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dehydration also lowers one’s ability to absorb nutrients, providing clean water helps those suffering from hunger
dehydration
Moreover, our current system is built around fact-based learning, but the Internet makes almost every fact desirable instantly available.
1999 book Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen pointed out that political liberty
development = freedom
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,
Cognitive dissonance & identity bias
Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of exponential change, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility,
“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire
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
told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.
Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines.
“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.”
Rosling’s TED presentation—now
out of 108 predictions made for 2009, 89 have come true outright and another 13 were damn close, giving Kurzweil a soothsaying record unmatched in the history of futurism.
Moore’s law, the average $1,000 laptop should be computing at the rate of the human brain in fewer than fifteen years.
Steven Levy’s In the Plex:
it wasn’t enough to know which fields were accelerating exponentially; we also needed to know where they overlapped and how they might work together.
Archimedes: “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will
move the world.”
Venter has built a library of over forty million different genes, which he can now call upon for designing his future biofuels. And these fuels
My home computer, including electricity, costs less than two-tenths of a penny per CPU core hour.
suffer endocarditis,
“nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].”
technology enables increasing specialization that leads to more opportunities for cooperation.
Chris Anderson’s “long-tail” economics.
new possibilities for sharing mental resources—
Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus”
every twenty-one minutes, YouTube provides more novel entertainment than Hollywood does in twelve months.
radical transparency and transformed
That different machine was finished in 2003
It’s the size of a dorm-room refrigerator, with a power cord, an intake hose, and an outflow hose. According to the inventor,
April Rinne, the director of WaterCredit,
Pritchard decided to do something. A few years later, in 2009, he’d completed the Lifesaver bottle.
NanoH2O won a spot on the 2010 Cleantech 100 list for a novel filter that uses 20 percent less energy while producing 70
precision agriculture,”
“You can burn the fecal portion of the waste and use that energy to completely clean up the urine, turning it back into water and solids,” explains Wood.
Toilets account for 31 percent of all water use in America.
This 87-fold increase in hectares makes genetically engineered seeds (GEs) the fastest-adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture.
Many believe the incredible waste in our distribution system is the issue.
It’s time to move the farm.
Aeroponics, meanwhile, is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics.
On top of all that, we could reforest the old farmland as parkland and slow the devastating loss
“New York City alone,” says Despommier, “is shitting away nine hundred million
kilowatts of electricity each year.”
standard ratio of energy input to beef output being 54:1.
salmon, aquaculture requires two pounds of wild-caught fish to feed one pound of farmed fish.
40 percent of the world’s cereal grains now devoured by livestock
golden rice
Cultured meat, meanwhile, is probably ten to fifteen years out, and the same appears true for widespread deployment of vertical farms. Moreover, vertical
BioBricks
“IGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision—without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on
In 2010, KickStart-backed businesses accounted for 0.6 percent of Kenya’s GDP and 0.25 percent of Tanzania’s GDP.
