Chris Hadfield

And so to answer the question specifically, yeah, I'm rethinking the ideas that are in An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth to try and frame them as clearly and as usefully as I can for the people that I hope will read it.

Both.

I mean, everything makes me feel hopeful and gives me pause.

And that's how life goes, right?

And it's hard to keep things together at a personal level, at a family level, at a business level, and at a species level.

What gives me great optimism is the incredible, relentless, unstoppable human ability to imagine and create new things.

You know, we are almost the only species, if not the only one, that can imagine things that don't exist yet.

And that's our big lever.

That's what has given us the great advantage in the animal kingdom, right?

Is we can picture things that haven't happened yet and take action and build things and do things anticipating something that's coming and not just reacting to how we feel right now.

And, you know, leading this big international technology incubator or looking at some of the creativity that's going on around the world.

And when you said 8.3 billion people loose with the activity of their minds, it's just wild the stuff we can come up with.

And so that gives me great optimism.

the history of our species gives me great optimism as well despite the daily ability to snuff ourselves out to to stop all civilization to do ourselves irreparable harm we are still here after many hundreds of thousands of years despite our destructive nature we find a way to muddle through and and keep and keep it going and we have rises and falls but we're we're still here and and um

So when people say, oh, we're ruining the world and it's never been as hard to be an adult or a human as it is right now and all of that.

It's hard, but it's always been hard.

You're just demonstrating your ignorance of history when you say stuff like that.

I don't think your great grandparents would have said they weren't worried about existentialism.

You know, the First World War, Second World War, the, gosh, nuclear weapons being invented, the McCarthyism, Vietnam War.

That's just the last hundred years.