On the edge of darkness or science?

I have been lucky in life. I have four children, ranging from 4 years to 24 years old. And I am living in the happiest country of the world. So the news keep telling me. And indeed, I do experience this after having had the chance of living, studying, working and entrepreneuring in a very stable and safe Finnish and Nordic society.

Nowadays, one special moment during each weekend is when we are at home with our 4-year-old Iisak boy and we are watching nature documentaries. Yesterday Iisak picked up a program about the strange hippos and today about the exciting Cuban nature. Wonderful miracles of nature.

I do, however, start getting a heavy gut feeling during these happy family moments. That is because of the planet damage. When I was a small boy, I often heard that only crazy people were happy. It was meant to be a joke, or at least 50% of it, but does not feel like that anymore.

I am running my private businesses by trying to help customers to do good things, and in that way, succeed in their businesses. On the reading frontier, my last three book trips have been about narrow national corridors (Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson), soon uninhabitable earth (David Wallace-Wells) and future life protection ministry (Kim Stanley Robinson). These stories truly do not ease up the pain. And yes, we have some factful progress behind us. I do not want to reject that.

As an engineer, I enjoy the fact that our field is becoming more focused on saving our planet. I truly wish that also people, politics and profits could become more or less 100% focused on the planet now. We have been so stupid in the past. That’s how I feel.

In the current pandemic, scientists have been the drivers of hope. Perhaps this lesson will start pulling us out from the edge of darkness, onto the right track with our planet. This requires a lot more light inside each one of us. If we beat this one, we can beat anything.

I sometimes think that it must have been a crazy feeling after the second world war ended. Let’s end this third one too.