I am extremely grateful to be living where and when I am.

Power comes from the wall, clean, hot and cold water from the faucet, and I've got three flush toilets. My house is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Unlike a lot of people, I know what it took to bring this to me, and how complex and fragile the system is that gives me these luxuries.

Unlike my great-grandparents, the graves in my backyard are goldfish and gerbils, not children. My kids never knew chicken pox, measles, polio, or mumps. Their children or grandchildren may never know cancer. I thank the nearest big pharmaceutical company for the medicines that gave us this, and the ones that allow my wife to live a better life.

The poor in my country live better than the middle class in many other countries. How many hundreds of millions on Earth would love to live somewhere where the biggest worry is getting fat?

My daughter went to college knowing she could be anything she wanted to be. Anything. How recently was that true? My own parents were part of the first generation of my ancestors that knew they would not be doing what their parents and grandparents had done for a living.

I can go anywhere on Earth in hours, instead of days, or months.

I have seen men walk on the Moon, tire tracks on Mars, and seas on Titan. Soon I will see the face of Pluto.

Where once I worked for almost the only company in the world who believed the private sector could fly in space, there are now dozens, and a number of those that will carry passengers within a few years. In twenty years, most of the orbital facilities will not belong to governments. "long-term thinking" and "long-range planning" are not monopolies of public programs.

The Cold War is over. Someday a city may burn under an atomic cloud, but I will never have to worry about a hundred of them doing so. I believe fewer countries in the world are under tyrannies than ever before.

I have a marvelous machine in front of me that allows me to do the work that used to need a room full of people. I'm paid accordingly. It also gives me access to almost every piece of knowledge in the world, if I know where to look. I can talk to people across the planet in real time.

There aren't flying cars, but I think that's mostly because nobody wants them badly enough yet.

One side might say that freedom to innovate created prosperity. Another side might say that a progressive ethic created women's rights, and the equality that gives us all opportunities they never had.

The bottom line is all kinds of people looking around them and saying, "this could be better," and making it that way, and they still are.

I'm sorry that Elhefnawy's "New Polynesia" fantasies of an egalitarian world without work didn't pan out, but that isn't reality. Life requires effort and skills. He should be happy that he isn't following an ox through a field, which is what almost everybody used to do. Maybe one reason our cultural elite is so bitter about the future, and projects that in so much of their product, is that their "New Polynesia" ideas didn't pan out like they were supposed to back in the 60s. Still they chase after it. "The European Dream," I guess it's called now.

Personally, I'm ready for a new cultural elite, one that thinks optimism is a good thing.

There will be rough spots, but for the most part, the future is going to be great. It already is.