Would you like to be inspired? Your wish is my command.

That gentleman is futurist Jason Silva. And he may be just about the most optimistic human on the planet. Well among the top three at least.

Rather than being concerned about where science and technology might be taking human beings, Silva is packing his things so he does not miss the first shuttle to the future.

Here is Silva from an interview with New Statesman in November of last year: 

“I think that technology has always been a double-edged sword,” Silva says. “If you look at the work of Steven Pinker, Better Angels Of Our Nature, the world has never been less violent than today. The chances of a man dying at the hands of another man have never been lower than today. If we can transcend our overactive amygdalas that are always focusing on the danger, you’ll find the world is getting better on a whole range of indicators.” 

“There’s always been a terror about new technology. The same was said about the radio and television. There’s a great book by Steven Johnson - it’s called Everything Bad Is Good For You - he talks about how video games, for example, engage our problem-solving and strategy skills in an immense way. There are all these counter-intuitive examples of tools that we were afraid of, but at the end of the day it’s just evolution, man. Minds like ours were made for merger.” 

Silva is also dismissive of the possibility that we’ll run out of resources, because “technology is a resource-liberating mechanism”. Nanotechnology will allow us to perform alchemy, reconfiguring materials on an atom-by-atom basis. Water wars are ridiculous because “we live on a water planet”, and advanced desalination technology “is going to give us more water than we ever could need”. Overpopulation is misdirection. Technology doesn’t hurt us, it brings us out of poverty and is our method of reaching a higher plane of existence. The little details don't matter when you realise that the big picture averages out as an overwhelming positive. 

“People say these new technologies are only for the rich, I say, ‘yeah, just like cellphones’. Everyone in Africa has better communications technology than the US president had 25 years ago.” If anything, Silva appears to be arguing for a post-scarcity future of the sort written about by a range of economists and science fiction authors for decades, if not centuries. “The capitalist underpinnings of society would be completely transcended - people would be liberated,” he explains.

Essentially Silva believes that our futures are only hampered by our imaginations and our fears of where they may lead.

I am a big fan of this kind of thinking, because in many ways it reflects my own.

Which is one of the main reasons that I am so hard on religion and work to reduce its influence on how we think, and how we perceive ourselves. So long as we see ourselves as subservient and beholden to a magic man in the sky, we undermine our ability to see ourselves as gods and the creators of magic that we live with everyday.

We can communicate across the world in an instant, see into the vastness of space, fly though the air at supersonic speeds, and enter virtual reality worlds almost as real as the one all around us.

When I think of the future I am always optimistic, but I am also very aware that there are people desperate, and I mean DESPERATE, to hold us back.

P.S. If you want to see a great Star talk episode featuring Silva and Neil deGrasse Tyson click here.