Optimism is Not Insane

In which Hank talks about our cognitive bias toward bad news, how that affects us, and why there are, in fact, lots of reasons to be optimistic about the future of humanity on the Earth. All of this was inspired by the people I met in Seattle while helping launch this Kickstarter for a space telescope (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1.... Also, one of the guys behind that project wrote a book that heavily inspired this video and it is really really good and very interesting. I suggest you buy and read it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451... Now I want to be clear that I don't think humanity is safe, or that we're not in the middle of a significant mass-extinction event, or that we're royally screwing up the planet, or that future generations won't be astounded by our arrogance... I do, however, think that there is a very good chance that humanity will still be creating and solving problems thousands of years from now. Because creating and solving problems appears to be the two things we're best at. Awesome moving graph came from http://www.gapminder.org