Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

“in a crisis, what do we do? We ship water. After a few weeks, we set up camps, and people are forced to come into these camps to get their safe drinking water. What happens when twenty thousand people congregate in a camp? Diseases spread, more resources are required, the problem just becomes self-perpetuating.” So Pritchard decided to do something. A few years later, in 2009, he’d completed the Lifesaver bottle. With a hand pump on one end and a filter on the other, the bottle doesn’t look especially high tech, but that filter is unlike any other. Researchers in nanotechnology work at miniscule scales, where distances are measured in atoms. One billionth of a meter—a nanometer, in technical parlance—is their baseline. Before Pritchard came along, the best hand-pumped water filters on the market worked down to the level of 200 nanometers. That’s small enough to capture most bacteria, but viruses, which are considerably more microscopic, still slipped through. So Pritchard designed a membrane with pores 15 nanometers wide. In seconds, it removes everything there is to remove: bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites, fungi, and other waterborne pathogens. One filter lasts long enough to produce six thousand liters of water, and the system automatically shuts off when the cartridge is expired, preventing the user from drinking contaminated water. Lifesaver was designed for disaster relief, but why wait? A jerry can version of the system produces twenty-five thousand liters of wa...