Why I am always filled with hope

Reading my blog it's easy to mistake scepticism for cynicism and passionate anger for ranting. It's how I write and it's not to everyone's taste.

An area that frequently gets under my skin is the lack-of-hope, doomsday scenarios that are mindlessly parroted in the media and by politicians. To the vast majority of these I say piffle!

For as long as I can remember, humans have found a way around problems by invention, method, culture or attitude. It's why we're at the top of the tree. It's why I am always filled with hope.

There will always be chicken littles, Machiavellis and the ignorant. There will always be forward thinkers, problem solvers and persisters. I've made my choice.

That's my point made. The rest of this post concerns an example.

As an example, here's an article on an Australian inventor Max Whisson who has invented a device to extract water from wind (it's by Phillip Adams) :

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21123007-12272,00.html
or http://tinyurl.com/ytrdcu

Here's some highlights that give me great joy:

"It involves getting water out of the air. And he’s not talking about cloud-seeding for rain. Indeed, he just might have come up with a way of ending our ancient dependence on rain, that increasingly unreliable source. "

"And that’s not all. As well as the apparently empty air providing us with limitless supplies of water, Max has devised a way of making the same “empty” air provide the power for the process. I’ve been to his lab in Western Australia. I’ve seen how it works."

"The secret of Max’s design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by. Like many a great idea, it couldn’t be simpler – or more obvious. But nobody thought of it before."

That's the phrase that always makes me happy - "nobody thought of it before". Love it!

I harbour hope that one day someone (maybe me or you) will work out a way to make it uneconomical for the media to make money from misery or politicians to hoard power through fear. On that day I hope to hear someone say "Wow, I'm surprised that no-one thought of that before."