Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

These are turbulent times. A quick glance at the headlines is enough to set anybody on edge and—with the endless media stream that has lately become our lives—it’s hard to get away from those headlines. Worse, evolution shaped the human brain to be acutely aware of all the potential dangers and thus our news media and politicians focus on the grim to capture your mindshare. As will be explored in later chapters, this dire combination has a profound impact on human perception: It literally shuts off our ability to take in good news. This creates something of a challenge for us, as Abundance is a tale of good news. At its core, this book examines the hard facts, the science and engineering, the social trends and economic forces that are rapidly transforming our world. But we are not so naïve as to think that there won’t be bumps along the way. Some of those will be big bumps: economic melt-downs, natural disasters, terrorist attacks. During these times, the concept of abundance will seem far-off, alien, even nonsensical, but a quick look at history shows that progress continues through the good times and the bad.

The short answer is yes. Our days of isolation are behind us. In today’s world, what happens “Over there” impacts “Over here.”

Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius. The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.”

China, meanwhile, has spent thirty years under a one-child-per-family policy (while it’s often discussed as a blanket program, this policy actually extends to only about 36 percent of the population). According to the government, the results have been 300 million fewer people. According to Amnesty International, the results have been an increase in bribery, corruption, suicide rates, abortion rates, forced sterilization procedures, and persistent rumors of infanticide. (A male child is preferable, so rumors hold that newborn girls are being murdered.)

The second force is money—a lot of money—being spent in a very particular way. The high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy technophilanthropists who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates is crusading against malaria; Mark Zuckerberg is working to reinvent education; while Pierre and Pam Omidyar are focused on bringing electricity to the developing world. And this list goes on and on. Taken together, our second driver is a technophilanthropic force unrivaled in history.

John Oldfield, managing director of the WASH Advocacy Initiative, which is dedicated to solving global water challenges, explains it this way: “The best way to control population is through increasing child survival, educating girls, and making knowledge about and availability of birth control ubiquitous. By far the most important of these is increasing child survival. In communities where childhood death rates hover near one-third, most parents opt to significantly overshoot their desired family size. They will have replacement births, insurance births, lottery births—and the population soars. It’s counterintuitive, but eradicating smallpox and vaccine-preventable disease and stopping diarrheal diseases and malaria are the best family planning programs yet devised. More disease, especially affecting the poor, will raise infant and child mortality which, in turn, will raise the birth rate. With fewer childhood deaths, you get lower fertility rates—it’s really that straightforward.”

Once our basic survival needs are fulfilled, the next level up the abundance pyramid is energy, education, and information/communication. Why this particular trio of advantages? Because these three pay double dividends. In the short term, they raise standards of living. In the long run, they pave the way for two of the greatest abundance assets in history: specialization and exchange. Energy provides the means to do work; education allows workers to specialize; information/communication abundance not only furthers specialization (through expanding educational opportunities), it allows specialists to exchange specialties, thus creating what economist Friedrich Hayek called catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by the division of labor. In his excellent book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley elaborates: “ ‘If I sew you a hide tunic today, you can sew me one tomorrow’ brings limited rewards and diminishing returns. ‘[But] . . . I make the clothes, you catch the food’ brings increasing returns. Indeed, it has the beautiful property that it does not even need to be fair. For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal but it still benefits both sides.”

The final item at this level of our pyramid is information and communication abundance.

In Kenya, a job placement service known as KAZI 560 uses mobile phones to connect potential workers with potential employers. In its first seven years, some 60,000 Kenyans have found employment via this network. In Zambia, farmers without bank accounts now rely on mobile phones to buy seeds and fertilizer, boosting their profits by almost 20 percent. In Niger, in 2005, cell phones served as a de facto national food distribution system, and effectively warded off a famine. In 2007, business executive Isis Nyong’o (then with MTV, now with Google) told the BBC that the impact of the mobile phone in Africa has “had about the same effect as a democratic change of leadership.”

A technology now under development, known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC), has the potential to solve these problems. Packaged into a portable, cell-phone-sized device, LOC will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluid (such as urine, sputum, or a single drop of blood) and run dozens, if not hundreds, of diagnostics on the spot and in a matter of minutes. “It’s a game-changing technology,” says John T. McDevitt, a Rice University professor of bioengineering and chemistry and an early pioneer in the field. “In the developing world, it will bring reliable health care to billions who don’t currently have it. In the developed world, like here in the US—where medical costs go up another 8 percent every year and 16.5 percent of the economy goes to health care—if personalized medical technologies like the lab-on-a-chip aren’t brought to bear on the situation, we’re going to bankrupt the country.” Another upside to LOC technologies is their ability to gather data. Because these chips are online, the information they collect—like, say, an outbreak of swine flu—can be immediately uploaded to a cloud, where it can be analyzed for deeper patterns. “For the first time,” says McDevitt, “we’ll have access to large quantities of global medical data. This will be crucial in halting the spread of new, emerging diseases and pandemics.”

The final element in our pyramid of abundance is freedom. This may seem a tall order, but it’s a critical one. In his 1999 book Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen pointed out that political liberty moves in lockstep with sustainable development. Since abundance, by definition, is a sustainable goal, then a certain level of freedom is the prerequisite for reaching that goal. Luckily, a certain level of freedom also emerges organically in response to certain new technologies—especially those of the communication and information variety.

In recent years, scientists have begun to notice larger patterns in our biases. One of those is often described as our “psychological immune system.” If you believe your own life hopeless, then what’s the point of pushing on? To guard against this, we’ve developed a psychological immune system: a set of biases that keep us ridiculously cocksure. In hundreds of studies, researchers have consistently found that we overestimate our own attractiveness, intelligence, work ethic, chances for success (be it winning the lottery or getting a promotion), chances of avoiding a negative outcome (bankruptcy, getting cancer), impact on external events, impact on other people, and even the superiority of our own peer group (known as the Lake Wobegon Effect after author Garrison Keillor’s fictional happyland “where all the children are above average”). But there’s a flip side: while we seriously overestimate ourselves, we significantly underestimate the world at large. Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

These days, we are saturated with information. We have millions of news outlets competing for our mind share. And how do they compete? By vying for the amygdala’s attention. The old newspaper saw “If it bleeds, it leads” works because the first stop that all incoming information encounters is an organ already primed to look for danger. We’re feeding a fiend. Pick up the Washington Post and compare the number of positive to negative stories. If your experiment goes anything like mine, you’ll find that over 90 percent of the articles are pessimistic. Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

Statistically, the industrialized world has never been safer. Many of us are living longer and more uneventfully. Nevertheless, we live in worst-case fear scenarios. Over the past century, we Americans have dramatically reduced our risk in virtually every area of life, resulting in life spans 60 percent longer in 2000 than in 1900. Antibiotics have reduced the likelihood of dying from infections . . . Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Our garbage is removed quickly. We live in temperature-controlled, disease-controlled lives. And yet, we worry more than ever before. The natural dangers are no longer there, but the response mechanisms are still in place, and now they are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism into a maladaptive panicked response.

For abundance, all this carries a triple penalty. First, it’s hard to be optimistic, because the brain’s filtering architecture is pessimistic by design. Second, good news is drowned out, because it’s in the media’s best interest to overemphasize the bad. Third, scientists have recently discovered an even bigger cost: it’s not just that these survival instincts make us believe that “the hole we’re in is too deep to climb out of,” but they also limit our desire to climb out of that hole.

About twenty years ago, Oxford University evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar discovered another problem with our local and linear perspectives. Dunbar was interested in the number of active interpersonal relationships that the human brain could process at one time. After examining global and historical trends, he found that people tend to self-organize in groups of 150. This explains why the US military, through a long period of trial and error, concluded that 150 is the optimal size for a functional fighting unit. Similarly, when Dunbar examined the traffic patterns from social media sites such as Facebook, he found that while people may have thousands of “friends,” they actually interact with only 150 of them. Putting it all together, he realized that humans evolved in groups of 150, and this number—now known as Dunbar’s number—is the upper limit to how many interpersonal relationships our brains can process.

“We might be gloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in the Pleistocene.”

Acid rain was the first sign that the facts were not matching the fanfare. Once considered our planet’s most dire environmental threat, acid rain develops because burning fossil fuels releases sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, causing an acidic shift in the pH balance of precipitation—hence the name. First noticed by English scientist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain took another century to blossom from scientific curiosity to presumed catastrophe. But by the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall. In 1982 Canada’s minister of the environment, John Roberts, summed up what many were thinking, telling Time magazine, “Acid rain is one of the most devastating forms of pollution imaginable, an insidious malaria of the biosphere.” Back then, Ridley agreed with this opinion. But a few decades passed, and he realized that nothing of the sort was happening. “It wasn’t just that the trees weren’t dying, it was that they never had been dying—not in any unusual numbers and not because of acid rain. Forests that were supposed to have vanished altogether were healthier than ever.”

So how have people managed to save time over the years? Well, we’ve tried slavery—both human and animal—and that worked okay until we developed a conscience. We also learned to boost muscle power with more elemental forces: fire, wind, and water, then natural gas, oil, and atoms. But at each step on this path, we have not only developed more power, we’ve also saved more time.

Light is a fabulous example. In England, artificial lighting was twenty thousand times more expensive circa AD 1300 than it is today. But when Ridley extended the equation and examined how the amount of light bought with an hour’s work (at an average wage) has changed over the years, there is an even bigger savings: Today [light] will cost less than a half a second of your working time if you are on the average wage: half a second of work for an hour of light! Had you been using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you would have had to work for 15 minutes to get the same amount of light. A tallow candle in the 1800s: over six hours’ work. And to get that much light from a sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC would have cost you more than fifty hours work.

Between 1980 and 2000, the consumption rate—a measure of goods used by a society—grew in the developing world twice as fast as on the rest of the planet. Because population size and population health and longevity are impacted by consumption, these numbers improved as well. Compared to fifty years ago, today the Chinese are ten times as rich, have one-third fewer babies, and live twenty-eight years longer. In that same half-century time span, Nigerians are twice as well off, with 25 percent fewer children and a nine-year boost in life span. All told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.

Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

Humans share knowledge. We trade ideas and exchange information. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley likens this process to sex, and his comparison is more than just florid metaphor. Sex is an exchange of genetic information, a cross-pollination that makes biological evolution cumulative. Ideas too follow this trajectory. They meet and mate and mutate. We call this process learning, science, invention—but whatever the term, it’s exactly what Isaac Newton meant when he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.”

But the very best news in all of this is that we have lately become specialized enough that we now trade in an entirely different kind of good. When people say we have an information-based economy, what they really mean is that what we have figured out is how to exchange information. Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. “In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”

Here’s the controversial part: as our faster computers help us design better technologies, humans will begin incorporating these technologies into our bodies: neuroprosthetics to augment cognition; nanobots to repair the ravages of disease; bionic hearts to stave off decrepitude. In Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Google cofounder Larry Page describes the future of search in similar terms: “It [Google] will be included in people’s brains. When you think about something you don’t know much about, you will automatically get the information.” Kurzweil celebrates this coming possibility. Others are uneasy with the transition, believing it’s the moment we stop being “us” and start becoming “them”— though this may be a little beside the point.

The world doesn’t need another ultraspecialist-generating research university. We’ve got that covered. Places like MIT, Stanford, and the California Institute of Technology already do a fine job creating supergeniuses who can geek out in their nano-niche. What’s needed is a place where people can go to hear of the biggest and boldest ideas, those exponential possibilities that echo Archimedes: “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

And autonomous cars are but a small slice of a much larger picture. Diagnosing patients, teaching our children, serving as the backbone for a new energy paradigm—the list of ways that AI will reshape our lives in the years ahead goes on and on. The best proof of this, by the way, is the list of ways that AI has already reshaped our lives. Whether it’s the lightning-fast response of the Google search engine or the speech recognition used for directory information calls, we are already AI codependent. While some ignore these “weak AI” applications, waiting instead for the “strong AI” of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s not like we haven’t made progress. “Consider the man-versus-machine chess competition between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue,” says Kurzweil. “In 1992, when the idea that a computer could play against a world chess champion was first proposed, it was dismissed outright. But the constant doubling of computer power every year enabled the Deep Blue supercomputer to defeat Kasparov only five years later. Today you can buy a championship-level Chess AI for your iPhone for less than ten dollars.”

So when will we have true HAL-esque AI? It’s hard to say. But IBM recently unveiled two new chip technologies that move us in this direction. The first integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon. These chips communicate with light. Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain.

3-D printing drops manufacturing costs precipitously, as it makes possible an entirely new prototyping process. Previously, invention was a linear game: create something in your head, build it in the real world, see what works, see what fails, start over on the next iteration. This was time consuming, creatively restricting, and prohibitively expensive. 3-D printing changes all of that, enabling “rapid prototyping,” so that inventors can literally print dozens of variations on a design with little additional cost and in a fraction of the time previously required for physical prototyping.

Perhaps most impressive is the ability of infinite computing to find optimal solutions to complex and abstract questions that were previously unanswerable or too expensive to even consider. Questions such as “How can you design a nuclear power plant able to withstand a Richter 10 earthquake?” or “How can you monitor global disease patterns and detect pandemics in their critical early stages?”—while still not easy—are answerable. Ultimately, though, the most exciting development will be when infinite computing is coupled with 3-D printing. This revolutionary combination thoroughly democratizes design and manufacturing. Suddenly an invention developed in China can be perfected in India, then printed and utilized in Brazil on the same day—giving the developing world a poverty-fighting mechanism unlike anything yet seen.

Drexler himself described a “gray goo” scenario, wherein self-replicating nanobots get free and consume everything in their path. This is not a trivial concern.

Because of the exponential growth rate of technology, this progress will continue at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. What all this means is that if the hole we’re in isn’t even a hole, the gap between rich and poor is not much of a gap, and the current rate of technological progress is moving more than fast enough to meet the challenges we now face, then the three most common criticisms against abundance should trouble us no more.

The answer, of course, is this same chain of effect: technology (bones, muscles, neurons) leading toward specialization (the femur, biceps, and femoral nerve) leading toward cooperation (all those parts and many more leading to our bipedal verticality) leading toward greater complexity (every novel possibility that sprung from our upright stance). But the story doesn’t end here. In the words of Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, “Next humans started a completely second kind of evolution: cultural evolution (the evolutions of ideas, memes, and technologies). Amazingly, that evolution has sustained the trajectory that biological evolution had established towards greater complexity and cooperation.”

Because information-spreading technology has traditionally been expensive, the ideas that have been quickest to spread have usually emerged from the wealthier, dominant powers—those nations with access to the latest and greatest technology. Yet because of the cost reductions associated with exponential price-performance curves, those rules are changing rapidly.

On average, Hollywood produces five hundred films per year and reaches a worldwide audience of 2.6 billion. If the average length of those films is two hours, then Hollywood produces one thousand hours of content per year. YouTube users, on the other hand, upload forty-eight hours’ worth of videos every minute. This means, every twenty-one minutes, YouTube provides more novel entertainment than Hollywood does in twelve months.

Rob Kramer, chairman of the Global Water Trust, likes to tell an apocryphal story of a trunk line extension project in remote Africa, where pipe was run to within a quarter mile of a village in need—but the pipe kept getting vandalized. “Turns out,” he says, “the four hours every other day that the women spent hiking out to gather water was the only time they got away from their husbands. They cherished this privacy, so they kept sabotaging the pipe.”

Population is linked directly to fertility. Today the majority of developed countries have fertility rates at or below replacement levels—meaning that population is either stable or declining. The issue lies in the developing world, where the number of babies born is much higher. And the problem isn’t in cities. Urbanization actually lowers fertility rates. The issue is in the country, as the most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor. It takes lots of hands to do farm work, so farmers have large families. But they want boys—usually three at the minimum. Their logic is heartbreaking. Three boys are desirable because one will probably die, while the second will stay home to tend the farm, providing for parents as they age as well as making enough money to send the third child to school so that he can get a better job and end this cycle. Thus child mortality among the rural poor is one of the largest factors driving population growth, and dirty water is often the root of this problem.

And Lifesaver is just the beginning. The nanotechnology industry is exploding. Between 1997 and 2005, investment rose from $432 million to $4.1 billion, and the National Science Foundation predicts that it will hit $1 trillion by 2015. We are entering the era of molecular manufacturing, and when you work at this scale, rearranging atoms leads to entirely new physical properties.

Thermal desalination consumes too much energy for large-scale deployment (about 80 megawatt hours per megaliter) and the brine by-product fouls aquifers and is devastating to aquatic populations. Reverse osmosis, on the other hand, uses comparatively less energy, but toxins such as boron and arsenic can still sneak through, and membranes clog frequently, reducing the lifetime of the filter. But the Los Angeles–based company NanoH2O won a spot on the 2010 Cleantech 100 list for a novel filter that uses 20 percent less energy while producing 70 percent more water.

Yet, despite all of this devastation, the past century has also seen a miraculous change in our ability to produce food. We’ve managed to feed more people using less space than ever before. Currently we farm 38 percent of all the land in the world. If production rates had remained as they were in 1961, we would have needed 82 percent to produce the same amount of food. This is what petrochemical-backed agricultural intensification has made possible. The challenge going forward is to replace this unsustainable brute force with a considerably more nuanced approach. If we can learn to work with our ecosystems rather than run roughshod over them, while simultaneously optimizing our food crops and food systems, we could easily find ourselves in the place of that second shoe salesman: with a wide-open market and an infinite potential.

Furthermore, the idea that GE crops are a Frankenfood sin against nature is, to be blunt, pretty ridiculous. It rests on the proposition that there’s something natural about agriculture. As idyllic as it seems, farming is just a 12,000-year-old way of optimizing lunch. In fact, as Matt Ridley explains: [A]lmost by definition, all crop plants are “genetically modified.” They are monstrous mutants capable of yielding unnaturally large, free-threshing seeds or heavy, sweet fruits and dependent on human intervention to survive. Carrots are orange thanks only to the selection of a mutant first discovered perhaps as late as the sixteenth century in Holland. Bananas are sterile and incapable of setting seed. Wheat has three whole diploid (double) genomes in each of its cells, descended from three different wild grasses, and simply cannot survive as a wild plant—you never encounter wild wheat. The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. For a very long time, crossbreeding was the preferred method, but then came Mendel and his peas. As we began to understand how genetics worked, scientists tried all kinds of wild techniques to induce mutations. We dipped seeds in carcinogens and bombarded them with radiation, occasionally inside of nuclear reactors. There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified “Organic.”

Moreover, after thirty years of research, a great many of our GE fears have been quieted. Health concerns appear to be a nonstarter. More than a trillion GE meals have been served, and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up. Ecological devastation was another worry, but, overall, GE appears to be good for the environment. The seeds don’t require plowing, so soil structure remains intact. This halts erosion, improves carbon sequestration and water filtration, and massively reduces the amount of petrochemical inputs needed to grow our food. Herbicide use is also down, while yield increases are up. “[W]hen farmers in India adopted Bt cotton in 2002,” writes Stewart Brand in the Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, “the nation went from a cotton importer to an exporter, from 17 million bales to 27 million bales. What was the social cost of that? The main event was that Bt cotton increased yields by 50 percent and decreased pesticide use by 50 percent, and the Indian grower’s total income went from $540 million to $1.7 billion.”

By 2020, this one genetically modified crop could radically improve the health of the 250 million people for whom it is a daily meal.

Sure, there are issues with GE. No one wants to see a few companies in charge of the world’s food supply, so who owns the seed is a real concern. But this too won’t last. As the wife-and-husband team of University of California at Davis plant pathologist Pamela Ronald and UC Davis organic farming expert Raoul Adamchak described in their book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food: “It [GE] is a relatively simple technology that scientists in most countries, including many developing countries, have perfected. The product of GE technology, a seed, requires no extra maintenance or additional farming skills.” This means that GE is already democratic, provided that we can learn to share the intellectual property. This hasn’t happened yet (or not in any great measure), but in a recent speech given at the Long Now Foundation, author and organic activist Michael Pollan called for an open source movement for GE crops. Stewart Brand agrees, arguing that “if Monsanto throws a fit, tell them that if they’re polite, you might license back to them the locally attuned tweaks you’ve made to their patented gene array.”

World War II changed all of this. In 1945 the US military began building a series of large-scale hydroponic experiments, first on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and later on Iwo Jima and in Japan—including what was then the world’s largest hydroponic facility: a twenty-two-acre farm in Chofu. Simultaneously, because we had troops guarding our oil supply, more hydroponic farms were built in Iraq and Bahrain. All were incredibly successful. In 1952 alone, the army’s hydroponic division grew over eight million pounds of fresh produce. After the war, most people forgot about these successes. Food production went back to the soil. The Green Revolution occurred, and hydroponics was further sidelined for petrochemical solutions. A trickle of research continued. NASA, which wanted to know how to feed astronauts on Mars, stuck with it. A few others did as well. In 1983 Richard Stoner made a major breakthrough, discovering that it was possible to suspend plants in midair, delivering food through a nutrient-rich mist. This was the birth of aeroponics, which was when things started to get really interesting. Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on the planet. Hydroponics is 70 percent more efficient than traditional agriculture. Aeroponics, meanwhile, is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics. Thus, if we used aeroponics for agriculture, we could drop water use from 70 percent to 6 percent—quite the savings. With the threat of water scarcity getting more s...

What all of this means is that for the 70 percent of us who will soon live in cities, vertical farms offer the clearest path toward ending hunger and malnutrition. These farms already have the ability to increase the amount of food grown per harvest by orders of magnitude and increase the number of possible harvests by factors of ten.

But something is changing—actually, two things. In the near term, there’s aquaculture; in the long term, there’s in-vitro meat.

In 1932 Winston Churchill said, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” As it turns out, it took a few extra decades for biotechnologists to deliver on Churchill’s promise, but more and more, it looks like it was worth the wait. Cultured meat (or in-vitro meat, as some prefer) is meat grown from stem cells. The process was pioneered by NASA in the late 1990s, as the agency suspected this might be a good way to feed astronauts on long space flights. By 2000, goldfish cells were being used to create edible muscle protein, and research began in earnest. By 2007, there had been enough progress that a collection of international scientists formed the In Vitro Meat Consortium to promote large-scale cultured meat production. The following year, an economic analysis presented at the In Vitro Meat Symposium in Norway showed that meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors could be cost competitive with European beef prices, and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) created a $1 million incentive prize to move things along. By 2009, scientists in the Netherlands had succeeded in turning pig cells into pork inside a petri dish. More work has been done since then, and while we’re still a decade away from bringing this technology to market, we are definitely heading in that direction.

As PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told the New Yorker: “If people are unwilling to stop eating animals by the billions, then what a joy to be able to give them animal flesh that comes without the horror of the slaughterhouse, the transport truck, and the mutilations, pain, and suffering of factory farming.”

And they’re getting them. A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent.