I think the world a few thousand years ago seemed much younger to people alive at the time. I'm sure that hardly anything going on today is as exciting as being alive during the springtime of human understanding. In those 'good old days' information and socializing opportunities were harder to come by. Many people remained curious, questioning and childishly-wise their whole lives. Cultural accomplishments-languages, oral traditions, technologies- had accumulated sufficiently that big-picture issues could be talked about. They had not mounted so high that nothing remained to discuss. We know this because these small populations generated the cosmologies and myths now regarded as common-sense and realism. A new generation of Socratic philosophers is needed to restore curiosity and optimism to a moribund world-and perhaps save it in the process.