Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of Kings. 
Let us, since life can little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die, 
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man

-Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" 

Over the next five months, this website will be home to a hundred-odd inquisitive minds from around the globe, doing their very best to raise awareness and emphasize solutions to some of the most intractable and disheartening problems humanity has ever faced. As a species, we have developed our preferred methods of troubleshooting: the directed application of overwhelming amounts of power. Amassed into governments and supranational organizations, we see a problem and throw stuff at it indiscriminately. Depending on the merits of each case, we decide if we are throwing money, or high explosive - but we've always felt the most important thing has been to throw enough of it.

Now it's 2010, and even our armies prefer to swing smaller sticks with greater precision.

The cornerstone of Th!nk3 is the Millenium Development Goals manifesto, and its headline quote is the desire to end poverty globally by 2015. Guess what: we probably won't make it. Five years certainly isn't enough time. I don't know if we will ever get there.

But I know for a fact that we can.

A huge number of Th!nk3 authors are from countries that essentially started from scratch in the early 1990s. Twenty years later, we still have social and economic problems. We have people living below the poverty line. We have people with debilitating drug habits, AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer, alcoholism, and more. But if you were conscious and aware as early as 1991, if you th!nk back to those times, you will be stupefied by how far we have come. In 2010, even in the EU, a lot of countries are, in many ways, still developing. But from where I'm sitting here in Estonia, there is no doubt that the end of poverty is viable.

All this development was made possible to enormous quantities of money being catapulted in our general direction, and for that, German taxpayers have my sincere thanks.

Now it's time for us to continue that good work. And since it's 2010, we don't have to carpet-bomb Central Asia with melted-down Euro coins. We can use laser-targeted, GPS-guided smart munitions to penetrate iron curtains and take out threats. No collateral damage, and very little administrative overhead.

It's Thursday. I know there's a party or a concert tomorrow, and on Saturday, but are you going out to a bar tonight too? It'll cost you at least twenty Euro, maybe more. How about this Thursday night, you stay at home and watch youtube videos of me and my friends pretending we can sing, and instead spend that money on a loan at Kiva.org? There are many microfinancing websites out there, but Kiva is probably the best-known one, and it's the one I use. At $25 increments, you and others can give individual entrepreneurs from developing countries a cheap medium-term loan to grow their businesses, and drag their families out of poverty. This is aid, but it is not charity: every Euro you spend has a ripple effect through the world's most vulnerable economies, contributing to infrastructure, tax revenues, and most importantly - the confidence of people to help themselves.

We, the Th!nk About It authors, will spend the next five months blogging. But your Thursday beer money will probably create a bigger objective, immediate benefit.

I made a new loan earlier today, then created a Th!nk About It group on Kiva.org. If you are already a Kiva lender (and I suspect a lot of our readers are), you are welcome to join. If not, click on the link and join. It's the best thing you can do for the world this evening.