sense of adventure and curiosity, the lure of being the first humans to open up an entirely new world, the desire to explore an exotic and unique environment, the expectation of fame and glory. For scientists there are added reasons. A geologist on Mars would be like a kid in a candy store, and would soon clock up a sensational publication record. The crowning achievement would be evidence for life, a discovery likely to transform our view of nature and our place in the cosmos. A straw poll among my colleagues convinces me that there would be no lack of volunteers.

When might the first colonists set out? Within a few years, if politics didn't stand in the way. NASA could send a crew of four to Mars with existing technology, but the agency lacks the nerve and imagination for such an adventurous mission. However, I am optimistic that the new players in space—China and India—will not suffer from Western timidity. A joint Indian-Chinese colony on Mars by 2100 is not only technologically feasible, it is also politically realistic.

The Impact Of Multilingualism In Europe

I'm optimistic about Europe. On May 30th 2005, the day after the French rejected in a referendum the project of the European Constitution, I was traveling on the Thalys high speed train from Paris to Brussels for a committee meeting at the European Community. The train was full people of my age—in their late thirties—going to Brussels as "experts" in various domains to attend meetings and participate in various EC projects. I looked around and started chatting with my neighbors. The conversation was light, mainly about restaurants and bars in Brussels or new exhibitions and movies. Most of the people I spoke with came from more than one cultural background, with two or more nationalities in the family: Say, father from Germany, mother from Ireland, grown up in Rotterdam. All of us were at least bilingual, many trilingual or more. I quickly realized that asking the opening question of ordinary train encounters, "Where are you from?" had become patently obsolete. The image was quite at odds with the newspapers' and politicians' cliché of the prototypical EC officer as a grey, square, hideously boring civil servant in a checkered jacket, wasting time inventing useless bureaucratic rules. My neighbors epitomized the deep cultural change that is now taking place in Europe. A new generation has grown up, people born more than a quarter of century after the end of the Second World War and now moving around Europe to study and work, meeting, dating, marrying, and having children with people from other European countries, and doing so as a matter of course.

More and more European children grow up multilingual. They are unlike immigrants born in one culture and having to grow up in another. They are unlike children growing up in a monolingual, monocultural family that happen to be located in a wider multicultural environment. For the children I am talking about, cultural and linguistic diversity is not just outside them in the society at large, it is part of their own, implanted in their minds as novel kind of cultural identity. Multilingualism is going to become an existential condition in Europe, and this is really good news for a continent in which national identities have been so powerful and have caused so much pain and tragedies in the past.

Multilingualism however is not only an existential condition: it has also an impact on our cognitive life. Recent research in developmental psychology shows that bilingual children are faster in developing the ability to understand the mental states of others. Most children under four fail to demonstrate any understanding of the fact that a person's behavior is based not on the way things are but rather on beliefs—true or false—the person has about the way things are. Bilingual children, intriguingly, succeed in what is known as the "False Belief Task" several months earlier than do monolingual. A likely interpretation of these findings is that bilingual children have a more fine grained ability to understand their social environment, and in particular, a greater awareness of the fact that different people may represent reality in different ways. My bilingual six-year-old son makes mistakes in French and in Italian, but never confuses contexts in which it is more appropriate to use one language than the other, including contexts where there are other bilinguals.

I believe that active multilingualism in Europe will help produce a new generation of cognitively more flexible children who will have integrated from the onset in their own identity and their own cognition their mixed cultural background. It will become impossible for educational institutions around Europe to inflict to these individually multicultural students their local "sacred values" based on Higher Civilization, greater bravery, spiritual superiority, or what have you. They will have to update their educational programs for young people who recognize themselves neither in local foundational myths, nor in a feel-good Multiculturalism predicated upon the maintenance of sharply distinct cultural identities. This will help new generations to get rid of "unreal loyalties", to use the words of Virginia Woolf, to nation, flag or local customs and manners. Multilingual citizens of a European space will be more tolerant and less sensitive to local allegiances and partialities. Their tolerance of diverse cultural identities, in the old "mono" style or recomposed, will be built from within, and not learned as a social norm.

All this may be just wishful thinking, projecting my own personal trajectory on the future of Europe. But I can't help thinking that being multilingual is the best and cheapest antidote to cultural intolerance to be found today. And a way of going beyond the empty label of "multiculturalism" by experiencing a plural culture from within. And, of course, this is not just an European issue.

We Can No Longer Be Sure Of Anything

The brain does not see a thing. Most of its energy is consumed predicting in darkness. At last we understand why we only see what we want to see, just as the moon looms larger on the earthly horizon than above. Now we know that visible light is only a tiny fraction of the whole spectrum. We can no longer be sure of anything. So we need not fight against somebody's views nor die for our own convictions.

The Public Will Become Immune To Hype

I am quietly optimistic that in the wake of years of hype over the practical significance of gene discoveries, fusion power, magic bullets, superconductivity, gene therapy, cures for ageing, and embryonic stem cells*, the public will become more pessimistic about the practical benefits of discoveries made in the lab and more appreciative of what science is really about — basic curiousity, rationality and the never-ending dialogue between ideas and experiments. With luck, the public will spend more time gazing up at the blue skies of science and not down at the brown torrent of parochial and humdrum expectations about what science can do for them. Science does not have to be useful, save to put forward useful models of how nature works. Science does not have to cure disease. Science does not have to make us live to 120. Science does not have to make money.

* Being a science journalist, I plead guilty on all counts

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"—it has always been that way.

Most men have been slaves of necessity, while the few who were not lived by exploiting others who were. Although mechanization has eased that burden in the advanced countries, it is still the case for the majority of the human race. Limited resources (mainly fossil fuels), as well as negative consequences of industrialization such as global warming, have made some people question whether American living standards can ever be extended to most of the human race. They're pessimists, and they're wrong.

Hardly anyone seems to realize it, but we're on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. Within a generation—sooner if we want it enough—we will be able to make a self-replicating machine, first seriously suggested by John von Neumann.

Such a machine would absorb energy through solar cells, eat rock and use the energy and minerals to make copies of itself. Numbers would grow geometrically, and if we manage to design one with a reasonably short replication time—say six months—we could have trillions working for humanity in another generation. You might compare this process to a single cell of blue-green algae, which replicates over the summer until it covers the entire pond. But unlike algae, a self-replicating machine would be programmed and controlled by us. If it could make it its own mechanical and electronic parts, it would also be able to make toasters, refrigerators, and Lamborghinis, as well as the electricity to power them. We could make the deserts bloom, put two cars in every pot, and end world poverty, while simultaneously fighting global warming. It's closer than you think, since the key technologies are already being developed for use in rapid prototyping and desktop manufacturing. Aristotle thought that slavery would only end when looms weave by themselves: we're almost there.

Right now the human race uses about 13 trillion watts: the solar cells required to produce that much power would take up less than a fifth of one percent of the Earth's land surface—remember that the Earth intercepts more solar energy in an hour than the human race uses in a year. That's a lot of solar cell acreage, but it's affordable as long as they make themselves. We could put them in deserts—in fact, they'd all fit inside the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. As I understand it, we like depending on the Saudis for energy.

But there are better ways. Solar energy works better in space—sure, the weather is better, but also consider that the vast majority of the Sun's energy misses the Earth. In fact only about one part in two billion warms this planet. Space-based self-replicating systems could harvest some of that lost sunlight—enough to make possible a lot of energy-expensive projects that are currently impractical. An interstellar probe is a bit beyond our means right now, and the same is true of terraforming Venus or Mars. That will change within our children's lifetimes.

I'm reminded of Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia... He enchanted a broomstick to fetch water, but didn't know how to stop it. When he split the broom with an axe, over and over, each of the pieces took up a pail—and before you know he was in over his head. But where he saw a crisis, we see opportunity.

Evidence-Based Decision Making Will Help Transform Society

I am optimistic (and hopeful) that one of the key tenets of scientific investigation, "evidenced-based decision making" will be extended to all aspects of modern society. Good experimental design works toward creating conditions that provide the most useful information on a given topic while attempting to eliminate, or at least limit, spurious, irrelevant artifacts from being generated that could falsely influence data interpretation. Data or information is collected until a threshold is exceeded permitting either conclusions to be drawn or at least development of a hypothesis that with further testing can be validated or falsified. 

Not all questions can be simply answered by just looking at the evidence because we are still at a very early stage in understanding the universe around us. For example, in attempting to understand how life began on our planet we can only guess based on certain assumptions whether it originated de novo here or arrived from another planet or a distant galaxy. We do know that a few hundred kilograms of material is exchanged annually between the Earth and Mars, and that new planets are discovered at an unprecedented pace.  When we discover microbial life on Mars we will double the number of planets with known life while increasing the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

For most scientists the evidence for evolution, regardless of its origins, has been overwhelming.  The fossil record was sufficient evidence for most, but now with genome sequencing information from all branches of life, including from some of our closest relatives like Neanderthals, chimps and rhesus monkeys, the results should be clear cut for anyone whose thinking is not overly clouded by a "belief" system.

In contrast we have newspapers, radio and television news stations owned by individuals or governments presenting subjective, selective subsets of information. As well, there are political campaigns and statements by those wishing to gain or retain power that can only be dismissed as partisan."

We need to push harder for an education system that teaches evidence-based decision making while we hold our public leaders to a higher standard and less partisan behavior as we attempt to tackle some of the historically most difficult challenges facing the future of humanity.

Save The Arctic

No one truly thinks we can slow global climate change within half a century; at least, no economist who has looked at the huge momentum of energy demand in the developing countries.

So: despair? Not at all. Certainly we should accept the possibility that anthropogenic carbon emissions could trigger a climactic tripping point, such as interruption of the gulf stream in the Atlantic. But rather than urging only an all out effort to shrink the human atmospheric-carbon footprint, my collaborators and I propose relatively low tech and low expense experiments at changing the climate on purpose instead of by mistake.

If we understand climate well enough to predict that global warming will be a problem, then we understand it well enough to address the problem by direct means.

Perhaps the simplest idea uses the suspension of tiny, harmless particles (less than one micron) at about 80,000 feet altitude, in the stratosphere.

A first test could be over the arctic, since the warming there is considerable. The polar bears need hjelp right now, not when we might get control of emissions, out beyond 2050. The Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns tend to confine the deployed particles, sweeping them around the pole but not southward.

One could use enough of the tiny particles to create a readily measurable shielding effect. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. The particles would reflect UV rays back into space. They would reduce warming and stop the harm of UV rays to plants and animals. Robust photosynthesis would still occur, fueled by the visible spectrum.

This idea exploits our expanding understanding of the climate system, plus our knowledge that the marked cooling by volcanoes in the last century arose from sulphate aerosols at high altitude.

If this works, it could arrest Arctic warming and reverse the loss of sea ice. Since few live there, any side effects on people would be minor. By placing the particles at a high altitude, we can arrange for the first experiments to end when they rain out into the sea, perhaps after the Arctic summer has passed.

We could then put this particulate shield and other technologies on the shelf quickly and cheaply. They would be ready for use if the global environment worsens, signals that the scarier scenarios of a warming climate might be threatening.

Costs seem attainable—perhaps ten million dollars for a first experiment. Trials over open ocean are little constrained by law or treaty, so show-stopper politics may be avoided. "No Environmental Impact Statement Required" should be the goal.

We hope that a favorable experiment could change the terms of the global warming debate for the better. We must think of other methods of trimming the effects of warming, not just a War on Carbon that will take a century to win. As economist Robert Samuelson recently said, "The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless."

Altruism on the Web

Had the question been, "What are you pessimistic about?" I would have answered: If there is any progress in human wisdom (and, yes, I suppose there is) it is pathetically slow, while ever faster technological advances provide the means for self-righteous, unwise people with power, wealth, or charisma to cause greater and greater havoc. I don't alas have any equally broad and compelling reasons to be optimistic about the future of humankind. Humans, however, are full of surprises, many of them excellent, arousing new hopes every day.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," so did Marx define communism. Outside of narrow kinship or friendship groups, this kind of altruistic sharing of resources has hardly ever been encountered, and it is not difficult to understand why: Such a utopia, however attractive, is quite impractical. Yet, with the advent of the new information technologies and in particular of the Web, a limited form of informational 'communism' that no one had predicted has emerged and is fast developing. A vast array of technological, intellectual and artistic creations, many of them of outstanding quality, are being made freely available to all according to their needs by individuals working according to the best of their abilities and often seeking self-realization even more than recognition. I have in mind the freeware, the wikis, the open source programs, the open access documents, the million of blogs and personal pages, the online text, image, and music and libraries, the free websites catering to all kind of needs and constituencies. Who had been optimistic enough to expect not just the existence of this movement, but its expansion, its force, its capacity to rival commercial products and major businesses and to create new kinds of services, blogs for instance, of great social and cultural import even if of limited economic value?

Cynics or realists—call them what you want—might say: Economic benefit is still the main force driving innovation. Gifted disinterested amateurs—if that is truly what they are—are a welcome anomaly spurring competition, but what matter to the end user is the utility of the product. A cheaper product, and a fortiori a free one, is preferable, everything else being equal, but businesses, by providing extra quality worth the cost, make it sure that everything is rarely equal. So let us praise innovation wherever it comes from, paying the price when justified and mouthing a word of praise when it comes free. But let us not read too much—informational communism? Give me a break—into a probably ephemeral sociological oddity. As many others have noted, the economics of information are peculiar, if only because you can give information without losing it and you may gain from giving it as much or more as from receiving it. Applying a standard economic model to the movement of information on the Web may not be the best science (actually, applying a standard economic model to standard economic situations may not be the best science either).

I am optimistic about the development of both individual and collective forms of altruism on the Web. Moreover, I believe that what we see on the Web has more diffuse counterparts in society at large. The Web is a network of networks where, at every individual node, many communities overlap, and where local allegiances have at best a weak hold. The World Wide Web is the most dynamic and visible manifestation, and a driving force of a world that is itself becoming one wide web. In this world, more and more altruistic acts—acts that had in ancestral times been aimed just at one's kin, and later extended to tribe, sect, or country—may now, out of sensible sense of common destiny, be intended for the benefit of all. No Hallelujah however. If our destiny is indeed ever more common, it is because we all stand to suffer from the misdeed of a few as much as to benefit from the generous actions of many.

"Free Love"    

"Love wins; love always wins," it has been said. But throughout most of our agrarian past, love lost, at least among the upper classes. Today I am optimistic about romantic love, because we are returning to patterns of romance that humankind enjoyed across most of our deep history: choosing lovers and spouses for ourselves.

Parents may have started to arrange their children's marriages when the brain began to develop some two million years ago. But in those few hunting and gathering societies that still survive, parents only initiate the first wedding of a son or daughter. Moreover, this contract is flexible. If the callow newlyweds are not happy with their match, they pick up their few belongings and walk home. The contract has been honored and parents are pleased to see their youth again. The young go on to choose their next partner for themselves.  

But as our forebears began to settle down some 10,000 years ago, and as they acquired immoveable property like fields of grain and sturdy homes, they began to need to cement their social ties. What better way than to wed your daughter with my son? Strictly arranged marriages became a way to built one's fortune and secure one's genetic future. These marriages had to endure, too. In some farming communities, you could fall in love with whom you chose; but you married the "right" individual, with the "right" kin connections and "right" social, economic and political ties. 

The widespread tradition of strictly arranged marriages began to dissipate with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As men and women left the farm for factory work, they no longer needed to maintain many of these connections. They could chose partners for themselves.

Today this movement is gaining speed, due to two dramatic world trends: the global rise of women in the paid labor force; and the aging world population. For millions of years women commuted to work to gather their fruits and vegetables and came home with much of the evening meal. Women were economically, sexually and socially powerful. With the invention of the plow, however, women lost much of their economic independence. But as women go back to work and come home with money, they are reacquiring their economic autonomy—and their ancient ability to choose their lovers and spouses for themselves. With the aging world population, high divorce and remarriage rates, and many modern inventions, from Viagra to hip replacements, women (and men) now have the time, opportunity and health to make their own match, what the Chinese call "free love."

And along with the rise of romantic love within marriage has come what sociologists hail as the 21st century marital form, known as peer marriages, symmetrical marriages or companionate marriages: weddings between equals. "Marriage," Voltaire wrote, "is the only adventure open to the cowardly." Today more and more men and women have the opportunity to enjoy this adventure—life with someone they passionately love. In this way humanity is regaining a tradition that is highly compatible with our ancient human spirit.

I Will Be Dead Wrong Again

I am optimistic that I will be dead wrong again. As I have frequently been in the past. Being a philosopher, I was strongly opposed to marriage—on strictly theoretical grounds of course! And about the only thing I always agreed on with Nietzschewas that married philosophers basically are clowns, as he put it: people who belong in a comedy play. Real life proved me wrong (at least I think so), and I am glad it did. Not a single one of all these high-paid sociologists and politologists predicted the wall's coming down in 1989. They were dead wrong. And, boy, would each one of them have loved to be the one to make exactly this prediction! I was also dead wrong in believing that European governments would never have the guts and the actual power to ban advertisements for tobacco products—or that European citizens would actually stop smoking in bars and public places, simply because their governments told them to. Wasn’t it much more plausible to expect major rebellions in countries like Ireland or Italy? How could anyone believe this could actually work?

Now that America is not a Western country any more, I have serious doubts that Europe can actually rescue the heritage of enlightenment. Who will sustain democratic values, and fight for all these old-fashioned ideas like human rights and freedom of speech? China forcefully looks for a path of its own, but in a way that many find quite unsettling. Will India—now the world’s greatest democratic project—manage or will it collapse into even more corruption and self-generated chaos? Who will conserve and cultivate our legal systems, who will culture scientific rationality and the brand new tradition of settling ethical issues by argument, not by force? Europe is in a strange state: Russia looks bad, Italy is a twilight state, Germany can’t move, in many countries like Austria or Denmark the voters are flirting with the extreme right. No constitution. No common vision. And the pressure of globalization on our social nets.

If global sociodynamics keeps on unfolding as it currently does, isn’t it likely that Europeans on their own will not stand a chance to change the overall trend? America is gone for good. How rational is it really—to still keep on believing that Europe as a whole will not only grasp the historical challenge, but eventually get its act together? I am optimistic that, once again, I will be dead wrong.

Strangers In Our Midst

I am optimistic about the prospect of detecting alternative life. All life that we know, as different as it may appear in size and shape, shares a common heritage at the biochemical level. From amoebas to zebras, familiar life is dominated by two types of large molecule—nucleic acids and proteins. This biochemical similarity, which extends to many other features as well, implies that we are all products of a single life-starting event.

If this event was extremely improbable, then Earth may be the only seat of life in an immense and barren universe. This picture would be little changed if our kind of life has drifted across empty space to fertilize our nearest planetary neighbors. As Jacques Monod commented: "The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game."

As no firm evidence exists that supports or denies this package of gloom, we are not obliged to purchase it. A different scientific position holds that the generation of life is written into the laws that govern the universe. If a limited set of environmental requirements are satisfied—a supply of useful energy, fertile material to absorb and use the energy, and a fluid medium to support the transaction, then life will emerge. In the words of biologist Stuart Kauffman: "If all this is true, life is vastly more probable than we have supposed. Not only are we at home in the universe, but we are far more likely to share it with unknown companions."

The issue can be settled by scientific exploration. The discovery of life forms sufficiently different from our own to indicate a separate origin would tilt the debate decisively in favor of a fertile universe. The search for such life has traditionally been directed to extraterrestrial locales. Spacecraft have conducted preliminary surveys of Mars, Europa, Titan and Enceladus, and discovered that one or more of the necessary requirements have been met. As human have not yet traveled further than the Moon, the search for novel life forms on these worlds is likely to be carried out will be carried out by robots. If any creatures are encountered, then their biochemical characterization will also be conducted with the use of pre-programmed instruments, but weight limitations will constrain the versatility of the tools that can be landed on these distant worlds. The Viking missions of 1976 illustrated the ambiguities that can arise in such explorations. Even if encouraging data was returned to Earth, a sample return mission would most likely be needed to settle a question of such magnitude. Considerations of safety would make stringent quarantine measures mandatory for any returned samples.

Extensive planning and testing would be needed in advance to design a weight-limited apparatus capable of identifying alternative life. As astrobiology budgets are often under pressure, some delays would also be likely before such an apparatus was launched. Further, all of the above listed sites except Mars would require a number of years of travel time to bring the instrument package to its destination. Thus, even if the fertile universe view was correct, many decades might pass before the issue was settled.

Fortunately, a new strategy has emerged that is capable of providing much more rapid returns. One world exists that is known to have all of the capabilities needed to generate and sustain life. It is close at hand, so that any possible samples of alternative life could quickly be subjected to examination in depth, using the best instruments that science can provide. Human scientists would supervise the studies directly, and modify them as needed. That world is Earth.

The suggestion that alternative, novel life forms might be found on our own planet runs of course directly into the obstacle of an entrenched paradigm. Biologists have characterized hosts of life forms, particularly at the microbial level, and encountered the familiar nucleic acid-protein based system every time. Our type of life reigns on this planet. If alternative creatures ever existed, then surely they were eliminated during the intense combat of evolution. The fact that no such creatures had turned up despite the intense efforts that biologists have expended in studying life on Earth has served to reinforce this widely accepted conclusion.

Recently, however, two papers have challenged this assumption. One, written in Australia, was provided by physicist Paul Davies and mathematician Charles Lineweaver. The other was authored by Colorado-based philosopher Carol Cleland and microbiologist Shelley Copley. Three of these writers and a number of other scientists who have been interested in the question of extraterrestrial life (myself included) gathered at Arizona State University to discuss this possibility. A central conclusion that emerged was that alternative Earth life may simply have been overlooked because microbiological search techniques were targeted at our own kind of life. Many diverse cell-like objects can be observed when samples taken from soil or water are examined under the microscope. Only about 1 % of them choose to multiply when conventional growth media are added to the mixture and these colonies are the easiest to characterize. In some cases, newer techniques based upon nucleic acid sequencing have been used to identify additional species. Some of them represent early and unexpected branches from our presumed universal tree of life. The existence of truly different organisms in that mix, for example ones that lacked nucleic acids entirely and stored their hereditary information in some other way, was hardly considered. If such organisms existed, they would most likely be products of that speculative second origin.       

How could such organisms have survived the competition of our robust nucleic acid based life? In one scenario, they may have preferred to dine upon alternative food stuffs not favored by familiar life, selecting for example arsenate in place of phosphate, unfamiliar amino acids or mirror image forms of conventional biomolecules. The most extreme example of this type may be the speculative mineral-based life forms suggested by Scottish chemist Graham Cairns-Smith.

A different strategy would also allow alternative Earth life to flourish without direct competition. The organisms may have selected environments that are uninhabitable by conventional life. Conventional terrestrial organisms have shown great versatility in adapting to extremes of acidity, temperature, dryness, saltiness, radiation and other variables. Even so, their adaptability is not unlimited and some niches yet remain which they cannot utilize. Yet organisms with a very different set of internal chemicals might find them to be ideal dwelling places. One such locality that was mentioned at the conference was Iron Mountain, California, from whose interior extremely acidic waters emerge.

Ironically (forgive the pun) a front page story in the New York Times of Dec. 23, 2006, derived from a paper published in Science a day earlier reported the isolation of novel microorganisms from the waters of Iron Mountain. Their novelty arose from the record-breaking smallness of the cells, rather than from a difference in their internal biochemistry sufficient to suggest a separate origin. Yet the group of California-based scientists that had made the discovery also noted the presence of "rounded objects" that "were not shown to contain DNA."

How could such objects, or others that may turn up if a deliberate search for biochemically novel organisms is made, be shown to be offspring of a second origin? My own suggestion is that an inventory be made, as complete as possible, of their chemical contents. Many advanced instruments have been devised in recent years that can perform a microchemical analysis of tiny samples. No questions of instrument payload, robotic analysis or sample return need be considered, in contrast to the case of specimens taken on other worlds. If the analysis should reveal a chemical suite that differed notably from those derived from conventional life and from the near-random mixtures produced by abiotic processes, then we would have a strong indication that we may have hit a scientific jackpot. Another approach to the identification of alternative life would involve the use of unorthodox culture media, toxic to conventional life, that induce the alternative organisms to grow. More ingenious strategies may emerge when the energies of additional scientists are turned toward this question.

Of course, a thorough search of this planet may yet return empty-handed. My own optimism is based on my particular outlook on the mechanisms involved in the origin of life. But that is another story.

Things Could Always Be Worse

Things could always be worse. Is this a cause for optimism? And if so, is this a form of optimism worth having — a wimpy, agnostic, non-committal, damn-with-faint-praise kind of optimism?  Quite the contrary.  It’s a rough-and-ready, rustic kind of optimism.  This optimism is suited for everyday life and doesn’t fold under pressure. We have all heard of the "grass is greener" syndrome. This is its "grass is browner" counterpart, the achievable anecdote for broken dreams, and bolster of the status quo. 

Psychophysics — the study of the psychological impact of physical events — indicates that more is not always better, and that greener grass, once acquired, quickly starts to yellow. We keep order in our lives because two inches always seem twice as long as one inch, but unlike length, other sensations do not grow in a linear manner.  A tone, for example, must be much more than twice as powerful as a standard to sound twice as loud. As with tones, the quirks of our brain doom a path to happiness based on the accumulation of stuff. The second million dollars, like the second Ferrari, does not equal the satisfaction provided by the first, and a second Nobel is pretty much out of the question, a dilemma of past laureates. Goals once obtained become the new standard, to which we adapt, before continuing our race up the escalating, slippery slope of acquisitiveness and fame. Philosophers and scientists from antiquity to the present generally agree that life is a marathon, not a sprint, and the formula for happiness and well-being is the journey — not achievement of the goal — and the comfort of friends and family.

This brings me back to my proposal, "things could always be worse." It finesses our biologically determined law of diminishing returns and the impossibility of keeping up with the Joneses. Lacking the understated nobility of "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself," my slogan would not lift the spirits of a depression-era nation, serve a candidate seeking political office, nor provide a philosophy of life, but it does help me to slog on. Best of all, my modest proposal is unconditionally true for anyone healthy enough to understand it.  When things take a nasty turn, as they often do, celebrate the present and recite my slogan —"things could always be worse."
 

We Have the Capacity to Understand One Another

Sharp polarities between clashing points of view are wreaking all sorts of havoc in the world right now. Perhaps for many of us the divide that cuts closest to the quick is that between science, reason, and logic, on the one hand, and sectarianism, faith, and religion, on the other. My optimism is anchored to one aspect of human nature: We have the capacity to understand one another.  Evolution has bequeathed us a sketchy folk psychology, just as it has a sketchy folk physics. We come equipped with the understanding that we are engaged with others who manifest propositional attitudes—beliefs, desires, regrets, dreads, hopes: the whole gamut. We come equipped, too, with skills for discovering what those propositional attitudes of others might be.

Since at least the 1940s social psychologists have been studying our capacity to attribute mental states to others. In one early important experiment (Heider & Simmel 1944), almost every single subject, when shown a short movie consisting of geometrical shapes moving on a screen, attributed propositional attitudes to the shapes. Subsequent research has strengthened the view that our capacity for mental attribution is universal and nearly reflexive—in short, an aspect of human nature.

Our folk physics—involving ideas about space and time, about objects and forces—can be extended and deepened, refined and corrected by that sophisticated enterprise we call science. So, too, can our primitive folk psychology be expanded and refined. We can even come to understand those whose propositional attitudes diverge significantly from our own. We humans may never be able to know what it's like to be a bat, but Daniel Dennett could, in principle, know what it's like to be a believer, to hold that life has meaning only if it conforms to some larger-than-life purpose, say, or to be the victim of a dread of death so overwhelming that comfort is gained only from denying the reality of mortality altogether. And so, too, Pope Benedictus XVI could, in principle, understand the propositional attitudes of a proponent of naturalism, determined to trim his ontology to the entities required only by science because of a higher-order desire never to be duped into believing something which is false and, therefore, committed to the highest standards of empirical evidence. (Not all propositional-attitude bearers share this higher-order desire not to be duped, which can come as a shock to many in the scientific community. )

Quite obviously, to understand the propositional attitudes of another is not to endorse them; it isn't the same as wanting them for one's own, although that can, of course, occur—as when, as occasionally happens, we learn from one another. Still, to come to know better the propositional attitudes of others, grasping what the world is like for them, can be intrinsically interesting. It can also be useful—in fact, often essential to survival and reproduction. (A seducer will get nowhere without at least a rudimentary grasp of the propositional attitudes of the seducee. ) It is also implicated in widening the circle of sympathy that promotes the outward dissemination of ethical attitudes.

And of course the most effective means for changing someone's mind usually involves grasping the mind he already has.

Just as science improves on our primitive folk physics, we have an enterprise that extends the primitive skills of folk psychology, refining them into a means of arriving at a complex and shared knowledge of what it's like to have propositional attitudes and representational structures quite different from one's own. This enterprise is the narrative arts. What gives me any optimism at all in this dark season of dangerous divides is that there is a trend among contemporary novelists to turn their artistic attention to the divisive themes of the day. Given the nature of the literary enterprise—what it is that novels do—this effort to develop narrative techniques for taking the full human measure of such divides can only contribute to deepening our understanding of what lies behind what seem like irreconcilable differences—and which often are just that: irreconcilable. We are not, ever, going to become an attitudinally homogenous species. Someone who desires, above all, not to be duped into believing something false will not be turned into someone who, say, wants his beliefs, above all, to affirm his affinity with his community, nor vice versa. Still, it's instructive for both to make their way into the other's mind. There's even a slight chance that someone's mind might be changed in the process. But the deepening of understanding isn't measured solely by changes of that sort.

So, at the end of the day, I am tethering my optimism to the work of our contemporary novelists—which is probably another way of saying that I'm pretty darned pessimistic. 

We Will Find New Ways To Block Pessimism

I am optimistic that we will soon find effective new methods for blocking pessimism. We are well on the way with antidepressants. Side-effects remain a major problem, and some people do not respond, but progress has been rapid.  Findings from neuroscience and genetics will provide the foundation, but the engine that will drive new developments is the huge profit potential from agents that relieve negative emotions. The anxiety and depression drug market already tops 20 billion dollars per year just in the USA.  The promise of profits will yield new agents. They will relieve much suffering. 

I am pessimistic, however, about our ability to use them wisely. Pessimism is not a problem, it is a useful emotional state. When the boat overturns a mile out to sea, optimism about one's ability to swim to shore is deadly.  When a hurricane is approaching, optimism is fine nine times out of ten, then comes Katrina. When deciding whether to invade a foreign country, optimism about receiving a warm welcome can result in a catastrophe that changes the whole course of history for the worse.  

The tendency to think optimism is superior to pessimism is a deep-rooted illusion.  Optimism is useful in propitious situations. Pessimism is useful in dangerous situations.  For the fortunate, life now is vastly safer and more secure than it was, so pessimism is less necessary.  But unintended consequences of blocking pessimism are likely.  Already thousands of employees are subjected to motivational exercises to foster positive thinking.  What will happen when we all can choose to feel positive most of the time?  The world will be better in many ways, and worse in others that are hard to predict. 

The Future Of String Theory

I am optimistic about the future of our thinking regarding string theory and the early universe. Until fairly recently I did not feel this way since string theory seemed to be a community unto itself, albeit a very talented one. Controversy has created an important dialogue and strife has erupted. I think this is all to the good. The basis for the disagreement goes back 30 years.

A unified understanding or so-called "theory of everything" has long been sought. The standard model that emerged in the 1970s provided a very significant step forward but left undetermined some 20 parameters: the values of the six quark and six lepton masses, various couplings etc. Initially it was hoped that string theory, aside from a unification of forces with quantum gravity, would determine the values of these parameters. That dream has not been realized.

A very significant group of theoretical physicists has now abandoned the dream. Pointing out that even string theory supports the view that an essentially infinite number of possibilities can be realized for a universe, the so-called landscape, they maintain that we live in one of these choices, the universe where the 20 or so parameters are fixed to be the values we observe. Other universes, with other values of the parameters, are continuously emerging and dying and still others live by our side. However we are limited in the possibility of observations and measurements to our own universe so that, in a deep sense, the 20 parameters that determine our world are completely arbitrary. We would not exist if they were not what they are, but there is no further understanding of their values.

A second group maintains that abandoning the dream that set elementary particle physics on its course a century ago, that of determining the forces and parameters of the sub-atomic world, is both premature and intellectually wrong. They maintain this is not science.

There is an intermediate position that, understandably, has not been embraced vigorously by either side. Perhaps very few of the 20 or so parameters, some of the mass scales, correspond to the universe we live in, but the others are set by string theory or some future theory we have not yet discovered. This could happen if e.g. the quark and lepton masses are calculable numbers that multiply a mass given by the particular universe we happen to live in. In this case both sides would be right. The numbers would be set by the theory and the mass scale by the choice of universe. I find the notion intriguing, but it may also be that both sides are wrong and some other stunning synthesis will emerge.

So why am I optimistic? Because I believe that controversy, with clearly drawn out opposing positions, galvanizes both sides to refine their opinions, creates excitement in the field for the participants, stimulates new ideas, attracts new thinkers to the fray and finally because it provides the public at large with an entrée into the world of science at the highest level, exhibiting for them heated arguments between great minds differing on questions vital to them. What could be more exciting?

We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)

Have you heard this one by Conan O'Brien: Yesterday, a group of scientists warned that because of global warming, sea levels will rise so much that parts of New Jersey will be under water. The bad news? Parts of New Jersey won't be under water. Or this one by Jay Leno: Heating bills this winter are the highest they've been in five years, but the government has a plan to combat rising bills. It's called global warming. Not their best jokes, but this year global warming became one of the staple topics of late night monologues.

This makes me very optimistic, because jokes are hard evidence of sociological currents. A joke can only work on national TV, if the majority of viewers is able to understand the cultural reference in a split-second and if a general consensus allows the joke to take sides. If Leno makes fun of global warming—great. It's now part of the collective subconscious. It means the general public made up its mind on the subject.

This is quite a change from just two and a half years ago. In the summer of 2004 Hollywood director Roland Emmerich released his disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow. He openly said he wanted to use his film to combat the widespread ignorance about climate change in the US. To emphasize how serious he thought the subject, he invited numerous scientists and activists to make the point that very ignorance about global warming might be one of the greatest obstacles for a solution.

His film was written accordingly. To bring the audience up to speed, large parts of the first act were spent on Dennis Quaid as a paleoclimatologist, who did a lot of reciting of scientific facts and fictions, not unlike the endless science dialogues between Spock and Kirk, which had to set up the outer worldly realities in Star Trek.

Emmerich’s disaster might have bombed at the box office, but it did trigger a chain reaction. Media attention to climate change rose. TV features about endangered polar bears created emotional impact. Sales of hybrid cars went up. Seven Northeastern states have signed the Kyoto protocol, an initiative followed by more than 300 cities. Several Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Leonardo di Caprio currently work on documentaries about global warming, which will raise the topic's profile for an audience normally not interested in scientific matters even further. Now even notoriously fatalistic Christian fundamentalists see earth as a gift from God mankind has to protect.

This is of course not just about the power of pop culture. It's not even just about climate change. This is about a society's choice between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford science historian Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance), Production has been booming. The editing of NASA reports about climate change. The political sanctification of coma patient Terri Schiavo. The introduction of intelligent design into curriculae. All those efforts have all just served the purpose of creating a widespread will to ignore facts and reason.

If a nation purposely kept in the dark about an imminent danger for so long manages to overcome public inertia and become acutely aware of a complex issue like global warming in the span of two years, it means that the power of reason is ultimately able to overcome the forces of ignorance driven by economic interests and religious dogma. This is a universally optimistic outlook on history. And not to forget that this ability to swiftly react as a collective is still most important in the US. The number of leading research facilities, the economic power, the pioneering spirit and entrepreneurial verve put the US in a leadership position that can affect not just global affairs, but down the line maybe even the weather.

"Monocausalitis" — Pessimistic Optimism To Overcome a Common Disease

Since the question is in "edge world" it has thought implicitly day and night in my brain what I could be optimistic about, (on the explicit level I had to do also some other things). Frankly speaking with respect to the "big questions" nothing came to the surface of my mind. Can I be optimistic as a scientist or as a citizen about such questions like: Can we come to sustainable peace? Will we really solve one day the question how our brain functions? Are we going to win the battle against diseases? Will it once be possible to be free from prejudices? Etc, etc. The answer is an emphatic "no". There is no reason to be optimistic about such "big questions".

On the other hand, I look at myself as an optimistic person; on a personal level I am optimistic about the future of my children and grandchildren, about the career of my doctoral students then and now, about the realization of some new research projects in the near future, about my health after some problems in the past; etc. etc. Thus, if everybody would be optimistic about personal matters (which empirically speaking is unfortunately not the case), possibly in the big picture there could be a reason for an optimistic attitude towards others and the world. Such optimism would be an expression of trust, not an expression of solving the problems of humankind.

On the other hand: It would be great if I could be optimistic about fighting successfully a disease of all humans, namely "monocausalitis". (But again: there is no reason to be optimistic; we better be realistic). Humans have the urge to explain everything in a monocausal way. We are always looking for one reason only. The philosophical sentence "nothing is without reason" (nihil est sine ratione) is usually misunderstood as "nothing is without one reason". Occam's razor, i.e. to look for the simplest solution of a problem is OK, as long as a solution is not too simple. We are apparently victims of our evolutionary heritage being satisfied only if one and only one cause for the solution of a problem is identified (or claimed).

In understanding biological processes, for instance brain processes, and how they control the "mindworks", we better free ourselves from this monocausal trap. I am not only referring to the problem of the many hidden variables which have to be accepted in any analysis of a biological process and which create the typical headache of an experimenter — it is never possible to control every variable —, but I am referring also to a structural problem. Biological phenomena can better be understood, if multicausality is accepted as a guiding principle. In particular, I would like to promote "complementarity as a generative principle". In quantum mechanics to the best of my knowledge complementarity is a descriptive principle; in biology it is a creative principle. Just one example: It does not make much sense to explain human behaviour only on a genetic basis; genetic and environmental information have to come together to form for instance the matrix of our brain. This and many other examples are so self-evident that it is even embarrassing to refer to them.

But still, if one looks at the expressed optimism that may save our world or that gives the final insight into mother nature's tricks we are confronted with monocausal solutions. Possibly, if we accept our evolutionary heritage, the burden of "monocausalitis", we may overcome this disease, at least partially.

The Future of Software

I am optimistic about the future of software, because more and more people are coming out of the closet every month — admitting in public that they hate their computers.

Within the last month I've heard three people shouting (or muttering) curses at their machines. One was a bona fide software virtuoso! These particular three were ticked off about (1) an airline website that was so badly designed it was useless, (2) a commercial web-site-building tool (bought for real money) that made it nearly impossible to build simple structures and (3) a home PC that, despite reasonably sophisticated software counter-measures, was so junked-up with viruses that starting a word processor took five minutes.

The file systems and desktop and spreadsheets, the word processors and mailers and database programs we rely on are vintage 1984 or older. They're as obsolete as a 1984 PC. When I first described the "empty computer" model in the early '90s, people thought I was crazy. Many still do—but fewer each year (and I guess that's progress). There was a larger jump in admitted cases of computer- and software-hatred in '06 than in any previous year I remember.

Technologists who blandly assume that hardware will (somehow) keep getting better while software stays frozen in time are looking wronger every month. In the empty-computer world of the near future, your information assets have all been bundled-up, encrypted and launched into geosynchronous orbit in the Cybersphere; computers are interchangeable devices for tuning in information. (If computers are so cheap, why does everyone need to carry one around with him? We don't make you carry a desk and chairs around with you; we can afford to provide chairs and flat surfaces wherever you need them.)

In the empty computer world it will take five minutes to upgrade to a new machine (throw the old one out, plug the new one in—your information stays in orbit where it's always been); comfortable large-screen public computers will be available all over the place. And instead of expanding into a higher-and-higher-entropy mess, the Web will implode into a "blue hole": a single high-energy information beam that holds all the world's digital assets.

Gelernter's Law: the computer industry revolutionizes itself at least once a decade. We're nearly due for the next revolution.

Once and Future Optimism

I am optimistic about the past. It's looking better and better every day. A couple of hundred years from now, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have melted and sea levels have risen by two hundred feet, our genetically engineered descendants will be sitting by their ocean-front property in Nevada reminiscing about the high old times in those now submerged cities of New York, London, and Tokyo. From their perspective, the past is really going to look good.

I'm also optimistic about the future. It is well within our power as a species to avert the environmental catastrophe envisaged in the previous paragraph.  Prudent investment in carbon conserving technologies and economic strategies can postpone or prevent entirely the more extreme consequences of global warming. I am hopeful that policy makers will realize that relatively small sacrifices made voluntarily now, can prevent much larger, involuntary sacrifices later.

Let's be realistic: we human beings are addicted to damaging ourselves and others. When one rationale for conflict loses force, we seek out a new one, no matter how trivial, for prolonging the strife.  Nonetheless, we are capable of pulling back from the brink. During the cold war, the strategy pursued the United States and the Soviet Union was officially called MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction: anyone who started a nuclear war was guaranteed to be annihilated themselves. While risky in the long run — if the radar confuses a flock of geese with an incoming missile, we're all dead — the strategy worked for long enough for our leaders to realize just how mad MAD was, and to begin to disarm.  We are currently on the brink of a major environmental catastrophe; but there is still time to pull back.

Even if global warming does flood most of the world's major cities, human beings will survive and adapt.  Just how they will adapt, we can't predict: but they will. Technology got us into this mess in the first place by providing the wherewithal for modern industrial society. I am optimistic that our descendants will develop technologies to cope with whatever mess we leave them. The technologies for survival into the twenty third century need not be high technologies: simple, low technologies of water and fuel conservation will suffice. If we're careful with our basic resources, there should be enough left over to keep on playing video games.

We need not even leave the world a mess. The key to using resources wisely is to distribute them fairly. If only because the global distribution of resources such as money and energy is currently so skewed, I am guardedly optimistic that our increasingly globalized society can make progress towards a world in which each human being has equal access to food, clean water, education, and political representation. This optimism is tempered by the acknowledgement that the world's 'haves' have little motivation to share the world's resources with its 'have nots' We are unaccustomed to thinking of democracy as a 'technology,' but that is what it is: a systematic arrangement of human beings into a social machine that functions better in many respects than the social machine of totalitarianism. The real technology that we currently require is not a more fuel-efficient SUV, but rather a political system that gives each human being on earth a voice in policy.

Finally, I am wildly optimistic about the future of scientific ideas. Wherever I travel in the world — first, second, or third — I meet young scientists whose ideas blow me away.  The internet distributes cutting edge scientific work much more widely and cheaply than ever before. As a result, the fundamental intellectual equality of human beings is asserting itself in a remarkable way: people are just as smart in Peru and Pakistan as they are in London and Los Angeles, and those people can now participate in scientific inquiry with far greater effectiveness than ever before.  Human beings are humanity's greatest resource, and when those humans start becoming scientists, watch out!

The Baby Boomers Will Soon Retire

I am optimistic about the future of social science research because the influence of the baby boom generation on the culture and agenda of the social sciences will soon decrease. Don't get me wrong, many of my best friends are boomers, and technically I'm one too (born in 1963). I am grateful for the freedom and justice that the activists of the 1960s and 1970s helped bring to the United States. But if there is a sensitive period for acquiring a moral and political orientation, it is the late teens and early 20s, and most of those whose sensitive periods included the Vietnam war and the struggles for civil rights seem to have been permanently marked by those times. Many young people who entered Ph.D. programs in the social sciences during the 1970s did so with the hope of using their research to reduce oppression and inequality. This moral imprinting of a generation of researchers may have had a few detrimental effects on the (otherwise excellent) science they produced. Here are two:

1) Moralistic antinativism. The deep and politicized antipathy to 1970s sociobiology produced a generation of social scientists wary of nativism in general and of evolutionary thinking in particular. Nobody these days admits to believing that the mind is a blank slate at birth, but in practice I have noticed that social scientists older than me generally begin with a social learning explanation of everything (especially sex differences), and then act as though it is "conservative" (scientifically) or "liberal" (politically) to stick with social learning unless the evidence against it is overwhelming, p<.05, which it rarely is. But shouldn't we use p<.5 here? Shouldn't we always let nativist and empiricist explanations both have a go at each question and then pick the one that has the better fit, overall, with the evidence? I look forward to the day when most social scientists learned about the astonishing findings of twin studies in their twenties, and very few know who Stephen Jay Gould was. 

2) Moral Conformity Pressure. Imagine an industry in which 90% of the people are men, male values and maleness are extolled publicly while feminine values are ridiculed, and men routinely make jokes, publicly and privately, about how dumb women are, even when women are present. Sounds like a definition of hostile climate” run wild? Now replace the words male” and female” with liberal” and conservative,” and we have a pretty good description of my field —social psychology—and, I suspect, many other areas of the social sciences. I have no particular fondness for conservatives. But I do have a need for them. I study morality, and I have found that conservative ideas (about authority, respect, order, loyalty, purity, and sanctity) illuminate vast territories of moral psychology, territories that have hardly been noticed by psychologists who define morality as consisting exclusively of matters of harm, rights, and justice. If social psychology had been a morally diverse field, we would have done a much better job of studying the full expanse of human morality, and we'd be in a much better position right now to understand the morality of radical Islam.

Will younger social scientists be more morally diverse than the baby boom generation? Maybe not. But if they make it through their sensitive periods without seeing themselves as part of a revolution, they just might be more open to diverse ideas about the origins of mind, the scope of morals, and the workings of society.

The Importance Of Innocence

"I don't think a lot of people realize how important innocence is to innocent people." These are haunting words spoken in the film "A Cry in the Dark"

The wrongful conviction of innocent people has been a serious problem in our society.  It is a problem that we are now becoming acutely aware of through the release of individuals who were shown to be actually innocent by DNA testing.  One happy consequence of these sad cases is the advent of a number of "innocence projects," typically operated out of law schools and dedicated to the freeing of those who were wrongfully convicted.

I wish I could say that I was optimistic that the problem of wrongful convictions will virtually disappear, sort of like polio. I can't. But I am optimistic that the problem of wrongful convictions will become smaller than it once was. Here's why. Just as the a plane crash leads to a microscopic analysis of what went wrong, so these cases of proven wrongful conviction have been dissected to determine what went wrong. The answer in the majority of cases is faulty memory. In a recent case, a rape victim misidentified a man as her attacker — a mistake of faulty memory. Readers can find out more about how these kinds of errors happen by reviewing the cases on the website of the Innocence Project.

The mistaken identification by the rape victim, and others similarly situated, comes as no surprise to scientists who have studied eyewitness memory. We have learned a great deal about what it is about our system that promotes these tragic errors. And finally our government is listening, a price paid by the hundreds individuals whose suffered through years of imprisonment and are now free. The Dept of Justice convened a committee to make recommendations to law enforcement for how witnesses and victims should be handled to preserve that valuable "memory evidence." Many states have recently adopted a package of reforms for how witnesses are interviewed and lineups are conducted. It has been a triumph of scientific discovery — a science that has taught us much about the workings of the human mind, and also has made a difference in the way our world works. But the science has only scratched the surface, and has layers upon layers to go.  During this period we will see more memory science, more reforms in the justice system, and we will have fewer errors.

As we invest in the science, and make more progress, society needs to keep one important idea in mind. Memory, like liberty, must be cherished, nourished, and protected. Without one, we can easily lose the other.

Pessimistic In Its Optimism

It's easy to be a pessimist. These are dark times for physics in the United States. One by one, national laboratories are shuttering their high-energy physics experiments; within a few years there won't be a single U.S. accelerator exploring the energy frontier. As NASA squanders billions and billions of dollars on the International Space Station and on lunar exploration, it is tearing the guts out of its other programs—the ones that provide actual scientific discoveries.

Physics is a transplant to the U.S. Before 1900, you could count the number of great American physicists on one hand. A few decades later, the U.S. had become the premier power in theoretical and experimental physics, thanks to refugees from Hungary, from Austria, from Germany, from Italy, from Denmark, and from all across Europe. The transplant took root and flourished.

Even though the future is dimming for American physics, there is room for optimism—the prospects for major discoveries are the brightest they've been in years. We are in the midst of a cosmological revolution; we are beginning to understand the physical laws that governed the early universe. Before the end of the decade, European experiments, such as the Planck satellite and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will allow physicists to delve deeper than ever before into the story of the infant cosmos. While physics in the United States is withering, there will be fertile soil where a transplant can take root once again.

We're Not Insignificant After All

When gazing up on a clear night, it's easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we're smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are probably more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we've learned that we're not that special either. Darwin taught us that we're animals, Freud taught us that we're irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance.

The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet in recent years, I've suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I've come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

The nature of life and consciousness is of course a hotly debated subject. My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally that in the carbon-based examples we know of.

I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information. Clearly, if atoms can be assembled to make humans, the laws of physics also permit the construction of vastly more advanced forms of sentient life. Yet such advanced beings can probably only come about in a two-step process: first intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, then they choose to pass on the torch of life by building more advanced consciousness that can further improve itself.

Unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually inhabit much of our observable universe. Science fiction writers, AI-aficionados and transhumanist thinkers have long explored this idea, and to me the question isn't if it can happen, but if it will happen.

My guess is that evolved life as advanced as ours is very rare. Our universe contains countless other solar systems, many of which are billions of years older than ours. Enrico Fermi pointed out that if advanced civilizations have evolved in many of them, then some have a vast head start on us — so where are they? I don't buy the explanation that they're all choosing to keep a low profile: natural selection operates on all scales, and as soon as one life form adopts expansionism (sending off rogue self-replicating interstellar nanoprobes, say), others can't afford to ignore it. My personal guess is that we're the only life form in our entire observable universe that has advanced to the point of building telescopes, so let's explore that hypothesis. It was the cosmic vastness that made me feel insignificant to start with. Yet those galaxies are visible and beautiful to us — and only us. It is only we who give them any meaning, making our small planet the most significant place in our observable universe.

Moreover, this brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided. We'll have the technology to either self-destruct or to seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt that we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another century. If we end up going the life route rather than the death route, then in a distant future, our cosmos will be teeming with life that all traces back to what we do here and now. I have no idea how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

The Climate Optimist

Mention global warming at a seasonal social gathering and see what happens, now that skepticism has turned into concern and sorrow. They will assume that you're a pessimist about our prospects. "Not really," I protest. That earns me a quizzical look.

"Wait a minute," she says. "If you're an optimist, why do you look so worried?"

"So you think it's easy, being an optimist?"

Many scientists look worried these days. We've had a steady diet of bad news coming from climate scientists and biologists. To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.

First, I reflected, the history of science and medicine shows that, once you mechanistically understand what's what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. I'm optimistic that we will learn how to stabilize climate.

Unfortunately the window of opportunity is closing. Fifty years have now passed since the first unequivocal scientific warnings of an insulating blanket of CO2 forming around the planet. Politicians apparently decided to wait until something big went wrong.

It has. We have already entered the period of consequences. Climate scientists have long been worried about their children's future. Now they are also worried about their own.

Our Faustian bargain over fossil fuels has come due. Dr. Faustus had 24 years of party-now, pay-later—and indeed, it's exactly 24 years since Ronald Reagan axed the U.S. budget for exploring alternative fuels. This led to doubling our use of cheap coal, the worst of the fossil fuels. They're planning, under business as usual, to re-double coal burning by 2030—even though we can now see the high cost of low price.

The devil's helpers may not have come to take us away, but killer heat waves have started, along with some major complications from global warming. We're already seeing droughts that just won't quit. Deserts keep expanding. Oceans keep acidifying. Greenland keeps melting. Dwindling resources keep triggering genocidal wars with neighbors (think Darfur). Extreme weather keeps trashing the place.

All of them will get worse before they get better.

Worse, tipping points can lead to irreversible demolition derbies. Should another big El Niño occur and last twice as long as in 1983 or 1998, the profound drought could burn down the rain forests in Southeast Asia and the Amazon—and half of all species could go extinct, just within a year or two.

Time has become so short that we must turn around the CO2 situation within a decade to avoid saddling our children with the irreversible consequences of a runaway warming. That means not waiting for a better deal on some post-Kyoto treaty. It means immediately scaling up technologies that we know will work, not waiting for something better that could take decades to debug.

This isn't optional. It is something that we simply have to do. The time for talk is past.

"I see why you're worried," she says. "But what's your optimistic scenario for dealing with this fossil fuel fiasco?"

For starters, I think it likely that the leaders of the major religious groups will soon come to see climate change as a serious failure of stewardship. And once they see our present fossil fuel use as a deeply immoral imposition on other people and unborn generations, their arguments will trump the talk-endlessly-to-buy-time business objections— just as such moral arguments did when ending slavery in the 19th century.

Second, the developed nations are fully capable of kick-starting our response to global warming with present technology—enough to achieve, within ten years, a substantial reduction in their own fossil fuel uses. How?

Wind farmers will prosper as pastures grow modern windmills to keep the cows company.

Giant parking lots, already denuded of trees, are perfect places for acres of solar paneling. Drivers will love the shaded parking spaces they create.

The Carbon Tax will replace most of those deducted from paychecks and create a big wave of retrofitting homes and businesses.

Big brightly lit grocery stores with giant parking lots will compete poorly with warehouses that deliver web and phone orders within the hour, like pizza. Smaller neighborhood grocery stores will once again do a big walk-in business and they will compete with the warehouses by offering "green bicycle" delivery.

High-speed toll gates will become the norm on commuter highways. (Yes, I know, but remember that the paycheck was just enriched by eliminating withholding for income tax.)

Speed limits will be lowered to 50 mph (80 kmh) for fuel efficiency and, as in 1973, drivers will marvel at how smoothly the traffic flows. Double taxes will apply to vehicles with worse-than-average fossil fuel consumption, reducing the number of oversized vehicles with poor streamlining. Hybrids and all-electric cars will begin to dominate new car sales.

A firm, fast schedule will be established for retiring or retrofitting existing coal plants. My bet is that adding nuclear power plants—France gets 78% of its electricity that way, New Jersey 52%—will prove safer, cheaper, and faster than fixing coal.

On the quarter-century time scale, let us assume that the new rapid transit systems will reduce car commuting by half. The transition to electric and hydrogen vehicles will shift transportation's energy demands to greener sources, including biofuels, geothermal, tidal, and wave generation.

The highly efficient binding energy extractors (BEEs, the fourth-generation nuclear power plants) will be running on the spent fuel of the earlier generations.

The low-loss DC transmission lines will allow, via cables under the Bering Strait, solar-generated electricity to flow from the bright side to the dark side of the earth.

And in this 25-year time frame, we ought to see some important new technology making a difference, not just improvements in what we already use. For example, we might encourage rapid adaptation of the whale's favorite food, the tiny phytoplankton which provide half of the oxygen we breathe as they separate the C from the CO2.

Since the shell-forming plankton sink to the ocean bottom when they die, their carbon is taken out of circulation for millions of years. Forests can burn down, releasing their stored carbon in a week, but limestone is forever. If shell-forming plankton could thrive in warmer waters with some selective breeding or a genetic tweak, their numbers might double and start taking our excess CO2 out of circulation.

But even if we invent—and debug—such things tomorrow, it can take several decades before an invention makes a dent in our urgent problem. And all this assumes no bad surprises, such as the next supersized El Niño killing off the Amazon and, once we lack all those trees, increasing the rate of warming by half.

By mid-century, let us suppose that we have begun extracting more CO2 from the atmosphere than we add.

This will only happen if the technology of the developed world has become good enough to compensate for what's still going on in the overstressed nations that are too disorganized to get their energy act together.

When CO2 levels fall enough to counter the delayed warming from past excesses, we will begin to see a reversal of droughts and violent weather— though the rise in sea level will likely continue, a reminder to future generations of our 20th-century Faustian bargain.

As Samuel Johnson said in 1777, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

We need to turn on a dime—by which I mean, close to what we saw in the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

From a standing start in late 1941, the automakers converted—in a matter of months, not years—more than 1,000 automobile plants across thirty-one states... In one year, General Motors developed, tooled, and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft... GM also produced the amphibious 'duck'—a watertight steel hull enclosing a GM six-wheel, 2.5 ton truck that was adaptable to land or water. GM's duck `was designed, tested, built, and off the line in ninety days'... Ford turned out one B-24 [a bomber] every 63 minutes....
— Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride, 2000

Now there's a source of optimism: we did it before. Indeed, GM currently needs a new purpose in life (and I'd suggest repurposing the manned space program as well). All of that talent is badly needed.

With great challenges come great opportunities and I'm an optimist about our ability to respond with innovation. Countries that innovate early will have an economic edge over the laggards.

Our present civilization is like a magnificent cathedral, back before flying buttresses were retrofitted to stabilize the walls. Civilization now needs a retrofit for stabilizing its foundations. It will be a large undertaking, not unlike those that once went into building pyramids and cathedrals. I'm optimistic that the younger generation can create a better civilization during the major makeover—provided that those currently in the leadership can stop this runaway coal train, real fast.

Climate change is a challenge to the scientists but I suspect that the political leadership has the harder task, given how difficult it is to make people aware of what must be done and get them moving in time. It's going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.

Whichever country I travel to for conferences on the subject of autism, I hear the same story: It's on the increase.

In 1978, the rate of autism was 4 in 10,000 children; today (according to a 2006 article in Lancet) it is 1 percent. No one can explain this increase, though conservatively it is put down to better recognition and broadening the diagnostic category to include milder cases, such as Asperger syndrome. It is neither proved nor disproved that the increase might reflect other factors, such as genetic change or some environmental (e.g., hormonal) change. For scientists to answer the question of what is driving this increase will require imaginative research comparing historical and cross-cultural data.

Some may throw up their hands at this increase in autism. They may feel that the future is bleak for all of these newly diagnosed cases. But I remain optimistic that for a good proportion of them it has never been a better time to have autism.

Why? Because there is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age. The digital revolution brought us computers, but this age is remarkably recent. It was only in 1953 that IBM produced their first computer; but a mere fifty-four years later many, children now have their own computer.

Computers operate on the basis of extreme precision, and so does the autistic mind. Computers deal in black-and-white binary code, and so does the autistic mind. Computers follow rules, and so does the autistic mind. Computers are systems, and the autistic mind is the ultimate systemizer. The autistic mind is only interested in data that are predictable and lawful. The inherently ambiguous and unpredictable world of people and emotions is a turn-off for someone with autism, but a rapid series of clicks of the mouse that leads to the same result every time that sequence is performed is reassuringly attractive. Many children with autism develop an intuitive understanding of computers in the same way that other children develop an intuitive understanding of people.

So, why am I optimistic? I anticipate that many among this new generation of children with autism will find ways to blossom, using their skills with digital technology to find employment, to find friends, and in some cases to innovate. When I think back to the destiny of children with autism some fifty years ago, I imagine fewer opportunities for them. When I think of today's generation of children with autism, I do not despair. True, many of them will have a rocky time during their school years, when their peer group shuns them because they cannot socialize easily. But by adulthood, a good proportion of these individuals will have not only found a niche in the digital world, but will be exploiting that niche in ways that may bring economic security, respect from their peers, and a sense of worth because of the contribution they are making.

Such opportunities may be open only to those individuals with autism who have language and otherwise normal intelligence, but this is no trivial subgroup. For those more severely affected—by language delay and learning difficulties—the digital age may offer less, though even for this subgroup I remain optimistic that new computer-based teaching methods will have an appeal that can penetrate the wall that separates autism from the social world. The autistic mind—at any level of IQ—latches onto those aspects of the environment that provide predictability, and it is through such channels that we can reach in to help.

A Knowledge Driven Economy Allows Individuals to Lead Millions Out of Poverty In a Single Generation

Freedom to create, to work, to fundamentally alter is unprecedented. For better and worse, science and technology provide ever greater power. Individuals and small groups can leverage this power to set their own rules, make their own lives, establish their own boundaries. Paradoxically, this is leading to massive global networks and ever smaller countries.

Don't like your country or your neighbors? Had enough of the religious, nationalist, or ethnic fanatics nearby? Groups that like to speak obscure languages, that want to revise the heroes in the grammar school textbooks, or who advocate a different set of morals are increasingly able to do so. Borders and boundaries in both rich and poor countries are breeding like rabbits. In Europe there are demands for autonomy or outright separation in the former United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy...

It used to be the bright had to leave India, Pakistan, China, and Mexico to make a living, to lead and have a global impact. No more. There are ever more powerful enclaves and zip codes within countries where there is a concentration of smarts and entrepreneurship. If their neighbors let them, these groups and networks flourish. If not they separate or they leave.

As long as you can become and remain a part of the network, the power of place matters ever less. Who your parents were, where you were born, is irrelevant as long as you have access to and interest in education, technology, science, and networks. Every time you open a science magazine, research a new material or gene, map a brain, ocean, or piece of the universe there is a smorgasbord of opportunities to learn and build something new, to create, to accumulate enough prestige, wealth, or power to fundamentally change many lives.

A knowledge driven economy allows individuals to lead millions out of poverty in a single generation. Many within the biggest, China and India, as well as the smallest Singapore and Luxembourg can thrive. One no longer needs to take what the neighbor has to survive. One can thrive by building something complementary, by thinking up something better. Knowledge unlike land, oil wells, gold mines, is ever expanding. Someone's success depends ever less on taking what the other had. You can build and make your own.

Sometimes the real and cyber merge and cross over. Second lifers, inhabitants of a virtual world, are free to become whatever they wish, wherever they wish. Their creations and wealth are increasingly crossing boundaries into the real world of corporate planning, art, and dollars. This is just a foreshadowing of real world governance going forward as the digital becomes the dominant language and means of generating wealth on the planet.

Throughout the world, likely your grandpa's favorite sports team moved, his flag changed, and his job merged, moved, and morphed. All of this implies an accelerating set of shifts in allegiance and identity. Politicians and citizens who wish to preserve and protect the current country are well advised to pay attention to these trends as more have a choice and as ever more debate whether to become a more compact few. For the illegitimate or the slow, it will be harder to maintain boundaries and borders. There is little margin for error; each government and temporarily dominant party can screw up the whole. And the whole can be spit very fast. But you have any options. You can fight to preserve that you love or you can choose to build or inhabit an alternative space. Your choice.

People Are Using Technology Effectively To Mediate Toward a Healthier Global Community

Ten years ago, the novelist Andrei Codrescu came to visit me at Microsoft, where, at the time, I was Director of the Virtual Worlds (now Social Computing) Group.  As he watched me engage in conversation in V-Chat and Comic Chat, he mused skeptically about these virtual communities—until a soldier entered the conversation. 

"Ask him where he is?!" Codrescu demanded.  The soldier’s reply, "Stationed in Germany, fighting in Bosnia."  Andrei grabbed the keyboard from me, full attention now on the soldier, as he was sucked into the virtual world.  When he finally disengaged, he seemed fascinated by the possibilities.

Technology has advanced so significantly in the last decade, and many in the generation of kids, high school age and younger, are so fluent in every aspect of the technology that they have moved beyond being participants stimulated by the technology to being creators, creating both technology and content, collaborating and sharing every aspect of their lives, their opinions and their causes across borders that, to them, are increasingly invisible.

Everything can change when we change the way we look at it, and the generation coming of age sees a more global world and experiences a range of resources for creation and collaboration on a scale previous generations could only imagine.  Through Podcasts, Youtube, blogs, MySpace, and emerging technologies, every issue we face today, from successful alternative energy solutions to avian flu outbreak areas to disaster recovery is part of the global conversation and there are many pathways to participate and co-create solutions.

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.   The opportunity this generation can and appears to be seizing, is to move collective attention away from the type of anxiety and despair fueled by campaigns like the War on Terror and Climate Crisis and toward the most positive future we can create together, as highlighted by blogs like Worldchanging.com.

Through shared experiences, the generation growing up today has a broader sense of global issues and possibilities and a reality that moves beyond "my country," and, instead, embraces "our planet."

The Future

The future. That's what I'm optimistic about. The historian Macaulay said, in 1830: 'We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason.' The eternal, enduring pessimism of human beings about the future does real harm by persuading people, especially the young, to retreat from adventure and enterprise into anomie. Sure, the world has problems: AIDS, Islamofascism, carbon dioxide. But I bet we can solve them as we have solved others, such as smallpox, the population explosion and the high price of whale oil.

Personal Genomics Will Arrive This Year, and With It a Revolutionary Wave Of Volunteerism and Self-Knowledge

A small but crucial set of human pursuits have experienced smooth exponential growth for many decades—sometimes so smooth as to be hidden and then revealed with a jolt. These growth industries involve information—reading and writing complex artifacts made of electronic and/or DNA parts. The iconic example is the personal computer, which though traceable back to 1962, became manifest in 1993 when free web browsers spawned millions of personal and commercial web pages within one year. I’m optimistic that something similar is happening to personal genomics this year. We are in free-fall from a stratospheric $3 billion generic genome sequence (which only an expert could love) down to a sea level price for our personal genomic data. Early-adopters are posing and positing how to exploit it, while surrounded by envious and oblivious bystanders. We can now pinpoint the 1% of our genomes which in concert with our environment influences the traits that make us different from one another. Ways to tease out that key 1%, coalesce with "next-generation" DNA reading technology popping up this year, to suddenly bring the street-price down to $3000—about as easy (or hard) to justify as buying some bleeding-edge electronic gadget at an early stage when only minimal software is ready.

I am optimistic that while society is not now ready, it will be this year. The inevitable initial concerns about techno-downsides, e.g. the "Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2005", are already morphing into concerns about how to make these new gifts useful and reliable.  Witness just this August, the US Senate began consideration of the "Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2006". Momentum is thus building for millions of people to volunteer to have their genome data correlated with their physical-traits to benefit the billions who will hang back (due to inertia or uncertainty). These volunteers deserve up-to-the minute education in genetics, media, and privacy issues. They deserve protection, encouragement and maybe even rewards. Many current medical research studies do not encourage their human research subjects to fully fathom the potential identifiability of both their personal genome and physical traits data, nor to learn enough to access and appreciate their own data.  The cost of educating the subjects is far less than the other costs of such studies and yields benefits far beyond the immediate need for fully informed consent. In contrast, other studies like the Personal Genome Project, emphasize pre-education sufficient to choose among (1) opting-out of the study completely, (2) de-linking genomic and physical traits, (3) restricting linked data to qualified researchers, (4) allow peer-to-peer sharing, or (5) a fully open public database.  The subjects can redact specific items in their records at any point, realizing that items used to support conclusions in published work cannot be easily reversed. The excitement and dedication of these volunteers is already awesome.

I am optimistic that millions more will share. Millions already do share to benefit society (or whatever) in old and new social phenomena ranging from the Red Cross to Wikipedia, from MySpace/YouTube to SEC compensation disclosures. We wear ribbons and openly share personal experiences on topics that were once taboo, hidden from view, like depression, sexual orientation, and cancer. Rabbis' daily tasks now include genetic counseling. Our ability to track disease spread, not just HIV, bird flu, or bioterrorism, but even the common cold, will benefit from the new technologies and the new openness—leading to a bio-weather map. We will learn so much more about ourselves and how we interact with our environment and our fellow humans. We will be able to connect with other people who share our traits. I am optimistic that we will not be de-humanized (continuing the legacy of feudalism and industrial revolution), but we might be re-humanized, relieved of a few more ailments, to contemplate our place in the universe, and transcend out brutal past.

The Survival of Friendship

I am optimistic about human relationships — in particular, about friendship. Perhaps you have heard gloomy predictions about friendship: it's dying out, people no longer have friends they can confide in, loneliness is on the rise.

But friendship isn't dying out: it's just changing, adapting to the changes in the world. People are discovering different ways of getting together. It may be harder to find a bowling partner, but it's easier to find someone to chat with because there are many more ways to chat.

When I was a child, people with chronic illnesses were described as "shut-ins." Now a person can be shut in without being shut out. I have friends whom I know only through e-mail conversations but who are as dear to me as my college roommate and dearer by far than my next-door neighbor.

The desire to form and maintain relationships is one of the built-ins of human nature. Primates are social animals, and humans are the most social of all. An extravagant amount of mental capacity is devoted to relationships. We can recognize at a glance the faces of thousands of different people and, with equal ease, remember whether or not we like them. With a bit more effort, we can dredge up other useful information about most of them: their names or professions or where we met them. Throughout our lives we collect and store information about specific individuals, so that — just in case we ever run into them again — we will know how to act. We even store information about people we have never met and whose faces we have never seen.

Collecting people information is something we do without training and with no reward other than the enjoyment we get from doing it. We don't need a nudge from the conscious mind, telling us that the information may come in handy someday. But in fact it may come in handy. People we have never met before may be important to us in the future. They may become our trading partners or employers. They may become our lovers or our rivals.

Or they may simply become our friends.

Humans Will Learn to Learn From Diversity

I am optimistic that humans might finally come to understand that they can learn from other humans who are not like them. The supposed 'curse' of the Tower of Babel, the diversity of languages and cultures, is perhaps our greatest hope for continued healthy occupancy of this rock we all share in our unforgiving universe. Sure, there are dangers in this diversity that have led to murder and suffering. Diversity can all too easily be interpreted as 'incomprehensibility, inferiority, wrong-headedness'. But I am optimistic that our species has grown tired of this view of diversity. And I am optimistic that groups we have heard very little from will motivate us all to learn new solutions to old problems in the coming years.

However we define the group to which we belong, ethnically, geographically, linguistically, or nationally, I believe that 2007 could be the year in which we come to embrace a symmetry of status between groups and a cross-pollination of ways of living and ways of thinking about the world. 

Let me say what I think it means for people groups to learn from one another and then why I am optimistic about it.

The world presents us all with similar problems at the level of biological and emotional need. We need shelter, food, companionship, affection, sex, and opportunities to develop our abilities, among other things. As humans we also have intellectual and social needs that go beyond other species. We need affirmation, we need respect, we need to feel good about our lives, we need to feel like we are useful, and we need to feel optimistic. And we need to know how to get more meaning out of the world around us. And, especially, we need to learn to love more and tolerate more. But how do we learn these things? Where can we go for new ideas for the problems we are still beset by in 2007? Anthropological linguistics can offer some suggestions. We can learn from the stories and values of smaller, overlooked groups, endangered peoples, and even extinct peoples that we have records of, about how to live more harmoniously in the world.

For example, when we look back to the now extinct cultures of the Narragansett Indians the Northeastern British colonies in the early 18th century and before, we learn about their tolerance of difference. When Increase Mather and his father Cotton Mather expulsed Roger Williams from the colony of Massachusetts in 1735, during a ferocious winter, Mather expected Williams to do the right thing and freeze to death. Williams had expressed views of tolerance and respect for others and against tenets of the church of Mather that Mather and Governor Winthrop found intolerable. But Williams was taken in by the Narragansett and spent the winter safely with them, learning about their language and their philosophy of tolerance, of which he was living proof. When Williams later wrote about these people, his writings influenced the thought of Thomas Jefferson and eventually the Narragansett philosophy seems to have influenced, though indirectly, the writings and thought of William James as he helped to develop American Pragmatism, perhaps the only uniquely American contribution to world philosophy — a philosophy that evaluates ideas by their usefulness, by their tolerance of diverse ideas, and by their rejection of the idea that any one group holds a monopoly on Truth.

We have spent most of our existence on this planet in an attempt to homogenize it. To remove uncomfortable differences. But I believe that we are growing weary of this. I believe that this year the hurt and pain that our species is inflecting on itself will surpass, for many of us at least, what we are willing to bear. We are going to look for other answers. And we are going to need to turn to humans who have mastered the art of contentment and peace and tolerance. These people are found in various parts of the world. Zen Buddhists are one example. But there are others.

My thirty years of work with the Pirahãs (pee-da-HANs) of the Amazon rain forest, for example, has taught me a great deal about their remarkable lack of concern about the future or the past and their pleasure in living one day at a time, without fear of an afterlife, with full tolerance for others' beliefs. The Pirahãs know that people die, that they suffer, that life is not easy, through their daily struggle to provide food for their families without being bitten by snakes or eaten by jaguars and from loved ones they bury young, dead from malaria and other diseases. But this doesn't dampen their joy of life, their love for other Pirahãs or their ability to look at death without fear and without need for the idea of heaven to get them through this life, to them the only life.

Religions have a concept of Truth that lacks tolerance, a Truth that wants to missionize the world to eliminate diversity of belief. Western history has shown what that leads to. But peoples like the Narragansett, the Pirahãs, Zen Buddhists, and many others offer alternatives to homogenizing and destroying the diversity of the world. They show us how different people can solve the same problems of life in ways that can avoid some of the by-products of the violent homogenization of Western history. I believe that the impact of the internet and of rapid dissemination of research in popular and professional forums, coupled with widespread disgust at some of the things that our traditional cultural values have produced, can be the basis for learning from other peoples.

What is there to learn? Let me give some examples from my own field research among Amazonian peoples.

Cooperation: I once thought it might be fun to teach the Pirahã people about Western games. So I organized a 'field day', with a tug of war, a foot race, and a sack race, among other things. In the foot race, one Pirahã fellow got out in front of everyone else. He then stopped and waited for all the others to catch up so they could cross together. The idea of winning was not only novel but unappealing. We cross the line together or I don't cross it. And the same went for the sack race. The tug of war contest was a joke — just guys keeping the slack out of the rope talking. The people loved it all, laughing and conversing all day and told me they had a good time. They taught me more than I ever taught them: you can have a great time and have everyone win. That is not a bad lesson. That is a fine lesson.

Pluralism: The Pirahãs, like the Narragansett and other American Indians, believe that you use your knowledge to serve yourself and to serve others in your community. There is no over-arching concept of Truth to which all members of society must conform.

Communalism: The Pirahãs seem to accept only knowledge that helps, not knowledge that coerces. Think of our English expression 'knowledge is power'. The concept as practiced in most industrial societies is really that 'knowledge is power for me so long as I have it and you don't'. But to many peoples like the Pirahãs, knowledge is something for us all to share. It is power to the people, not power to a person. The Pirahãs don't allow top secret conversations. Every member of their society knows what every other member is doing and how they are doing it. There is a communal mind. There is freedom and security in group knowledge.

Toleration: In Western society we associate tolerance with education — the more you learn, the more you tolerate. But there is little evidence for this thesis when we look at our society as a whole (where education is even compatible with religious fundamentalism, one of the worst dangers for the future of our species). Yet among some hunter-gatherer societies, toleration of physical, mental, and religious diversity can be much greater than our so-called pluralistic Western societies. Not everyone has to look alike, act alike, behave alike, or believe alike. In fact, they don't even have to pretend to do so.
           
In the 1960s there was a similar optimism among my fellow hippies, as many of my generation went into fields like anthropology, literature, and science to learn more about diverse facts and truths and to give us a cornucopia of coping lessons for life. We are ready now for a new 60s-like exploration of diversity and I am optimistic that we will do this. I am optimistic that we will learn the simple and useful truths of cooperation, pluralism, communalism, and toleration and that no one Idea or Truth should be the ring to bind us all.

Our Ability As a Species to Respond To the Challenge Presented By Peak Oil

I am optimistic about our ability as a species to respond to the challenge presented by peak oil, the end of the cheap energy era that has lasted about 200 years, and to enter a new cultural phase in our evolution. There are several key developments that, despite the unprecedented challenge of this transition, encourage me to believe that we can make it. These come from both our scientific and technological insights into ways of resolving some deep problems in present cultural habits, and from shifts of perception that are occurring in cultural values.

The primary factor in scientific insight that is producing a major shift of awareness is the recognition that our dependence on cheap fossil fuel to satisfy our needs and desires has now entered the phase of disruption of the complex web of relationships on which the life of our planet depends. This has come from an understanding of the ways in which climate change due to the heating of the planet is causing average temperatures to rise, a consequence of releasing carbon dioxide from its buried condition in oil deposits into the atmosphere. Among the many consequences are the disturbed weather patterns due to the excess energy that gets dissipated through increasingly destructive hurricanes and the rise in sea levels as the polar ice caps melt, threatening all coastal habitation, in particular the majority of cities. This awareness is becoming more and more widespread, leading to both global action as in the Kyoto agreement and in various forms of carbon trading, and in local initiatives to shift our energy source from oil to renewables. There is no guarantee that we will survive this learning process. Every species throughout evolution has had to make hard choices in learning to live the path of sustainable relationships with others, or has gone extinct. We face the same alternative possibilities. We are special in our own way, as is every species, but not different regarding this fundamental dichotomy of life or death.

A shift has also begun within the culture of science itself, where it is becoming clear why our separation of nature from culture has been a useful but dangerous assumption. Although this distinction was made in modern science in order to separate the 'objective' from the 'subjective', reliable knowledge of nature from idiosyncratic expression of human creativity, it has now exceeded its usefulness and encourages us to see nature as a separate reality outside us that is ours to use for our own cultural purposes. However, we are nature, and nature is culture. That is, we are embedded in and reflective of the principles that govern the rest of reality, not separate as a result of our evolutionary gifts such as consciousness and language. So we are all participants in the same evolutionary adventure. This insight came first in physics when quantum mechanics showed us that nature is holistic, not causally separable into independent, objective elements, while 'subjective' observers are contributors to this reality. And now in biology we are learning that it is not the genome that makes the organism but the networks of molecular elements in and between cells that selectively read and make sense of the information in the genes, creating organisms of specific form. The nature of this creative agency is what we are currently trying to understand. As I read the evidence this is leading us to the realisation that organisms use language as part of their creativity, as we do. Networking is also the principle of Gaia, the complex pattern of relationships between living organisms and the earth, the seas and the atmosphere that results in the remarkable properties of our planet as a place fit for continuously evolving life. We are not passengers on the planet but participants in this evolution.

Finally, what encourages me to believe that we have a chance of getting through the most difficult transition that we have ever faced as a species is the proliferation of new technologies, and experiments in trading and monetary systems, that could result in robust local communities that are self-sufficient and sustainable in energy, food production, and other human needs. The key here is again inter-relatedness and networking. Whatever renewable, sustainable energy process is used, whether solar or wind or water or biofuels or other (the combination will vary with geographic location and bioregion) will become the basis of a trading system that naturally links together the components of the community into a coherent, holistic pattern of relationships that is responsive to local conditions and responsible in its actions toward the natural world. These local communities will also trade with one another, but will preserve their distinctness so that diversity is both inherent and valued, unlike the homogenisation of current global relationships. Whatever the population size that emerges in such organic human networks will necessarily be within the carrying capacity of the bioregions that support them. Life will be comfortable but not indulgent, and there will be  a great capacity to celebrate the life of quality that emerges. The deep expression of our capacity to make this transition is evident in powerful expressions of public awareness,  as in this insight from 'A Book of Miracles':

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is not our darkness but our light that frightens us most".

We do indeed have the power and are equipped to make the transition, though it requires a fundamental shift in what drives our power, from fear of nature to a deep sense of connection with her. This new organic way of living that combines science, technology, art, craft and ritual in unified, coherent patterns of learning and doing and celebrating has now become a dream to be realised because it is not only possible; it has also become a necessity.

People Will Increasingly Value Truth (Over Truthiness)

Optimism is an "ism" like any other. People reading these pages should recognize the responses as the hopeful beliefs that they are. With this caveat, I'm optimistic that people will increasingly value truth (over truthiness). After recent digressions into beliefs and images dominating current thought, I'm anticipating that society will increasingly recognize and understand the value of knowledge. People will want to make their own critical judgments, know more facts, and stop deferring to questionable authorities or visual media for their education. I don't necessarily think everyone will do so. But I'm optimistic that the ones who do won't remain a silent minority.

Part of my optimism stems from my experiences talking and writing about the future of particle physics to the public and the surge of interest I've found when people realize how much they can learn and understand. All of us in the particle physics community are eagerly awaiting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a proton-proton collider being built in Switzerland that will turn on in 2007 and begin its real operation in 2008. I'm optimistic (with calculations that support my optimism) that this machine will tell us about the nature of mass and explain to us the weakness of gravity relative to the other known elementary particle forces. I'm optimistic that we'll learn something truly new and exciting about the fundamental nature of matter and our world-maybe something as exciting as extra dimensions of space—or perhaps something no one has even thought about yet. Whatever the results will be, the LHC gives reason to be optimistic.

A Breakthrough In Understanding Intelligence Is Around The Corner

The clinically depressed often have a more realistic view of their problems than those who are optimistic. Without a biological drive for optimism it might be difficult to motivate humans to take on difficult problems and face long odds. What optimistic view of the future drives string theorists in physics working on theories that are probably hundreds of years ahead of their time? There is always the hope that a breakthrough is just around the corner.

In 1956 a small group of optimists met for a summer conference at Dartmouth, inspired by the recent invention of digital computers and breakthroughs in writing computer programs that could solve mathematical theorems and play games. Since mathematics was among the highest levels of human achievement, they thought that engineered intelligence was immanent. Last summer, 50 years later, another meeting was held at Dartmouth that brought together the founders of Artificial Intelligence and a new generation of researchers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the pioneers from the first meeting were still optimistic and chided the younger generation for having given up the goal of achieving human level intelligence.

Problems that seem easy, like seeing, hearing and moving about, are much more difficult to program than theorem proving and chess. How could this be?  It took hundreds of millions of years to evolve efficient ways for animals to find food, avoid danger and interact with one another, but humans have been developing mathematics for only a few thousand years, probably using bits of our brains that were meant to do something altogether different. We vastly underestimated the complexity of our interactions with the world because we are unaware of the immense computation our brains perform to make seeing objects and turning doorknobs seem effortless.

The early pioneers of AI sought logical descriptions that were black or white and geometric models with a few parameters, but the world is high dimensional and comes in shades of gray. The new generation of researchers has made progress by focusing on specific problems in computer vision, planning, and other areas of AI. Intractable problems have yielded to probabilistic analysis of large databases using powerful statistical techniques. The first algorithms that could handle this complexity were neural networks with many thousands of parameters that learned to categorize input patterns from labeled examples. New machine learning algorithms have been discovered that can extract hidden statistical structure from large datasets without the need for any labels. Progress is accelerating now that the internet provides truly large datasets of text and images. Computational linguists, for example, have adopted statistical algorithms for parsing sentences and language translation, having found transformational grammars too impoverished.

One of the most impressive learning systems is TD-Gammon, a computer program that taught itself to play backgammon at the championship level. Built by Gerald Tesauro at IBM Yorktown Heights, TD-Gammon started out with little more than the board position and the rules of the game, and the only feedback was who won. TD-gammon solved the temporal credit assignment problem:  If after a long string of choices you win, how do you know which choices were responsible for the victory?  Unlike rule-based game programs, TD-Gammon discovered better ways to play positions on its own, and developed a surprisingly subtle sense of when to play safely and when to be aggressive. This captures some important aspects of human intelligence.

Neuroscientists have discovered that dopamine neurons, found in the brains of all vertebrates, are central to reward learning. The transient responses of dopamine neurons signal to the brain predictions for future reward, which are used to guide behavior and regulate synaptic plasticity. The dopamine responses have the same properties as the temporal difference learning algorithm used in TD-Gammon. Reinforcement learning was dismissed years ago as too weak a learner to handle the complexity of cognition. This belief needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the successes of TD-Gammon and learning algorithms in other areas of AI.

What would a biological theory of intelligence look like, based on internal brain states derived from experimental studies rather than introspection? I am optimistic that we are finally on the right track and that, before too long, an unexpected breakthrough will occur.

We Will Finally Get Mathematics Education Right

For the first time since Euclid started the mathematics education ball rolling over two thousand years ago, we are within a generation of eradicating innumeracy and being able to bring out the mathematical ability that research has demonstrated conclusively is within (almost) everyone's reach. The key to this development (actually two developments, one in the developing world, the other in affluent, technology-rich societies) is technology (actually two technologies).

First the developing world. Forget the $100 laptop, which I think has garnered the support it has only because of the track record and charisma of its principal advocate (Nicholas Negroponte), the ubiquitous computing device that will soon be in every home on the planet is the mobile phone. Despite the obvious limitations of a small screen and minimal input capability, with well-crafted instructional materials it will provide the developing world with accessible education in the basic numerical and quantitative reasoning skills that will enable them to escape from the poverty trap by becoming economically self-sufficient. Such a limited delivery system would not work for an affluent consumer who has choices, but for someone highly motivated by the basic desires of survival and betterment, who has no other choice, it will be life transforming.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, the immersive, three-dimensional virtual environments developed by the gaming industry make it possible to provide basic mathematical education in a form that practically everyone can benefit from.

We have grown so accustomed to the fact that for over two thousand years, mathematics had to be communicated, learned, and carried out through written symbols, that we may have lost sight of the fact that mathematics is no more about symbols than music is about musical notation. In both cases, specially developed, highly abstract, stylized notations enable us to capture on a page certain patterns of the mind, but in both cases what is actually captured in symbols is a dreadfully meager representation of the real thing, meaningful only to those who master the arcane notation and are able to recreate from the symbols the often profound beauty they represent. Never before in the history of mathematics have we had a technology that is ideally suited to representing and communicating basic mathematics. But now, with the development of manufactured, immersive, 3D environments, we do.

For sure, not all mathematics lends itself to this medium. But by good fortune (actually, it's not luck, but that would be too great a digression to explain) the medium will work, and work well, for the more basic mathematical life-skills that are of the most value to people living in modern developed societies.

Given the current cost of developing these digital environments (budgets run into the millions of dollars), it will take some years before this happens. We can also expect resistance from mathematics textbook publishers (who currently make a large fortune selling a product that has demonstrably failed to work) and from school boards who still think the universe was created by an old guy with a white beard (no, not Daniel Dennett) 6,000 years ago. But as massive sales of videogames drives their production costs down, the technology will soon come within reach of the educational world.

This is not about making the learning of mathematics "fun." Doing math will always be hard work, and not everyone will like it; its aficionados may remain a minority. But everyone will achieve a level of competency adequate for their lives.

Incidentally, I don't think I am being swayed or seduced by the newest technology. Certainly, I never thought that television, or the computer, or even artificial intelligence, offered a path to effective math learning. What makes immersive 3D virtual environments the perfect medium for learning basic math skills is not that they are created digitally on computers. Nor is it that they are the medium of highly seductive videogames. Rather, it is because they provide a means for simulating the real world we live in, and out of which mathematics arises, and of doing so in a way that brings out and confronts the player (i.e., learner) with the underlying mathematical structure of our world. If Euclid were alive today, this is how he would teach math.

Scientistific Discoveries Are Surprisingly Durable

Anna Karenina famously begins with the line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A little less famously and a great deal more astutely, Nabokov turned the line on its head at the opening of Ada: "All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike." I'm with Nabokov, and that's why I can be an optimist.

Of course in the long run, optimism is impossible. Entropy is unforgiving: even a historian knows that.

And history repeats itself. The same stupidities, the same vengeances, the same brutalities are mindlessly reinvented over and over again. The study of history can help the educated and the wise avoid the mistakes of the past, but alas, it does nothing for helping the numbskulls.

But the study of the past and its follies and failures reveals one surprising ground for optimism. In the long run, the idiots are overthrown or at least they die. On the other hand, creativity and achievement are unique, exciting, liberating—and abiding. The discoveries of scientists, the inventions of engineers, the advances in the civility of human behavior are surprisingly durable. They may be thwarted or attacked, and at any given moment it may seem that the cause of women's rights is beleaguered in too many places in the world. But the idea of women's equality with men is not going away. Too few students may master the natural sciences, but the understanding enshrined in Newton's laws of motion and the calculus are not going away. Too many people may eat and smoke their way to early graves, but the accurate understanding of the mechanisms of the human body and how they can be healed and repaired and kept healthy—that's not going away either.

After all, we started out in the African savannah, trying to run fast enough to catch up with things we could eat and fast enough to stay away from things that could eat us. Our natural destiny is to squat in caves and shiver, then die young. We decided we didn't like that, and we figured out how to do better. Even if the numbskulls get their way and we were to wind up back in a cave, we would remember—and we wouldn't be in the cave long. We do not remember everything, and there are losses. But we turn out to be a stubbornly smart, resilient and persistent species, and we do not forget the most important things.

The First Coming

I am optimistic that God may come at the end.

I've never been able to choke down the idea of a supernatural God who stands outside of time, a God who designs and creates the Universe. There is, however, an alternate notion of God relevant to the secular community, the skeptical, evidence-minded community that believes only in nature.

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in the 1950's called "The Last Question." The story opens in 2061 with the Earth cooling down. Scientists ask the giant computer, "can entropy be reversed?" and the computer answers "not enough data for a meaningful answer." In the next scene, earth's inhabitants have fled the white dwarf that used to be our sun, for younger stars; and as the galaxy continues to cool, they ask the miniaturized supercomputer, which contains all of human knowledge, "can entropy be reversed." It answers "not enough data." This continues through more scenes, with the computer even more powerful and the cosmos even colder. The answer, however, remains the same. Ultimately trillions of years pass, and all life and warmth in the Universe have fled. All knowledge is compacted into a wisp of matter in the near-absolute zero of hyperspace. The wisp asks itself "can entropy be reversed?"

"Let there be light," it responds. And there was light.

There is a theory of God imbedded in this story that is based not on faith and revelation, but on hope and evidence. God in the Judeo-Christian theory has four properties: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, and the creation of the universe. I think we need to give up the last property, a supernatural creator at the beginning of time. This is the most troublesome property in the Judeo-Christian theory: it runs afoul of evil in the universe. If God is the designer, and also good, omniscient, and omnipotent, how come the world is so full of innocent children dying, of terrorism, and of sadism? The creator property also contradicts human free will. How can God have created a species endowed with free will, if God is also omnipotent and omniscient? And who created the creator anyway?

There are crafty, involuted theological answers to each of these conundrums. The problem of evil is allegedly solved by holding that God's plan is inscrutable: 'What looks evil to us isn't evil in God's inscrutable plan.' The problem of reconciling human free will with the four properties of God is a very tough nut. Calvin and Luther gave up human will to save God's omnipotence. In contrast to this Reformation theory, modern "process" theology holds that God started things off with an eternal thrust toward increasing complexity (so far, so good). But mounting complexity entails free will and self-consciousness, and so human free will is a strong limitation on God's power. This theory of God gives up omnipotence and omniscience to allow human beings to enjoy free will. To circumvent 'who created the creator,' process theology gives up creation itself by claiming that the process of becoming more complex just goes on forever: there was no beginning and will be no end. So the process theology God allows free will, but at the expense of omnipotence, omniscience, and creation.

There is a different way out of these conundrums: It acknowledges that the creator property is so contradictory to the other three properties as to mandate jettisoning the property of Creator. Importantly, this very property is what makes God so hard to swallow for the scientifically minded person. The Creator is supernatural, an intelligent and designing being who exists before time and who is not subject to natural laws; a complex entity that occurs before the simple entities, thereby violating most every scientific process we know about. . Let the mystery of creation be consigned to the branch of physics called cosmology. 'Good riddance.'

This leaves us with the idea of a God who had nothing whatever to do with creation, but who is omnipotent, omniscient, and righteous? Does this God exist?

Such a God cannot exist now because we would be stuck once again with two of the same conundrums: how can there be evil in the world now if an existing God is omnipotent and righteous, and how can humans have free will if an existing God is omnipotent and omniscient. So there was no such God and there is no such God now.

Consider now the principle of NonZero that Robert Wright (2000) articulates in his book of the same name. Wright argues that the invisible hand of biological and cultural evolution ineluctably select for the complex over the simple because positive sum games have the survival and reproductive edge over zero sum games, and that over epochal time more and more complex systems, bulkily, but necessarily, arise. Space does not allow me to expand on Wright's thesis and I must refer the justifiably unconvinced reader to his very substantial arguments.

A process that selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness. Omniscience is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of science. Omnipotence is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of technology. Righteousness is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of positive institutions. So in the very longest run the principle of Nonzero heads toward a God who is not supernatural, but who ultimately acquires omnipotence, omniscience and goodness through the natural progress of Nonzero. Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end

So I am optimistic that there may be in the fullness of time a First Coming. I am optimistic that this is the door through which meaning may enter our lives. A meaningful life is a life that joins with something larger than the self and the larger that something is, the more meaning. I am optimistic that as individuals we can choose to be a tiny part of this process. Partaking of a process that has as it ultimate end  the bringing of a God, who is endowed with omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness joins our tiny, accidental lives to something enormously larger.

Breaking Down the Barriers Between Artists and the Public

For me, the most interesting development in the art world is what Charles Saatchi is doing with The Saatchi Gallery (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk), his new online gallery which opens Summer 2007. It is a tool that is immensely powerful as it is open on both sides to the artists and to the public without interference of curators, editors, dealers, critics, etc. This is exactly the way Contemporary Art should be presented. The artists can show whatever they want and the public can see whatever they choose to look at, there is no more the barrier of the museum or the gallery or the art magazine between the artists and the public. I find this immensely refreshing and interesting.

The recent creation of YouTube is another very interesting and important development which provides Internet users with a cheap and easy way to make and post short videos. I think we have just begun to touch the surface of this huge iceberg. It means that anyone who sees a policeman beating someone up, or someone kicking their dog, or Paris Hilton kissing a young man in a car, or someone being mistreated in a hospital, etc. can post it on YouTube and have the entire world see it in less than ten minutes. People can write great editorials and post great blogs, but the power of a short film is a thousand times stronger than any well written anything anywhere. I am excited and also terrified by this new opportunity.

That We Will Embrace the Reality of Progress

I am optimistic about the only thing—by definition—that we can be optimistic about: the future. When I tally up the plus and minuses at work in the world, I see progress. Tomorrow looks like it will be better than today.  Not just progress for me, but for everyone on the planet in aggregate and on average.

No sane person can ignore the heaps of ills on this planet. The ills of the environment, of inequality, of war and poverty and ignorance, and the ills of body and soul of many billion inhabitants are inescapable. Nor can any rational person ignore the steady stream of new ills that are bred by our inventions and activities, including ills generated by our well-intentioned attempts to heal old ills. The steady destruction of good things and people seems relentless. And it is.

But the steady stream of good things is relentless as well. Who can argue with the goodness of antibiotics—even though they are over-prescribed? Electricity? Woven cloth? Radio? The list of desirable things is endless. While they all have their downsides, we acknowledge the goodness of these inventions by purchasing them in bulk. And to remedy currently perceived ills, we keep creating new good things.

Some of these new solutions are often worse than the problems they were supposed to solve, but it is my observation that on average and over time, the new solutions slightly outweigh the new problems. As Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi once said, "There is more good than evil in the world—but not by much."  Unexpectedly "not much" is all that is needed when you have the power of compound interest at work—which is what culture is. The world needs to be only 1% (or even one-tenth of 1 %) better day in and day out to accumulate civilization. As long as we create 1% more than we destroy each year, we have progress. This delta is so small that it is almost imperceptible, particularly in the face of the 49% of death and destruction that is in our face. Yet this tiny, slim, and shy differential generates progress.

But is there really even 1% betterment? I think the only evidence we have of this is people's behavior. When we watch what people do, we see they inevitably, unwaveringly head towards more choices, more options, and the increased possibilities offered by the future.

No one I know has yet found a way to live in the future. Maybe someday we'll invent inexpensive time machines and we can vacation a hundred years into the future. Right now if we want to live in "tomorrow"—that place which is just a little better than today—the best we can do is to live in the most forward-looking city on earth. Cities are where the future happens. It is where there are increased choices and possibilities. Everyday one million people move from the countryside into cities. This journey is less a trip in space as in time. These migrants are really moving hundreds of years forward in time; relocating from medieval villages into 21st century sprawling urban areas.  The ills of these slums are very visible and don't stop the arrivals. They are coming—as we all do—for the slightly increased number of freedoms and options they didn't have in their past. This is the very same reason we are living where and the way we do—to have 1% more choices.

Moving back into the past has never been easier. Citizens in developing countries can merely walk back to their villages, where they can live with age-old traditions, and limited choices. If they are eager enough, they can live without modern technology at all. Citizens in the developed world can buy a plane ticket and in less than one day can be settled in a hamlet in Nepal or Mali. If you care to relinquish the options of the present and adopt the limited choices of the past you can live there the rest of your life.  Indeed you can choose your time period. If you believe the peak of existence was reached in Neolithic times you can camp out in a clearing in the Amazon; if you suspect the golden age was in the 1890s, you can find a farm among the Amish. We have the incredible opportunity to head into the past, but it is amazing how few people really want to live there. Except for a few rare individuals, no one does. Rather, everywhere in the world, at all historical periods, in all cultures, people have stampeded by the billions into the future of "of slightly more options" as fast as they can.

Why? Because the future is slightly better than the past. And tomorrow will be slightly better than today. And while everyone's actions confirm the essential reality of progress, progress is not something we have been willing to admit to in public. I am optimistic that in the coming years we'll embrace the reality of progress.

Understanding What Really Happens To Humans In Groups

At seventeen I saw that contemporary literature—I studied it then, and hoped eventually to be part of it—is an abyss of despair.  No surprise: it reflects the unspeakable circumstances of the 20th century. Even so, it's no good thing to be seventeen and without hope. Luckily, chance brought me together with some scientists, and I discovered that in science, optimism was, and is, abundant. 

Since then, I've spent much of my life trying to persuade my friends in the humanities that optimism on behalf of the human condition is a plausible point of view. It isn't the only point of view—the 20th century's horrors are a fact, and most of them happened through human agency.  But the full life can support several points of view, often simultaneously, and my personal inclination is toward optimism, however qualified it must be.

For a long time my optimism centered on computing in general, and what kinds of benefits it might bring us. Events have shown I entertained far too modest an optimism—I'm embarrassed to say that the impact of the Internet, in particular the World Wide Web, eluded me completely at first. A few years ago, I returned to artificial intelligence, which I'd written about early on, and then gone away from. Press narratives were uncritical about the field's death throes, and I expected to write an elegy. Instead, I found a revelation. Artificial intelligence is not only robustly healthy, building on its very significant gains since I first wrote about it, but the field's present ambitions burst with, well, vitality.

Lately I've been examining a new aspect of computing, the modeling of human behavior in groups, small and large, beginning from the bottom up, playing out dynamically, as only computer models allow. Years ago, in a casual dinner conversation with a social scientist, I wondered aloud if what prevented us from understanding what really happens to humans in groups is that we haven't found the code.  I meant to make a vague comparison between the genetic code and something hypothetical that encoded human behavior. Instead of laughing, she solemnly agreed. 

Such a code is not yet on the horizon, but thanks to some marvelous new work by very gifted social scientists, its intimations are teasing us.   I'm optimistic that it will eventually be found. When it is, it will be a scientific triumph. It will open not just the future to our understanding, but also the past. It will be a human triumph.

What will it mean to have such a code? For one thing we can plan more intelligently. Want to wage a war? Call in the experts to run a few scenarios for you, laid out in bottom-up detail, humans and their interactions with each other and the terrain they're going to fight it out on. 

Watch silicon agents melt away to fight you another day; watch them reach out for help elsewhere. Once you watch the model run its course, maybe you don't want to fight that particular war after all. Want to predict the possible spread of a disease? Good, the silicon model will tell you how many will fall, and where you can intervene to pinch off contagion effectively, where it's a waste of effort. Want to figure out the ebb and flow of urban crime waves? And then how to prevent them? Play it out in silicon first. Why do humans cooperate, at least as much as they compete? Compare identical silicon societies, same people, same resources, but vary the amount of cooperation, the amount of competition.  Which one collapses? Which one survives?  Which one thrives? Where's the tipping point?

Perhaps as interesting, we'll be able to reach backward in time. How, really, did Mesopotamia become a desert when once it had supported a network of rich societies?  How much of that collapse was climate change, how much human folly? Build a model of early modern Europe and show what really caused the European Renaissance. Compute in detail how Great Britain came to rule the waves—and then didn't any more.

We assume we've solved some of these problems, though historians dispute one another ferociously, as do epidemiologists, as do economists, sometimes over details, sometimes over emphasis, sometimes over fundamental assumptions. Here comes a chance to nail it down, and these techniques offer us insights we couldn't get any other way. Finding the code I once thought was only hypothetical will revolutionize our view of who we are, how we got that way, and who we might become, the same way cracking the genetic code revolutionized biology.

But of course I'm chronically too modest in my hopes, so you can comfortably hope for more.

Print As a Technology

I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product. That is why I appreciate the fact that many Edge forums are transformed into books, and it's why I hope someday that there is a gorgeous Edge Magazine that I can flip through and touch. Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 400 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, or the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the internet.

The Divide Between Rational Scientific Thinking and the Rest of Our Culture Is Decreasing

Some days I wake up optimistic, others not at all. When I am optimistic, I think that humans are increasingly realizing that rational thinking is indeed better for them than irrational thinking. In the process, scientific thinking is growing in depth, healing itself from a certain traditional superficiality, re-gaining contact with the rest of the culture, learning to deal with with the complexity of the search for knowledge, and with the full complexity of the human experience. Non-scientific thinking is still everywhere, but it is losing ground.

In the small world of the academia, the senseless divide between science and the humanities is slowly evaporating. Intellectuals on both sides realize that the complexity of contemporary knowledge cannot be seen unless we look at it all. A contemporary philosopher that ignores scientific thinking is out of the world, but an increasing number of theoretical physicists are also realizing, for instance, that to solve quantum gravity we cannot avoid addressing foundational "philosophical" questions.  And an increasing number of scientists coming out of the lab, and speaking out (here on Edge, for instance).

When I am pessimistic, I think that history shows that human madness with us to stay: war, greed for more power and more richness, religion, certainty to be the depositary of the ultimate Truth, fear of those different from us ... I see all this madness solidly in control of the planet's affairs. And even some of my scientists friends trust homeopathy.

When I am optimistic I think that the past was worse: we are definitely going towards a better and more reasonable world. There are countries today that have not started a war in decades, and, in fact, these countries are the majority: it is something new in the history of the world. The number of people that have realized how much nonsensical is there in religion continues to increase, and no doubt this will help decrease belligerency and intolerance.

But the process is in both sides. In a recent interview with CNN, the Dalai Lama was asked how it feels to be the leader of a major religion in a secular world. He smiled and answered that he was happy to see that the modern word has a rich secular spiritual life. A secular spiritual life is a life rich intellectually and emotionally. The next question was whether he really believed he was the Dalai Lama, reincarnation of previous Dalai Lamas. This time he laughed, and answered "of course I am the Dalai Lama", but to be the "reincarnation" of previous Lamas, he continued, does not mean to "be them": it means to continue something that they had been developing. Not all our major religious leaders are so reasonable, of course. But if one can be so, can't we hope, at least in our optimistic moments, the others will follow?

Twenty six centuries have lapsed since Anaximander suggested that rain is not sent by Zeus. Rather, it is water evaporated by the sun and carried by the wind. The battle to realize that the scientific method of representing knowledge and the science-minded mode of thinking is deeper, richer and better for us than any God, is still ongoing, but by no means is it lost, as it often seems.

The Increasing Coalescence of Scientific Disciplines

Under our very eyes, research in science has been taking a courageous and promising turn, to realize in our time an ancient dream.

Since Thales and other philosophers on the island in the Ionian Sea, over 2500 years ago, there has been an undying hope that under all the diverse and fluctuating phenomena, there could be found in Nature a grand, majestic order. This fascination, the "Ionian Enchantment," persisted ever since in various forms.

Thus, Isaac Newton thought mechanical forces that explained the motions of the solar system would also turn out to run all else, including human senses. After Darwin's magnificent synthesis, many attempts were made to extend it to include all societal phenomena. The influential Austrian polymath, Ernst Mach, to whom young Einstein referred as one of his most important influences, taught that the true task of scientific research is to establish a form of fundamental science, an Einheitswissenschaft, on which is based every different specialty. From about 1910 on, an increasing number of scientists in Europe and America gave allegiance to the idea of the "Unity of Science," a widespread movement hoping to find functioning bridges between not only different sciences but also between science and philosophy—Niels Bohr being one of the prominent promoters.

But, by and by, it became clear that such hopes were at best premature, that there was not enough of what William James had called "cash value," in terms of having secured many actual accomplishments—not least in attaining a Unified Field Theory. At one of the last meetings devoted to discussions about the Unity of Science, in 1956, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with typical eloquence, offered a valedictory to the Ionian Enchantment, with these words:

"It may be a question [whether there] is one way of bringing a wider unity in our time. That unity, I think, can only be based on a rather different kind of structure than the one most of us have in mind....The unity we can seek lies really in two things. One is that the knowledge that comes to us in such terrifyingly inhumanly rapid rate has some order in it....The second is simply this: We can have each other to dinner. We ourselves, and with each other by our converse, can create, not an architecture of global scope,but an immense, intricate network of intimacy, illumination, and understanding."

But even as such opinions were accepted with resignation, something new had been born, quietly grew, and in our time has become the source of increasing optimism about the value of the old dream—by turning in a new direction. I mean that scientific research, at first only sporadically during the last century, but more and more in our time, has been successfully reaching out for a new sort of unity—in practice, for an integration among disciplinary fragments. This time the movement is not driven by a philosophy of science or a search for the Ur-science. Rather it is appearing as if spontaneously in the pursuit and progress of research science itself.

There is an increasing coalescence of scientific disciplines in many areas. Thus the discovery of the structure of the genome not only required contributions from parts of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and information technology, but in turn it led to further advances in biology, physics, chemistry, technology, medicine, ecology, and even ethics. And all this scientific advance is leading, as it should, to the hopeful betterment of the human condition (as had been also one of the platform promises of the Unity of Science movement, especially in its branch in the Vienna Circle).

Similar developments happen in the physical sciences—a coalescence of particle physics and large-scale astronomy, of physics and biology, and so forth. It is a telling and not merely parochial indicator that about half of my 45 colleagues in my Physics Department, owning to their widespread research interests, now have joint appointments with other departments at the University: with Molecular and Cellular Biology, with Mathematics, with Chemistry, with Applied Sciences and Engineering, with History of Science. Just now, a new building is being erected next to our Physics Department. It has the acronym LISE, which stands for the remarkable name, Laboratory of Integrated Science and Engineering. Although in industry, here and there, equivalent labs have existed for years, the most fervent follower of the Unity of Science movement would not have hoped then for such an indicator of the promise of interdisciplinarity. But as the new saying goes, most of the easy problems have been solved, and the hard ones need to be tackled by a consortium of different competences.

From other parts of this university, plans are under way to set up a program for higher degrees in the new field of Systems Biology, which has the goal of reaching "an integrated understanding" of biological/medical processes; that program is to bring together faculty and students from biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computation and engineering. And these parochial examples are indications of a general trend in many universities. The new password to success is now "integration" and "interdisciplinarity." If an "official" sacralization of this movement were needed, it would be the 2005 release of a big volume by the National Academy of Sciences, with the title "Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research."

All this is not precisely what the philosophers and scientists, from Thales on, were hoping for. We will not, at least not for a long time, have that grand coalescence of all sciences and more. What has come lacks exalted philosophical pretensions, being instead a turn to weeks and years of many-heads-together, hands-on work on specific, hard problems of intense scientific interest, many of them also of value to society at large.

And, of course, these co-workers can also still have each other to dinner.

We Will Soon Devise a Scientific Theory for the Perennial Mind-Body Problem

The enigmatic relation between conscious experiences and the physical world, commonly known as the mind-body problem, has frustrated philosophers at least since Plato, and now stonewalls scientists in their attempts to construct a rigorous theory. Yet I am optimistic that, despite millennia of prior failures, we will soon devise a scientific theory for this perennial problem.

Why such optimism? First, the mind-body problem is now recognized as a legitimate scientific problem. In 2005, the journal Science placed it second in a list of 125 open questions in science. During the twentieth century, a multi-decade detour into behaviorism sidelined scientific investigation of the mind-body problem. But three decades into the cognitive revolution, the problem was dusted off and again given serious scientific attention.

Second, scientists soon rediscovered that the problem is surprisingly hard. Neurophysics, real and artificial neural networks, classical and quantum algorithms, information and complexity—standard tools that prove powerful in the study of perception, cognition and intelligence—have yet to yield a single scientific theory of conscious experiences. We cannot, for instance, answer the basic question: Why must this particular pattern of neural activity or this functional property cause, or be, this particular conscious experience (say, the smell of garlic) instead of that other conscious experience (say, the smell of a truffle), or instead of no conscious experience at all? Precise predictions of this type, de rigueur for genuine scientific explanations, have yet to be fashioned, or even plausibly sketched, with the standard tools.

Third, although science is laudably conservative, yet when pushed to the wall by recalcitrant data and impotent theories, scientists have repeatedly proved willing to reexamine dearly held presuppositions and to revise or jettison the ineffectual in favor of unorthodox assumptions, provided that these assumptions permit the construction of explanatory theories that answer to data. Aristarchus, then Copernicus, countenanced a heliocentric solar system, Newton action at a distance, Einstein quanta of light and distortions of space-time, Bohr probability waves, superpositions and nonlocality. Theories of quantum gravity now posit eleven dimensions, vibrating membranes, and pixels of space and time. The initial response to such proposals is, invariably, widespread incredulity. But considerations of explanatory power and empirical adequacy, wherever they point, eventually win the day. Scientists revise their offending presuppositions, adjust psychologically as best they can to the new world view, and get on with the business of science in the new framework.

Evidence is mounting that the mind-body problem requires revision of deeply held presuppositions. The most compelling evidence to date is the large and growing set of proposals now on offer. All are nonstarters. They are, to quote Pauli, not even wrong. We have yet to see our first genuine scientific theory of the mind-body problem. This has prompted some to conclude that homo sapiens has been cheated by evolution and simply lacks the requisite concepts: Those concepts necessary for us to survive long enough to reproduce did not include those necessary to solve the mind-body problem. If so, there is little hope, at present, for swift progress.

I am optimistic, however, that the obstacle is not in our genes but in our presuppositions. Tinkering with presuppositions is more clearly within the purview of current technology than tinkering with our genes. Indeed, tinkering with one's presuppositions requires no technology, just a ruthless reconsideration of what one considers to be obviously true. Science has risen to the task before. It will rise again. But progress will be tortuous and the process psychologically wrenching. It is not easy, even in the light of compelling data and theories, to let go of what once seemed obviously true.

Here are some obvious truths that guide current attempts to solve the mind-body problem: Physical objects have causal powers. Neural activity can cause conscious experiences. The brain exists whether or not it is observed. So too does the moon, and all other physical objects. Consciousness is a relative latecomer in the evolution of the universe. Conscious sensory experiences resemble, or approximate, true properties of an independently existing physical world.

Will we soon be forced to relinquish some of these truths? Probably. If so, the current ontological predilections of science will require dramatic revision. Could science survive? Of course. The fundamental commitments of science are methodological, not ontological. What is essential is the process of constructing rigorous explanatory theories, testing them with careful experiments, and revising them in light of new data. Ontologies can come and go. One might endure sufficiently long that it is taken for a sine qua non of science. But it is not. An ontology breathed into life by the method of science can later be slain by that same method. Therein lies the novel power of science. And therein lies my optimism that science will soon succeed in fashioning its first theory of the mind-body problem. But at the feet of that theory will probably lie the slain carcass of an effete ontology.

A Proper Scientific Understanding of Irrationality In General, and of Religion In Particular

I'm not actually optimistic about anything very much, but it's clear that if civilisation is to survive, we need a proper scientific understanding of irrationality in general, and of religion in particular. To be optimistic about that is a precondition for optimism about anything else. What might such an understanding look like?

For a start, it would be naturalistic and empirical. It would not start from definitions of religion or faith, but from a careful study, in the spirit of William James, of how it is that religious people actually behave and believe. What would be found, again in a Jamesian spirit, is that there are varieties of religious behaviour, as there are varieties of religious experience. We would need to know how these are related to each other, and to other things that are not described as religious. It may well be that "religion" is a concept no more useful than phlogiston.

It would take seriously Dan Dennett's distinction between beliefs and opinions—more seriously, I think, than he sometimes does himself. A belief, in Dennett's sense, is a kind of behaviour or a propensity to behave as if certain things were true. It need not be conscious at all. The kind of conscious, articulable propositions about the world which most people mean by "belief" he calls an "opinion".

In this sense, an enquiry into religious belief would be distinct from an enquiry into religious opinions: Religious "belief" would involve all of the largely unconscious mechanisms which lead people to behave superstitiously, or reverently, or with a disdain for heretics; religious opinions would be the reasons that they give for this behaviour. We need to understand both. It may be that their opinions would correspond to their beliefs but that is something to be established in every case by empirical enquiry. It's obvious that in most cases they don't. Intellectuals are supposed to be motivated by their opinions; some of them actually are. But everyone is motivated by their beliefs and prejudices as well.

In particular, such an enquiry would be very careful about what counts as evidence. A friend of mine who does consciousness research once said sourly that "The problem with the brain is that if you go looking for something in there, you're very liable to find it." Similarly, if you go looking for some particular quality in religious belief you are likely to find it there, as well as its opposite. What's needed is the distinctly scientific attitude that takes disconfirming evidence seriously, and doesn't respond to it by simply repeating the confirming evidence.

I happened to see a play "On Religion" by the British atheist philosopher AC Grayling last night, which is an excellent dramatisation of some of these issues. The atheist character, a woman lecturer, is given a speech in which she recounts the story of a scientist who has spent fifteen years arguing that the Golgi apparatus does not in fact exist. It is an artifact of the inadequacies of our microscopes. Finally, he attends a lecture from a visiting cell biologists who proves conclusively that the Golgi apparatus does exist. And, just as the whole department is trying to avoid his eye from sympathetic shame, he rushes up to the lecturer, grabs his hand, and says "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." It is an improving and inspiring story, which pitches over into bathos as soon as the atheist spells out the moral. "No religious person could ever say that" she says. Has she really never heard of the phenomenon of conversion? What do the converted say, if not that some evidence has convinced them they were wrong all their lives before?

So, I think, if I am to be optimistic, that there will be a real breakthrough in the empirical study of religion, at the end of which no scientist will ever feel able to assert that "no religious person could ever say" without making a careful enquiry into what religious people actually do say and what they mean by it.