Though evolution intends nothing, it can play cruel tricks. Mechanisms of survival and adaptation, once spawned in ancient environments, haunt us as we grow beyond the bounds of nature and ancestry.

Addiction, obesity, even certain diseases like diabetes, likely have evolutionary components, adaptations that under one set of conditions gave us a margin of fitness in some bygone eco-system. That is, before we took charge and started making environments all our own.

Nor are our psychologies and philosophies immune. Today, we take more seriously those who point out problems rather than those who solve them. We follow leaders who loudly point blame with far more alacrity than those who inspire or negotiate for the better good.

It’s neither a moral failing nor fundamental fault of human nature, just an adaptation built over 100,000 years and made obsolete in the last few centuries. We are built to hear that the lion is in the tall grass, that the water is rising and the crops are doomed, that the strangers who came over the hill have brought sickness to the clan or plan to kill us in our sleep.

These are serious things, and if they failed to command our attention once upon a time, we wouldn’t be here talking about it now. Our evolutionary adaptation to focus on the negative and the fearful, on conspiracy and scarcity, does little justice to our current capabilities and civilization.

To consider a future substantially different from the present is something new for us. No king or prophet of the past foresaw the cellphone, nor could they order it into being. Self-driving cars, diagnostic A.I., 3D printing, genetic modification, nuclear power, the Internet—a characteristic response to these wonders is to imagine their failure and complain of their worst influences.

Few marvel and none stand in awe of our rise to 7.7 billion souls. Fears and loathing to the contrary, we have not destroyed the planet, nuked the biosphere, or shackled every dream of human freedom under some indefatigable totalitarian regime. Nor are these eventualities likely.

No, I’m not blind to our problems and challenges, nor should you be. Utopia has not arrived. There will be catastrophe, murder, poverty, dissatisfaction, and disenfranchisement. Nation shall war against nation and all that stuff. Climate change and mass extinctions are certain one time or another.

And while it is wrong to minimize anyone’s suffering, let alone the death throes of eco systems and whole species, I’m being dismissive to make a point. The gloaming has always been there. Cold and darkness have claimed us since the beginning of time. The ticks in the Garden of Eden had Lyme disease. To steal a line from “Sapiens” by Davide Mana (DreamForge Issue 2) “We were cannibals far longer than we were fire-builders. But we have a big brain, and science, and art.”

In no other age, with death and destruction at our heels (admittedly with much of it attributable to our own devices these day), have we nonetheless: fought to free men rather than enslave them, embraced diversity in our sexes and ourselves, revolutionized medicine, linked the world together with electricity and commerce, walked the moon, accumulated knowledge beyond comprehension, and given it away freely to the masses on waves of light.

Did you know that according to the World Economic Forum, extreme poverty across the world has been declining for over two centuries, and in the last two decades the pace of that improvement has accelerated? In those same 20 years, the child mortality rate in less-developed countries has been cut in half. Hope has a dignity and a seriousness that cannot be ignored.

It could be argued that any rational creature would see our species as a few steps away, at best, from taking our homes among the stars, curing death itself, giving genesis to new species whose intelligence, curiosity, and perhaps empathy will surpass our own.

We can’t often see this for the same reason the color-blind person has trouble with distinguishing red from green. Our brains, emotions, even our cultures are pre-industrial and pre-technological artifacts. We are not built to reason; we are built to believe. We fail to recognize the radically different future we are creating, because it is in a color most of us must fail to perceive.

In the end, it may be left to one of our own sapient creations, whether of electricity and silicon or the flesh and blood of some new breed whose kind nature never engendered, to better appreciate the wonders we are about to bring into being.

While facts may show that our civilizations are becoming richer, healthier, smarter, safer, and likely even more democratic, our fears pull us back into the jungles of our youth. There is no faith in progress, and worse, a longing for rapture or apocalypse —a judgmental end or one we feel likely to be deserved.

Yet by fact and measure, no end is coming. We are advancing, improving, self-civilizing. To believe otherwise is to succumb to our age-old addiction to signals of disaster and the danger of shadows into which we cannot see.

There is a great line in a science fiction novel from the 1960s by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem that I believe captures this human contradiction of believing the worst and yet holding on, dimly perceiving the future offers something more.

“I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.” —Stanislaw Lem, Solaris