Author Peter Diamandis, X PRIZE founder, and co-author Steven Kotler, science writer, have written a book that is as optimistic on a global scale that Ray Kurzweil's and Terry Grossman's "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" was on an individual, personal scale. In many ways, it's the materialist's version of the Christian's realized vision of postmillennial eschatology.

In "Abundance: The Future Is Better than You Think" the authors explain four main factors that are contributing to making the world a better place, and indeed, moving the world toward a future of abundance, not scarcity.

The four driving factors are:
1. Exponentially Improving Technologies.
2. The Rise and Influence of the Do-It-Yourself Innovator.
3. The Development of Technophilanthropists.
4. The Rising Billion.


Our future, according to them, is one in which the majority of people will have their basic survival needs like water, food, and medicine met. This will result in an increase of true wealth: leisure and time to dream, invent, and do, rather than merely scratching around to barely live from day to day. As more and more people throughout the emerging world get online with increasingly powerful and affordable cell phones and other devices, we’ll experience increasing innovation of technology and ideas from places and people never before heard from.

Is it all rosy? No, of course not. There are many hurdles to overcome, most of which are political and cultural, not technological. Are there dangers involved? Most assuredly. The section on do-it-yourself genetic research and gene splicing was quite disturbing. Yet, for every possible pitfall there is also a large potential benefit. The chapters on energy, education, health care, and human freedom are quite hopeful and positive, for example.

Read the book. It deserves evaluation. Perhaps, after all, things are as bad as we think they are, but then again, maybe not as good as the authors propose. We'll have to wait and see.