Hope for the future in our fiction

Agent hunting left me depressed even without any new reject letters, not least its subtle messages about the state of Science Fiction which was not encouraging. So for my new story, something not toooo far into the future, maybe on earth, since that is what they are looking for, but it must be hopeful, even uplifting, which means at least a bit of trajedy along the way as well as cheerful. But what do we hope for?

Things I worry about but have hopes for include:
A shift toward caring about our environment as if it were the natural thing to do as well as the right thing to do. There is a tendency to think that the right thing must be the hard thing, and sometimes it is hard to start, but usually only because it is a change. Many companies going green have discovered that the results were both better and cheaper, and who can beat that? So one of our characters works at a recycled production plant (no point in recycling if no one's going to do anything with the gathered stuff). Is is possible to have a shortage of supplies from recycling, due to minimizing packaging and waste, and the regular habit of reuse as long as possible? That might be a fun problem to address :->

To take my own advice, though, it shouldn't be the main story line. I was once told that children's stories that taught values through some adventure or another, were very good at teaching children to pack their tooth brush and brush their teeth, because the characters always did so when they started their adventure or went to bed, just as a matter of course. So the recled production plant should be the setting, not the story.

Other things I have hopes for are space travel (though I have drafted a blog on that and wonder where we are going in that regard, whether it still serves the same purpose that it did before, and whether it has slid, for the next generation or two, into the impossible dream category). Still, it's there, and one or more of my characters can be aware of it, maybe with background on the state of the Mars project if the near future, or some similar project in the further future, to provide a sense of time. When is the next Haley's commet or some other space event due?

Medicine always progresses, many cancers have become avoidable or treatable, though not all, and the next bit worry seems to be new, less categorized things like autism (I still suspect it's a result of all those comms signals filling our lives from every direction, though some say not, or some other environmental effect that wasn't around in the past). Less invasive medicine would be nice, and better consideration of mixing medicines without all our medical information being stored in too many databases... How much information can be on a card and not give it to the computers using the data...

Well, that's a few pieces of the world to think about as we build some scenes and put some characters in it. More to come.