Why I am Hopeful.

The title for this blog is the Hopeful Muser. So why am I hopeful? It's not really in my nature, I'm more of a pessimist generally. It's not because somehow I've determined that it is better to be hopeful than pessimistic (it is) and then managed to convince myself to be so (I have no idea how to do such things). No, I'm hopeful based on hard evidence.
The world's biggest problem at the moment is population, it feeds all the other big problems, global warming, competition over resources, cultural fights. But the United Nations projects the world population to stabilize somewhere between 9-12 billion people over the next fifty to seventy years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates I've been keeping an eye on these predictions for about ten years now, and they seem to be coming down rather than going up. As technology and education increase populations cease growing, and actually start to decline http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/1979.cfm. I see no reason why the current spread of technology and education will not continue.
Then there is the condition of the people on the planet. As the population numbers have increased conditions have actually improved. People get more to eat on average now than they used to, and the trend as been for agricultural food stuffs to become cheaper http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/y3557e/y3557e06.htm. Life expectancy around the world is going up http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/lifeexpectancy.htm, there is less violence http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html than ever before, education is spreading with illiteracy rates dropping rapidly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World-Literacy-Rate-1970to2015.TC.png. The world is also getting more free, http://gsociology.icaap.org/report/polsum.html.
So, in summary people live longer, healthier, safer, more educated and more free lives, these tendencies are continuing and are projected to continue. The two things that might hold this back are calamity (nuclear war, massive plague, asteroids colliding with earth etc.) or lack of resources. Nuclear war on a scale that threatens the earth is declining as a threat to humanity, the effect of a single bomb is now so devastating that their presense has probably reduced warfare, what county will invade at the cost of the complete annihilation of their largets city? These remain a threat to people, but less a threat to humanity as a whole. At some point even politicians will realize that four or five of these things guarantee safety more than a thousand of them. Plague hasn't killed us off despite many, many attempts, and we are better equipped than ever to deal with it.
Lack of resources in the end comes down to lack of energy. The burning of fossil fuels has a finite time left, which is just as well since it's changing the climate. But there's no shortage of energy available, we just have to access it. The sun shines down more energy on the earth in an hour than the world uses in a year. The combination of hydrogen and oxygen, both abundant on earth as waer, burn very nicely to produce water. The difficulty in both cases is in designing technology that provides an energy profit from these resources. Now that global warming is being taken seriously (far, far earlier than I would have expected) massive investment is going to happen in these areas with extremely high chances of success http://www.enn.com/energy/article/24413, http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=solar&id=17025&a
Life is getting better for people in very real ways. The world is changing and will continue to change, and there will be casualties as a result. Species will die off and because of our increased connectivity there will be a reduction in biodiversity on a worldwide scale. But this has been happening for centuries. Europe has gone through this process repeatedly, and it is a beautiful and pleasant to live in as anywhere in the world. Indigenous cultures will die off, and the world will slowly look more and more the same the world over. But people will be happier, healthier, smarter and more free, people are becoming more moral people caring about a greater range of things than ever before, it's a trade-off that I am willing to make and I am very optimistic about the wonderful future that lies before us.