Here you will find just some of the huge amount of evidence that our world is getting better.
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There is a huge weight of boring evidence that points in the positive direction.
We are the Longest Living humans that have every existed on the face of the Earth, that is, during the last 150 000 years or 7000 generations. The average lifespan was only 25 years, for many tens of thousands of centuries, until the last 200 years when this jumped up to 80 – 90 and even more years.
We are the wealthiest humans to ever live (increasing the quality of our environment as a consequence). The global wealth per person has risen exponentially over the last 100 years … and even more so for Western countries in the last 50 years. The standard of living globally: developed, developing and least developed countries are all increasing. And the gap between the rich and the poor is decreasing. Not something that The Media will talk about.
We are the healthiest humans to ever grace this planet. In our very early lives childhood mortality has dropped around the world and in the West to very low levels. Diseases of childhood like diptheria, polio etc., which our grandparents talked about in the early 1900s, have all but disappeared today. Diseases of old age like heart disease have dropped dramatically in all western countries. Other chronic diseases (except for diabetes), like cancer & cardio-vascular disease (CVD) are also dropping. Our old age is not only longer but much healthier too.
And we are the safest people to ever walk on this planet. After WWI, with better global statistics, we see that the global death rates due to natural catastrophies decreases dramaticlly. In the US, as a proxy for other western countries, we see deaths due to floods, droughts etc. all decrease. Global natural catastrophy death rates per year per million people is much much smaller than in most of the 1900s.
Life is too short and beautiful to waste on needless worry. Best to enjoy the trend, produced by millions of boring data points, and enjoy the 21st Century like the rest of the world is on the way to doing.
Consider if we travelled just 150 years into our future, how much would that world seem like magic to us? Now think about jumping 300 years, 500, 1000 (a Viking time jump), 5000 years, 32 000 (a Lascaux Caves jump). Now look at these paintings below of imagined future human habitiats and future human lives. Impossible? Pure artistic fantasy? Never any connection with reality?
Given the huge weight of boring facts (just some given above in this post), the amazing rate of technological progress blatantly obvious today and considered in our technological thought experiment, as well as the perfect failure rate of past apocalypse predictions (even though it is extremely hard to be completely, absolutely wrong for thousands of years) … then I would suggest that such a human future depicted in these paintings would not only be possible but … (Should I say it? Dare I say it? … I dare! ) … probable. And even this projection is likely to be too conservative. It looks like we humans are about to embark into an amazing future: Wanna take a ride? 🙂
We humans can look the world and history right in the eye and smile, we have much to be proud of. Yes we have made mistakes, but in the last 200 years we have certainly achieved wonderful things and we will pass wonderous goals in the future. But let’s not rest on our achievements either, let’s look up, up to the sky, let’s reach for the stars, and who knows, maybe we’ll just catch those stars.
Brady – Optimist … with reason
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Skeptical Swedish Scientists 