Terence Tao: belief

Transcript context

…I’m a fan spectator of that site, just seeing the brilliance of the different people, the depth and knowledge that people have. And the willingness to engage in the rigor and the nuance of the particular question, it’s pretty cool to watch. It’s almost like just fun to watch. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on with human civilization? I think the younger generation is always really creative and enthusiastic and inventive. It’s a pleasure working with young students. The progress of science tells us that the problems that used to be really difficult can become trivial to solve. Like navigation, just knowing where you work on the planet was this horrendous problem. People died or lost fortunes because they couldn’t navigate. And we have devices in our pockets that do this automatically for us, like it is a completely solved problem. So things that seem unfeasible for us now, could be maybe just homework exercises. Yeah. One of the things I find really sad about the finiteness of life is that I won’t get to see all the cool things we create as a civilization because in the next 100 years, 200 years, just imagine showing up in 200 years.…

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