Not sure this explains anything, just a thought. We’re too grown-up.
We know the world is big, and improving things takes time, and no single action does much to shift the balance. So we keep waiting.
And it doesn’t help that there are problems today that we already know will not be solved completely and utterly by any specific date. E. g. whale extinction; it’s not that the thing literally cannot be “solved” at some point in the future, it’s more of a “we keep running into our own limitations of both the knowledge and the international cooperation required to do it, and we have become used to the delays”. At least a bridge is a bridge, you can count on it being built sooner or later.
Although on the other hand, we aren’t grown-up enough. “Whales seem to be going extinct no matter what has been done about it” is an achievement of science, yet I haven’t heard of anyone celebrating that.
I mean, the very expected misuse of antibiotics is producing superbugs. And knowing that superbugs are being produced is very, very valuable for us in the future. But people somehow aren’t breaking into song.
So it seems to me that the examples of exuberance in the OP had to do with celebrating “the goodness of man” as much as “the power of science”, and the former is a different problem today.
Not sure this explains anything, just a thought. We’re too grown-up.
We know the world is big, and improving things takes time, and no single action does much to shift the balance. So we keep waiting.
And it doesn’t help that there are problems today that we already know will not be solved completely and utterly by any specific date. E. g. whale extinction; it’s not that the thing literally cannot be “solved” at some point in the future, it’s more of a “we keep running into our own limitations of both the knowledge and the international cooperation required to do it, and we have become used to the delays”. At least a bridge is a bridge, you can count on it being built sooner or later.
Although on the other hand, we aren’t grown-up enough. “Whales seem to be going extinct no matter what has been done about it” is an achievement of science, yet I haven’t heard of anyone celebrating that.
I mean, the very expected misuse of antibiotics is producing superbugs. And knowing that superbugs are being produced is very, very valuable for us in the future. But people somehow aren’t breaking into song.
So it seems to me that the examples of exuberance in the OP had to do with celebrating “the goodness of man” as much as “the power of science”, and the former is a different problem today.