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I've been working my way through a pretty dense book called "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch.  He's sort of a strange guy as you might pick up on if you watch the video, but he's very smart and very well read.  He's basically the father of quantum computing, so there's that too.

His book cuts across some interesting lines.  The basic premise is that humanity's ability to acquire purposeful knowledge (read scientific knowledge) is unbounded.  It is also the most profound phenomenon in the universe.  Before The Enlightenment new technology would come occasionally by chance, but since that time we have been transitioning to a dynamic society with an unlimited potential for understanding. Not that we could ever reach a full knowledge of objective reality, but he argues that objective reality does exist and that our scientific theories give us ever closer approximations of it.  Yet he wouldn't say that humanity was anything but the result of chance nor that the universe intended to create us in any way.  He also takes plenty of jabs at religion.

Along the way he did a pretty good job of convincing me of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by arguing that all the world were already there and that they simply differentiate themselves over time (and sometimes come back together) rather than that they pop into existence when a measurement is made on a quantum state.

He ends with an anti-Malthusian sentiment saying that such doomsday predictions include the assumption that our ability to solve problems and innovate will cease.  He recast sustainability in an interesting light saying that when we think of sustainability, we envision static societies.  But static societies necessarily repress problem solving in their efforts to repress change, so they have all been destined for failure.  Dynamic societies on the other hand (again read scientific societies) are inherently unsustainable because new technologies disrupt the prior equilibrium (e.g. advancements in medicine lead to population growth which couldn't be sustained without further innovation in food production).  There's always a possibility that a problem will cause the destruction of a dynamic civilization before they are able to find a solution, but that would only be because the knowledge requisite to solve the problem was not acquired in time, not that the problem had no solution.

He suggests the following be carved in stone:
Problems are inevitable.
Problems are soluble.