Quote from: am on March 26, 2014, 05:09:00 PM

Quote from: Cryddit on March 08, 2014, 08:11:28 PM

Utopia is not something that is achievable. The world will never be perfect.

But we've achieved so many things that used to be considered the hallmarks of an impossible Utopia. Do you realize that less than one person out of ten thousand dies of homicide now? Less than one out of fifteen hundred of starvation? Nearly all of our children survive to adulthood! That's incredible! Or at least it would have been back when the word was coined.

If you'd told Thomas Moore that we'd come this far, he'd have declared it impossible and dismissed you as a dreamer. He'd have said it was impossible, for reasons of economics and human nature, and according to all that was known of economics and human nature at the time, there'd be no reason to say otherwise.

Who knows what dreams may become possible -- or be achieved -- in the next few hundred years?

This is a optimistic view for sure, one could argue that we've stalled (except maybe China) in the last thirty years or so. I think there needs to be a broad-scale restart of the global economy in the near future before we see progress accelerated. The kinds of projects to restart the system aka a globalized world - probably need to be huge in scale i.e space colonization or at least serious energy innovation here on earth.

We have had massive amounts of innovation over the last 30 years. Cars have gotten more efficient and faster, the internet has gone from dial up sites to what it is now, social media has been born, we can use a device the size of a small calculator to contact anyone in the world in a matter of seconds, we can translate almost any spoken language using nothing more then copy and paste.