For most of man's history, we have always looked back at a nostalgic Golden Age and bemoaned our barbaric present and gloomy future. It's just human nature; the geniuses of the Renaissance drew inspiration from the heroic Classical Age, not realizing that they were building the world of the future right there and then, and it was a much better world than that of Greece and Rome. Our infatuation with the future, that the world to come is actually going to be better than the present or the past is a relatively recent historical development, my guess is it started sometime in the 1700s. It has now become so pervasive in our thought that we find it difficult to understand what a novel and revolutionary world view it is.

I agree we should exploit this optimism and use it to guide our efforts, but I also think we should not rely on it too much. We might get severely disappointed if we run into unexpected obstacles. As I mention above, I think we first started looking forward to a glorious future in the 18th century, about the same time we had finally surpassed the great classical civilizations of antiquity in all aspects. It would be terrible if we ran into a temporary snag, like a world-wide energy crisis or minor nuclear war, and started to pine nostalgically for our own bygone heroic age, the Twentieth Century.