One answer to this conundrum is that God, or some other force – call it Kosmischegeist, if you like – simply arranged things that way.: Rubenstein, M.-J. (2015, December 15). God vs the multiverse: The 2500-year war. New Scientist, 3052. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830520-800-god-vs-the-multiverse-the-2500-year-war/
Back in 2014, I edited a feature on the many-worlds theory for New Scientist. It wasn’t about the scientific arguments, such as they were: it was about what it meant to live in the belief that countless other versions of you are out there somewhere, going about their own lives: Hooper, R. (2014, September 24). Multiverse me: Should I care about my other selves? New Scientist, 2988. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329880-400-multiverse-me-should-i-care-about-my-other-selves/
The distinction that’s sticking in my mind right now is the one that can be drawn between optimism and hope: Couched in this way, this distinction is mine, but researchers have been trying to tease out the various forms of unrealistic positivity that manifest in people facing terminal illness, and their implications for informed consent:
Jansen, L. A. (2013). Mindsets, informed consent, and research. The Hastings Center Report, 44(1), 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.237
Cable, J. (2013). False hopes, informed consent: The problem of therapeutic misconception and stage 1 clinical trials. Voices in Bioethics. https://doi.org/10.7916/vib.vi.6685
Jansen, L. A. (2011). Two concepts of therapeutic optimism. Journal of Medical Ethics, 37(9), 563–566. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2010.038943
‘[…] And that naivety is labelled optimism,’ the physicist David Deutsch said at the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 2015; he was representing the side of optimism in a debate with professional pessimist Martin Rees, the founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk: RSA. (2015). RSA Replay: Optimism, knowledge and the future of enlightenment [Video]. In RSA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncJQTYc27ME. Hosted on YouTube.
The particular cover that caught my eye – at least, as my memory reconstructs it – was for a special issue investigating the paranormal, featuring a skull, a UFO and a bent teaspoon: Until recently, Google Books offered all the issues of New Scientist prior to 1990. In its wisdom, it no longer does.
‘The lesson I drew from it is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,’ Musk told Rolling Stone in 2017: Musk, E. (2017, November 15). Elon Musk: The architect of tomorrow (N. Strauss, Interviewer) [Interview]. In Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-the-architect-of-tomorrow-120850/
Musk and Asimov were themselves acting out a bigger story: a ‘consensus cosmogony’ that had begun with Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 epic Star Maker: Webb, M. (2015, February 2). Consensus cosmogony. Interconnected. https://interconnected.org/home/2015/02/02/consensus_cosmogony
Choose the bright side:
