The atmosphere today for the future of our country and our world is bleak. Presidential elections force each party to emphasize what is wrong because there must be a reason to change things, and people believe it. Nothing is new about this. Indeed, every generation thinks it the end of the world. I ask you, though, to consider this, has it ever been the end of the world? That sounds naïve, but there is a point. Perhaps it is our nature to see it that way.

Taking a step back and looking at the "state of the world" you get a horrible impression. I don't have to tell you what awful or empty things there are. Look closer and you will see there is "good" going on, too. There is a balance in the world that steadily improves our condition. We have a hard time seeing the changes that are positive, it is not in our nature or habit, we instead are told to look for the negative. Unfortunately, we lack the education and experience to know what the past offered to us. We then incorrectly judge the present by a standard that never has existed. Put yourself in medieval times as a peasant. How is your life compared to now? Could you expect clothing, shelter, food? Could you expect justice from the courts? Did you have a say with the Baron or King? The answer is generally NO. It is true that things started to change then, and great changes came from there, but you would not notice it, you would be shocked at the lack of anything we consider normal. Yes, you can argue that the courts often don't dispense justice that not everyone can afford designer clothes or politicians don't listen to us, but are you really prepared to say that it is anything like living in a hut under the King?

Consider, also, that change comes in what appears to be predictable rates. Recently, I heard a lecture by the inventor Ray Kurzweil who spoke on the development of technology. Graph after graph showed how technology becomes smaller and doubles in capacity at a rate described as logarithmic. It looks like one of those new roller coaster rides that start out going forward and then takes off up a steep slope, almost straight up. A piece of technology has this rapid increase in change until it is almost exhausted (both in sales demand and resources to make the product) and then a new innovation takes its place before either the demand or supply is exhausted. It was amazing to see how the scenario was played out over time, even through wars and economic upheaval. The idea reminded me of predictable patterns in statistics.

Predicting the outcome in one event is difficult to impossible, like tossing a coin, but it is possible to predict it in multiple events. The more events you have, the more accurate the prediction becomes. Could it be that development is predictable on a broader scale, that you cannot predict what one person or group is going to do, but a country or planet as a whole would have predictable rates of advancement?
Now, your next question might be how do I define advancement? Am I talking about the development of new things to have? No, while that happens, I am talking about the method of development from individual humans roaming the planet to a civilization that feeds clothes and educates its population. Further, I am talking about humans that are able to visit other stars, have colonies and create a garden on earth.
If all this turns out to be right, then it is even possible other civilizations on other planets will go through the same steps and reach the same levels. That they learn working together is actually more beneficial than trying to go it alone. That going it alone only gets you so far and definitely not off the planet, perhaps eventually fails to do even that.