Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

Read Nomad Capitalist by Andrew Henderson. The future is decentralized, vibrant, hyper-local global revolving-door communities.

I think this is a pretty naive take and basically assumes that a second civil war would play out like the first. If we ever see a such a war, it won't be some guys from one walled off area fighting guys in a different area trying to win land. The battle lines won't be determined geographically. This will also definitely not be a conventional war like the first civil war. Such 40/60 places will not try to topple their neighbouring states for their own benefit, they'll be fighting among themselves. If you stir enough hatred, people will eventually clash in the streets. If you keep stirring, things might spill over to other regions. If this engulfs the entire US, you could have a full blown war without a single clear line of land along which people shoot each other. The lines will be determined by ethnicity, wealth, religion or a thousand other sources of conflict that are not so easily separated on a map.

Russia is threatening Europe now but, a century ago, Europe was in the breathing space between two massive wars with itself. The EU isn't perfect, but it's a vast improvement over what came before. The conflict with Russia is only hot inside Ukraine and it will, hopefully, not spill over into a shooting war between the EU/NATO and Russia due to the economic integration between the two. Although Putin has made absolutely irresponsible threats to use nuclear weapons, NATO and the EU have responded with restraint, but also without abandoning Ukraine.

Political polarization is a rising problem, but does it compare to the racial intolerance of a century ago? You might be honked at for putting the wrong bumper sticker on your car in some places, but being the wrong color or wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong place could have gotten you killed not that long ago. Go back a little further in time and people of the same colour were committing some of the very worst atrocities in all of history against each other over religion. People are starting to wake up to the idea that political tolerance is as important as religious or racial tolerance. The pessimistic view is that humans have a basic need to be cruel to each other and have just moved from pretext to pretext, but the optimistic view is that we've always used all these pretexts, and we're finding ways to deal with them one by one.

Climate change and pollution are the result of over a century of heavy industry. That industry has massively improved the standard of living across the whole planet, but there's a price to be paid. Just thirty years ago the public was barely aware of that price but, now, we're starting to figure out ways to pay it. Solar and wind power used to be costly, inefficient vanity projects, but now they're commercially viable and making up larger and larger parts of our power grids. Nuclear power, after decades of paranoia, is starting to make a comeback with some new projects. Carbon capture is starting to get some serious funding thrown at it. Electric vehicles are finally starting to take off. These technologies are still advancing but, more importantly, they're starting to be more widely used.

Human civilization is resilient, but not indestructible. Civilizations have collapsed before, often without anyone even just short distances away noticing. The global nature of our current civilization means a collapse would be planet-wide and truly devastating. However, it also means that resilience is higher than it's ever been. There are more eyes and minds watching and thinking about every problem than ever before. New, unforeseen challenges will arrive, but they won't conquer us easily.