Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

The 1918 influenza epidemic killed fifty million people, World War II killed another sixty million.

Despite such unrest, this period also saw infant mortality decrease by 90 percent, maternal mortality decrease by 99 percent, and, overall, human lifespan increase by more than 100 percent.

In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.

But between 1825 and 1845, Hans Christian Oersted and Frederick Wohler discovered that heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and then distilling away the mercury left a residue of pure aluminum.

Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

while 90 percent of the large fish are already gone.

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.

Ecosystem services are things like crop pollination, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water purification, air purification, nutrient dispersal, nutrient recycling, waste processing, flood control, pest control, disease control, and so forth, that the environment provides for us free of charge.

Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.

But we also suffer from the bandwagon effect—the tendency to do or believe things because others do—so even if you suspect there is real cause for optimism, these two biases will team up and make you doubt your own opinion.

Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

Each of us starts with the same twenty-four hours in the day. How we utilize those hours determines the quality of our lives.

“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”

global surveys find democracy the preferred form of government for more than 80 percent of the world’s population.

“If I have seen further, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.”

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.”

“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.”

Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,”

Imagine what we could do for the world’s grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention.

showed that at our current pace of exploitation, the world will run out of seafood by 2048

That’s what all this fuss has been about: a radical change in the quality and quantity of information available to us, a move from evolution by natural selection to evolution by intelligent direction.

While that’s true, if we’re really serious about feeding the world, the solution isn’t to find new ways to move food around more efficiently. It’s time to move the farm.

Cattle, for starters, are energy hogs, with the standard ratio of energy input to beef output being 54:1.

Ranching produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world,

Instead of striving for zero-environmental impacts, agroecologists want systems that produce more food on less land while simultaneously enhancing ecosystems and promoting biodiversity.

We have a measure for the amount of plant mass-produced each year: it’s called primary productivity.

Right now we’re consuming 40 percent of the planet’s primary productivity. That’s a dangerously high number. What’s the tipping point? Perhaps 45 percent could be enough to start a catastrophic loss of biodiversity from which our ecosystems cannot recover. Perhaps it’s 60 percent. No one knows for sure. What is known is that unless we figure out how to better the system and lower our impacts, then, with our ever-burgeoning population, we have little hope of a sustainable future.

New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.”

James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix in 1953,

The majority of the robber barons got generous in their august years, but many of the technophilanthropists were billionaires before the age of thirty-five, and they turned to philanthropy right afterward.

“If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and

creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up,”

Being a landlocked nation without access to shipping ports is one kind of poverty trap; being stuck in a cycle of civil war is another.

People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well. So notions bump into hunches bump into offhanded comments bump into concrete theories bump into absolute madness, and the results pave the way forward.

Furthermore, for most of the twentieth century, pulling oneself out of poverty demanded having a job that—one way or another—relied on these same natural resources, but today’s greatest commodities aren’t physical objects, they’re ideas.

In addition to their energy density and on-demand nature, another reason that we’ve relied so heavily on hydrocarbons is because they’re easy to store.

Rather than relying on lithium, a rare and toxic element, its battery uses sodium and water, two cheap and ubiquitous ingredients with the added advantage of being neither lethal nor flammable.

What we ought to do is flip the model and make coal plants into emergency backup plants. We can employ one hundred percent renewables for our baseload, and only turn on the coal plants when the weather forecast says we’re going to have a real problem. We just pay the utilities to maintain them and run them occasionally, like you would run your emergency generator.”

To put it another way: every year, we humans dump nearly 26 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, or about five tons for every person on the planet.

Generation IV technologies come in two main flavors. The first are fast reactors, which burn at higher temperatures because the neutrons inside bounce around at a faster rate than in traditional light-water reactors. This extra heat gives fast reactors the ability to turn nuclear waste and surplus weapons-grade uranium and plutonium into electricity. The second category are liquid fluoride thorium reactors. These burn the element thorium, which is four times more plentiful than uranium, and don’t create any long-lived

lived nuclear waste in the process.

“Today we have more than one and a half billion connections to the Internet. But this is small in comparison to the number of connections to the electric grid, which is at least tenfold larger. Just think of the number of electric appliances you have plugged in at home, compared to the number of IP addressable devices. This is a huge opportunity.”

There is more energy in the sunlight that strikes the Earth’s surface in an hour than all the fossil energy consumed in one year.

But overshadowing both of these is a third problem. The twenty-first century is a media-rich environment. Between the Internet, video games, and those five hundred channels of cable, the competition for our children’s attention has become ruthless.

If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.

“I’m calling for investments in educational technology that will help create … educational software as compelling as the best video game.” This revolution is upon us. Soon we’re going to be able to create gamed-based learning that is so deep, immersive, and totally addictive that we’re going to look back on the hundred-year hegemony of the industrial model and wonder why it ever hung around for so long.

five years after graduation, half of what one learns will probably be wrong—but no one knows which half.

Africa has 1.3 percent of the world’s health workers caring for 25 percent of the global disease burden.

The X-ray pixel array is the first step toward what Harvard chemistry professor turned uber-entrepreneur George Whitesides calls “zero-cost diagnostics.”