Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

“Proprietary systems slow things down,” he says. “We want the best minds around the world working on this problem. Our goal is not to control or own this technology but to accelerate it; put the pedal to the metal to make this happen as soon as possible.”

But the real benefit is that medicine will be transformed from reactive and generic to predictive and personalized.

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Since content creators in the developing world now outnumber content creators in the developed world, it’s safe to say that the tools of cooperation have enabled the world’s real silent majority to finally find its voice.

“strong evidence that better rainfall makes conflict less likely in Africa.”

Fresh water must go the route of aluminum, from one of the scarcest resources on Earth to one of the most ubiquitous.

Malthusians often use the word cornucopians to describe people lobbying for abundance.

Viewed across this vast distance, the Earth is inconsequential, a nondescript speck among specks—or, as Sagan says, “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam.” But it’s a blue mote; thus the photograph’s famous name: “the pale blue dot.”

These days, it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. In a world facing energy shortages, this alone makes the process untenable.

Many feel the question of how to best improve our food crops has been reduced to a binary—to GMo (genetically modified organism) or not to GMo.

Many believe the incredible waste in our distribution system is the issue.

1983 Richard Stoner made a major breakthrough, discovering that it was possible to suspend plants in midair, delivering food through a nutrient-rich mist. This was the birth of aeroponics, which was when things started to get really interesting.

Vertical farms are immune to weather, so crops can be grown year-round under optimal conditions.

Ranching produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world, and is the leading cause of soil erosion and deforestation. Disease is another issue.

Known as agroecology, the basic idea is to design food systems that mimic the natural 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.

“Fuller had put out this idea that there’s no use trying to change human nature. It’s been the same for a very long time. Instead, go after the tools. New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.”

My MoC system

“hacker ethic,” the idea—as Brand famously put it—that “information wants to be free.”

By 2010, following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a winning team from Delft University of Technology created the “alkanivore,” which they described as a “toolkit for enabling hydrocarbon conversion in aqueous environments”—or, in plainer language, a bug able to consume oil spills.

“Your money is safer in the hands of the world’s poor than in your 401(k).”

One concept lately gaining momentum is “impact investing” or “triple-bottom-line investing,” whereby investors back businesses that generate financial returns and meet measurable social or environmental goals.

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.

convincing multinational corporations that nimble and collaborative was a better approach than staid and defensive.

“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,”

Economists at the London School of Business and Finance figured out that adding ten phones per one hundred people adds 0.6 percent to the GDP of a developing country.

First, the methodology required to open these markets is based on cocreating products with the BOP consumer. Second, the products and services being commodified—soaps, clothes, home-building supplies, solar energy, microscopes, prosthetic limbs, heart surgery, eye surgery, neonatal baby care, cell phones, bank accounts, pumps, and irrigation systems, to name only the more famous success stories—may seem a random lot, but they share exactly what’s needed to move massive numbers of people up the abundance pyramid.

“[I]t is very difficult to remove cost from a business model aimed at higher-income customers without affecting quality or integrity.”

When a developing nation discovers a new natural resource, this causes its currency to rise against other currencies and has the downstream effect of making other exportable commodities uncompetitive.

There is no easy way to break the resource curse, but two of the more effective measures are the development of diversified markets and the emergence of a free press (and the transparency it brings).

“It’s no accident,” he says, “that the age of reason accompanies the rise of caffeinated beverages.”

The opportunities for collaborative thinking are also growing exponentially, and since progress is cumulative, the resulting innovations are going to grow exponentially as well.

“Because green technologies are frequently ‘disruptive’ in character (that is, they threaten incumbents in existing markets), the BOP may be the most appropriate socioeconomic segment upon which to focus initial commercialization attention . . . If such a strategy were widely embraced, the developing economies of the world become the breeding ground for tomorrow’s sustainable industries and companies, with the benefits—both economic and environmental—ultimately ‘trickling up’ to the wealthy at the top of the pyramid.”

rival goods and nonrival goods

This idea is nonrival: every carpenter in the world can use it at the same time to create a right angle.”

Energy is arguably the most important lynchpin for abundance.

Just as Africa’s lack of copper landlines allowed for the explosive deployment of wireless systems, its lack of large-scale, centralized coal and petroleum power plants could pave the way for decentralized, renewable-power generation architectures.

Over the past thirty years, the data show that for every cumulative doubling of global PV production, costs have dropped by 20 percent. This is known as Swanson’s law (after Dick Swanson, cofounder of SunPower). According to Swanson, the cost improvement is essentially a learning curve for manufacturing techniques and production efficiencies.

“Italy and the US will achieve grid parity [the point when renewables become as cheap as traditional sources] in two and five years, respectively.

The US Department of Energy says that algae can produce thirty times more energy per acre than conventional biofuels.

We’re basically turning sunlight, water, and CO2 into storable, transportable fuels—we call ‘solar fuels’—to address the other two-thirds of our energy consumption needs that normal photovoltaics miss.”

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.

These limits remain the largest impasse toward widespread renewable adoption. Until solar and wind can provide reliable 7x24 baseload power, neither will provide a significant portion of our energy supply.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how cheap solar gets unless we can store that energy, and storage on this scale has never been achieved before. Grid-level storage requires colossal batteries. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are woefully inadequate. Their storage capacity would need to be improved ten- to twentyfold, and—if we really want them to be scalable—they have to be built from Earth-abundant elements. Otherwise we’re just exchanging an economy built on the importation of petroleum for one built on the importation of lithium.

Civilization currently runs on sixteen terawatts of power—mostly from CO2-generating sources.

Concurrently, if we want to stabilize the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (the agreed-upon number for staving off dramatic climate change), we’ve got to replace thirteen of those sixteen terawatts with clean energy.

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.

“All struggles are effectively conflicts over the energy potential of resources. So end war.”

that poverty-stricken rural children take to computers just as quickly as all other children.

On average, only two-thirds of American public school students finish high school—the lowest graduation rate in the industrialized world.

Our current education system was forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, a fact that not only influenced what subjects were taught but also how they were taught. Standardization was the rule, conformity the desired outcome.

If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.