Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Solving Sanitation It’s an open debate: Who invented the modern toilet? Apocrypha holds that it was Thomas Crapper, a nineteenth-century English plumber, but the real story actually begins much earlier. In the West, while his technology was never commercialized, credit is now given to Sir John Harington, who invented a water closet in 1596 for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I. In the East, innovation stretches back much further. Archaeologists recently unearthed a Han dynasty latrine dating to 206 BC. Complete with a running water supply, stone bowl, and an armrest, this 2,400-year-old Chinese technology looks downright modern. And that’s the problem: when it comes to our indoor plumbing, not much has changed in a very long time. But imagine the potential upgrades. Imagine toilets that require no infrastructure. No pipes under the floor, no leach field under the lawn, no sewer systems running down the block. These high-tech outhouses powder and burn the feces and flash evaporate the urine, rendering everything sterile along the way. Rather than wasting anything, these toilets give back: packets of urea (for fertilizer), table salt, volumes of freshwater, and enough power that you can charge your cell phone while taking a crap, should the need arise. Tie these toilets into the smart grid, and the electricity can be sold back to the utility company, marking the first time in history that anyone has been paid to poop. As a final component, do all this at a cost to the consume...