Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Place a drop of saliva (or blood) on Goel’s nanotechnology platforms, and the DNA and RNA signature of any pathogen in your system will get detected, named, and reported to a central supercomputer—aka Dr. Watson. These chips are a serious step toward zero-cost diagnostics, and a critical component in helping to solve a trio of major health care challenges: arresting pandemics, decreasing the threat of bioterrorism, and treating widespread diseases like AIDS.

In recent years, this technology has evolved rapidly, moving from the battlefield to the surgical suite, initially at the behest of cardiac surgeons looking for ways to operate without splitting the sternum.

The robot will find the tiny cancerous lesion, insert a needle, and obliterate it, just like you do a cancerous mole today.”

Hariri believed that to harness the true potential of cellular medicine he had to ensure a steady source of stem cells for future procedures, so he created his first company to bank both placenta-derived stem cells and cord blood from newborns.

“We all start out as a single fertilized egg that develops into a complex organism of ten trillion cells, made up of over two hundred tissue types, each working twenty-four/seven at specialized functions,”

P4 stands for “predictive, personalized, preventative, and participatory,” and it’s where health care is heading.

Soon every newborn will have his or her genome sequenced. Genetic profiles will be part of standard patient care.

The genetic culprit here is the fat insulin receptor gene that instructs our body to hold on to every calorie we consume.

However, a new technology called RNA interference (RNAi) turns off specific genes by blocking the messenger RNA they produce. When Harvard researchers used RNAi to shut off the fat insulin receptor in mice, the animals consumed plenty of calories but remained thin and healthy. As an added bonus, they lived almost 20 percent longer, obtaining the same benefit as caloric restriction, without the painful sacrifice of an extreme diet.

Never again will ignorance be a valid excuse for not taking care of ourselves.

That the free flow of information has benefited most from the rise of mobile communications and the Internet is obvious. As mentioned earlier, the majority of humanity, even those in the poorest of developing nations, now have access to better mobile phone systems than the president of the United States did twenty-five years ago, and if they’re hooked up to the Internet, they have access to more knowledge than the president did fifteen years ago. The free flow of information has become so important to all of us that in 2011 the United Nations declared “access to the Internet” a fundamental human right.

“We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”

In 1795 Napoléon I offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method of food preservation to help feed his army on its long march into Russia. The winner, Nicolas Appert, a French candy maker, established the basic method of canning, still in use today.

Everyone from novices to professionals, from sole proprietors to massive corporations, gets involved. Experts in one field jump to another, bringing with them an influx of nontraditional ideas. Outliers can become central players.

I’ve always believed (to paraphrase computer scientist Alan Kay) that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself, and in my five decades of experience, there is no better way to do just that than with incentive prizes.

“In the beginning,” says Clarke, “people tell you that’s a crazy idea, and it’ll never work. Next, people say your idea might work, but it’s not worth doing. Finally, eventually, people say, I told you that it was a great idea all along!”

“Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense.

If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the day before it was discovered, it must have been considered crazy or nonsense or both—otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”

Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. Above that number, the correlation disappears.

Today’s technophilanthropist crowd seems determined to provide the necessary seed capital (and often much more than that), and today’s DIY innovators have proven themselves more than capable of getting the job done. Meanwhile, the one-quarter of humanity that has forever been on the sidelines—the rising billion—has finally gotten into the game.