Stargazing Guy

Hope vs Cope vs Mope:

Hope – We’ll build a better future. The future is bright.

Cope – Everything was better in the past. We need to slow down.

Mope – Everything’s bad. We’re all going to die very soon.

Credit: @_brightmirror (Twitter)

“Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.”

Richard Dawkins, one of his ‘commandments‘

Harsh past / Imperfect present / Better future

Albert Einstein is meant to have said; ‘learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning‘.

Snoopy said it better:

Learn from yesterday; Live for today; Look to tomorrow; Rest this afternoon:

Credit: Charles M Schulz

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

All three statements are true at the same time

Credit: https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

We aren’t aiming for utopia—which doesn’t exist.

We aim for “protopia”: a world that is always getting better, but is never perfect. Such a world always has new problems to solve, including some problems created by the old solutions.

My aversion to utopias goes even deeper. I have not met a utopia I would even want to live in.

Protopia is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.

Hope lives here:

Five essential actions for building sustainable human progress and leading to the settlement of space and a galaxy-wide civilisation:

1. Diversification of energy production (to nuclear power – the expansion of fission and then fusion; Solar Based Power Satellites; deep geothermal; whilst improving Earth Based Solar Panels, wind and ocean energy; and battery technology).

2. Electrification of commercial transport.

3. Hydrocarbon production from Sabatier process (for non-energy/fuel purposes).

4. Cislunar economy, partly to develop permanent space settlements, using asteroid and lunar resources

5. Move heavy industry to cislunar area (via space tethers and space elevators).

Keep your eyes open for more details on all these subjects in future blogs.

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“Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.”

Helen Keller (unsubstantiated)

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“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption

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“Always make your future bigger than your past.”

― Dan Sullivan, The Quotable Dan Sullivan

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“Catastrophizing the world’s problems does not motivate us to solve them. It robs us of hope.

Spreading doom and gloom is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Failing to see a way to change drains our will to act.

Progress does not require positivity. It rests on a sense of possibility.”

– Adam Grant (X = @AdamMGrant)

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

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