Illustration: Seba Cestaro/Guardian
Don’t fret the future.
A lot of people do, and for powerful reasons – we are facing enormous challenges unprecedented in human history, from climate change and nuclear war to engineered pandemics and malicious artificial intelligence. A 2017 survey showed that nearly four in 10 Americans think that climate change alone has a good chance of triggering humanity’s extinction. But we seem largely blind to the many profound reasons for hope – and it’s not entirely our fault.
Humans are wired with a “negativity bias” that triggers a stronger emotional response to bad news than good news – evident in the journalism maxim “if it bleeds, it leads”. This loss-aversion behavior served a purpose in our evolutionary past, when information and resources were scarce, but in the age of endless information access, it can lead to pessimism, anxiety and a distorted vision of what humanity is capable of.
In reality, we are making incredible progress in global poverty, health, longevity, climate change and much more, but these trends are harder to perceive because they accumulate gradually and quietly. As the Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly points out, progress is often about what doesn’t happen – the children who won’t die of smallpox, or the farmers whose crops won’t get raided.
The world is still an awful place in many ways, and the crises we face are daunting. But looking past the dark headlines, we can see bright trendlines that give us profound reasons to be optimistic for our future.
1 We’re getting a grip on climate change
Just a decade ago or so, it appeared that civilization was on a course to cause a disastrous 4C-5C of warming above pre-industrial levels. But since then, major nations and markets have responded with surprising force and urgency; global carbon dioxide emissions have significantly slowed, and in many countries, per capita emissions are falling even while per capita GDP and energy use are going up.
We are still not doing enough – there is a lingering risk of runaway carbon cycle feedback loops that could push us over 4C – but nations are making ambitious net-zero commitments that, if realized, could feasibly keep warming below 2C.
The pathway for avoiding the absolute worst outcomes – humanity’s extinction, for one – is increasingly clear and doable, and involves a combination of decarbonization, renewable energy breakthroughs, responsible geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal.
The central reason for optimism, however, remains the coming age of radically cheap renewable energy, primarily from solar photovoltaics.
2 Energy abundance is within reach
The exponential growth in solar energy has stunned even expert forecasters. In 2015, the International Energy Agency predicted that the world would add about 35 gigawatts of solar energy capacity by 2023.
Their estimate was off by a factor of 10. The costs of solar have fallen below the cost of coal, a tipping point that will financially incentivize markets to go green even in the absence of policy pressures. There are strong reasons to believe this exponential progress will continue; soon it could become cheaper to create fuel out of thin air and water using solar energy than to drill for it underground.
More signs of an energy revolution are all around: The same expert-defying growth is happening in the adoption of electric vehicles, and global investment in clean energy now far outstrips that of fossil fuels. With worldwide access to radically cheap renewable energy and carbon-neutral fuels, underdeveloped countries can achieve first-world standards of living without a corresponding increase in carbon emissions. Already wealthy nations will see new waves of growth as energy abundance triggers new economic possibilities, including affordable desalination, which could address water shortages in many parts of the world. We may be on the verge of a new industrial revolution and a new era of human prosperity.
3 We are eradicating poverty
As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, you’ve never seen a newspaper run the headline “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday” – yet this incredible statistic has been accurate every day for decades now. Since 1990, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, with the impoverished share falling from 38% of the global population down to 9.1% today.
That still leaves more than 600 million people living below the international poverty line of $2.15 a day, making it clear that the fight is far from over. But with energy abundance driving new growth and economic modalities, we can expect to see the downward trend continue; ultimately, we should strive for no less than a 0% rate of poverty globally. Further progress is there for the taking.
4 We are living longer than ever
It might be the most feelgood statistic of all time: an average person born today can expect to live more than twice as long as someone born around 1900. In South Korea, life expectancy has more than tripled, surging from just 23.5 years in 1908 to more than 83 years today.
This dramatic increase is thanks to huge advances in medicine, public health and living standards, but also by a stunning fall in child mortality: for most of human history, about half of all children died before their 15th birthday; today the figure is less than 5% globally and as low as 0.4% in some wealthy nations. We can, and probably will, save millions of children’s lives by driving the global rate this low – a feasible and morally urgent goal for the 21st century.
On top of all this progress, advances in ageing biology are leading to breakthroughs in slowing the ageing process and keeping laboratory animals healthier for longer. We now have numerous ways of accomplishing this with mice and primates; what is needed is an injection of funding to bring these experiments to human trials. Ageing is responsible for about two-thirds of all deaths; channeling our resources to lessen its tragic effects will have enormous and immediate benefits to human society. If the funding does come, the next few decades could get very interesting.
5 Medical breakthroughs are accelerating
Converging advancements in AI and biotechnology are pointing toward a radical enhancement of human health and wellbeing. Already, projects like Google’s AlphaFold are discovering structures of pathogens and potential treatments for cancer much faster than humans could. New gene-editing tools like Crispr have the potential to cure many of the more than 10,000 diseases that are caused by single-gene mutations.
Barney Graham, an immunologist who played a pivotal role in developing mRNA vaccines, puts it thusly: “You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.” In the coming decades, we could potentially gain the power to regenerate limbs, engineer designer life forms, eliminate all disease and possibly extend our life spans indefinitely.
6 Robots will take our jobs (and that’s a good thing)
If you’ve ever watched two-legged robots navigating obstacle courses and landing synchronized backflips, you are familiar with the incredible developments in robotics over the past decade. But the real reason to get excited now is not the leaps in physical capabilities (save for the potential of a future robot Olympics), but in intellectual abilities. OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, has partnered with Figure, a robotics startup, to incorporate multimodal artificial intelligence into a humanoid form factor. Their walking, talking full-body robots are learning tasks merely by watching videos – no manual training required. Tesla’s Optimus bot is a direct competitor that its CEO, Elon Musk, believes will eventually be more valuable than the company’s electric car business.
It’s not hard to see the value: humanoid robots could address acute labor shortages and replace labor-intensive and dangerous jobs, taking on roles in disaster response, healthcare, manufacturing, space exploration and much more – freeing real people to pursue more desirable jobs, elevating quality of life and boosting economic growth.
Of course, humanity will only benefit if we can address the risks of job displacement and human safety. Half of the battle will be controlling these risks and ensuring we reap the benefits, rather than be overcome by armies of terminators.
7 A new space age is dawning
For decades, the final frontier was only accessible to a handful of major nations with mainly geopolitical interests. But in the past 10-15 years, launch costs have fallen drastically thanks to the advent of reusable rockets and innovative fuel types, enabling a new generation of space technologies and opening up the final frontier to a wave of commercial and scientific interests. Satellite broadband is starting to bring internet access to rural and underdeveloped parts of the world, which will bolster agriculture, education, health, economic opportunity and participation in democracy. Low-gravity environments are uniquely ideal for cell research, where scientists are growing miniature organs for study, and could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Eventually, bolder prospects like asteroid mining could supply trillions of dollars’ worth of rare materials without compromising environments back on Earth.
You can almost feel the pace quickening: this decade has already seen twice as many moon missions as the 2010s. Plans for commercial space stations like Orbital Reef and Starlab are under way and slated to be operational before 2030. Nasa has plans to put humans on the moon again as soon as 2026. To top it all off, the recently launched James Webb space telescope is already discovering new secrets of the universe only two years into its mission. It’s finding water vapor on alien planets and holds the promise of detecting signatures of alien life. We may be on the verge of the most significant scientific discovery of all time. It’s safe to say that a new space age has arrived.
8 Humans are incredibly resilient
It’s not far-fetched to speculate that a major disaster may await us in the coming centuries. But humans have a long history of rebounding from catastrophic collapse. Our ancestors have survived asteroid impacts, ice ages, supervolcano eruptions and deadly plagues – each time eventually bouncing back to new heights.
The Black Death of 1347 killed up to half the population of Europe and one out of every 10 people globally. But even this did not derail human progress in the long term, and it was followed by the scientific revolution just 200 years later. The upward march of humanity has never been and will never be perfectly smooth, but progress is unmistakable over the long term. It will take a truly apocalyptic sequence of events to stop us.
Conclusion: optimism is a weapon
The modern world was built and shaped by optimists. We owe it to them to carry the torch. Optimism for the future is not only justified – it’s a weapon in the fight for a higher future, and a moral obligation to ourselves and to future generations.
No future is guaranteed; there will be injustices and suffering in every path forward, just as there have been forever. A utopia will never be achievable, but in striving to reach it, we can create the best possible world for us and our descendants.
The larger the problems we face, the greater the opportunity for progress; the immense challenges of the 21st century can be the catalyst for a new leap in the human condition to heights we cannot yet imagine.
We have everything we need to thrive. Our resiliency will protect us; our intelligence will propel us. If there is one lesson our history can teach us, it’s to never underestimate the human race.
Illustrations by Seba Cestaro