[coldtea]

"Rational opimist"? Sounds rather dellusional to me, one of those guys that made a religion out of science and/or technology.

>"But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again."

Yeah, just like Bertrand Russel's inductivist (and rational optimist) turkey:

The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”.

However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.