Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

Such daoism will lose infinite games to a motivated nihilistic opportunist.

Our times are not unique. Shit is continuously hitting the fan.

I don't think tomorrow will be any better or worse than today. Why should it? Technology isn't magic, despite what Arthur C. Clarke thought.

Excellent question and thanks for asking. I've spent some time with a fair number of millennials and I'm impressed with their kindness and consideration for others.

Me. Every single worry or concern is made in the mind. Continually grasping this and putting into practice every week.

I'm a PhD student in physics and I am really, really optimistic about how the field will be developing going forward.

People are well aware of the glamorous fields of physics: cosmology and particle physics. These are the disciplines that concern the frontiers of the very large and the very small respectively. I don't care so much about those. The frontier that I'm most interested in is the most abstract one: complexity. Physics has traditionally tackled problems that were either simple or could be made simple. Progress was made after the 1980s with the rise of solid state physics and associated attitudes towards emergence, but now? With the advent of statistical learning, advances in nonlinear dynamics and so on? Physicists are starting to tackle some insanely complex systems. Not to mention of course that computers are getting more powerful with time as per Moore's law, so simulations are really coming into their own as useful scientific approaches. Imagine the computational physicist of the 2050s, imagine the tools that she might have at hand to solve problems like the physics of life, or perhaps the phase diagrams of extremely heterogenous materials, or so on...

I can't help but be extremely excited! Here's to hoping that humanity makes it that far. :)