by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
(64)Release Date: February 21, 2012
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Product Description
Providing contentment is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we arise to meet it.
We will shortly be means to accommodate and surpass a simple needs of any man, lady and child on a planet. Abundance for all is within a grasp. This bold, contrarian view, corroborated adult by downright research, introduces a near-term future, where exponentially flourishing technologies and 3 other absolute army are conspiring to improved a lives of billions. An remedy to melancholy by tech businessman incited philanthropist, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning scholarship author Steven Kotler.
Since a emergence of humanity, a absolved few have lived in sheer contrariety to a hardscrabble majority. Conventional knowledge says this opening can't be closed. But it is closing—fast. The authors request how 4 forces—exponential technologies, a DIY innovator, a Technophilanthropist, and a Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve a biggest problems. Abundance establishes tough targets for change and lays out a critical roadmap for governments, attention and entrepreneurs, giving us copiousness of reason for optimism.
Examining tellurian need by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler deliver dozens of innovators origination good strides in any area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, among many, many others.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #25 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-21
- Released on: 2012-02-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
“At a impulse when a universe faces mixed crises and is awash in pessimism, Abundance redirects a conversation, spotlighting systematic innovators operative to urge people's lives around a world. The outcome is some-more than a mural of shining minds - it's a pointer of a gigantic possibilities for doing good when we daub into a possess consolation and wisdom.”—Arianna Huffington, CEO, Huffington Post
“This shining must-read book provides a pivotal to a entrance epoch of contentment replacing eons of scarcity, a absolute remedy to today’s sadness and pessimism.”—Ray Kurzweil, inventor, author and futurist, author of The Singularity is Near
"Now that tellurian beings promulgate so easily, we consider that zero can stop a unavoidable swell of new technologies, new ideas and new arrangements that will renovate a lives of a children. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler give us a blinding glance of a innovations that are entrance a approach — and that they are assisting to create. This is a critical book."—Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“Comprehensively sampled here are a ruin of a lot of a surpassing innovations going on to urge a tellurian condition. Every breakthrough helps commission others, and so they sum into a trend we can count on.”—Stewart Brand, author, Whole Earth Discipline
“Diamandis and Kotler plea us all to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Innovative tiny teams are now empowered to accomplish what customarily governments and vast companies could once achieve. The outcome is zero reduction than a many transformative and stirring duration in tellurian history.”––Timothy Ferriss, #1 NY Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek
“Today, philanthropists, innovators and ardent entrepreneurs are some-more empowered than ever before to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Abundance chronicles many of these stories and a rising collection pushing us towards an age of abundance. This is an brazen and absolute read!”—Jeff Skoll
“Diamandis and Kotler do a dictatorial pursuit of explaining because we are during a start of a new epoch of radically augmenting standards of vital via a world. Abundance is essential reading for anyone looking for a improved tomorrow.”—Elon Musk, CEO, SpaceX, CEO, Tesla Motors, Founder, PayPal
“Abundance provides explanation that a correct multiple of technology, people and collateral can accommodate any grand challenge.”—Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of a Virgin Group
"This enchanting book is a indispensable corrective, a whirlwind debate of a latest developments in health care, agriculture, energy, and other fields ...The authors make a constrained box for confidence over dismay as we face a refreshing unknown. " --Publisher's Weekly
"If a destiny isn’t indispensably splendid adequate for shades, then, write high-tech colonize Diamandis and scholarship publisher Kotler consider things are going to work out usually fine...A simply confident demeanour during a matter that customarily brings out a darkest thoughts among prognosticators..." --Kirkus
About a Author
Peter H. Diamandis is a Chairman and CEO of a X PRIZE Foundation, co-founder and Chairman of Singularity University and a owner of some-more than a dozen high tech companies. Diamandis has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
Steven Kotler is an author and journalist. His books include A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, and The Angle Quickest for Flight. His articles have seemed in some-more than sixty publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Discover, GQ, and National Geographic. He also writes a unchanging blog for PsychologyToday.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
OUR GRANDEST CHALLENGE
The Lesson of Aluminum
Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus, famous as Pliny a Elder, was innate in Italy in a year AD 23. He was a naval and army commander in a early Roman Empire, after an author, naturalist, and healthy philosopher, best famous for his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume thesaurus describing, well, all there was to describe. His opus includes a book on cosmology, another on farming, a third on magic. It took him 4 volumes to cover universe geography, 9 for flora and fauna, and another 9 for medicine. In one of his after volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells a story of a goldsmith who brought an surprising cooking image to a justice of Emperor Tiberius.
The image was a stunner, done from a new metal, unequivocally light, shiny, roughly as splendid as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, regulating a tip technique, a regulation famous customarily to himself and a gods. Tiberius, though, was a tiny concerned. The czar was one of Rome’s good generals, a belligerent who cowed many of what is now Europe and amassed a happening of bullion and china along a way. He was also a financial consultant who knew a value of his value would severely decrease if people unexpected had entrance to a glossy new steel rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving a goldsmith a courtesy expected, he systematic him to be beheaded.”
This glossy new steel was aluminum, and that beheading noted a detriment to a universe for scarcely dual millennia. It subsequent reappeared during a early 1800s yet was still singular adequate to be deliberate a many profitable steel in a world. NapolÉon III himself threw a party for a aristocrat of Siam where a respected guest were given aluminum utensils, while a others had to make do with gold.
Aluminum’s monument comes down to chemistry. Technically, behind oxygen and silicon, it’s a third many abounding component in a Earth’s crust, origination adult 8.3 percent of a weight of a world. Today it’s cheap, ubiquitous, and used with a throwaway mind-set, but—as NapolÉon’s party demonstrates—this wasn’t always a case. Because of aluminum’s high affinity for oxygen, it never appears in inlet as a pristine metal. Instead it’s found firmly firm as oxides and silicates in a claylike element called bauxite.
While bauxite is 52 percent aluminum, separating out a pristine steel ore was a formidable and formidable task. But between 1825 and 1845, Hans Christian Oersted and Frederick Wohler detected that heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and afterwards distilling divided a mercury left a excess of pristine aluminum. In 1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville combined a initial blurb routine for extraction, pushing down a cost by 90 percent. Yet a steel was still dear and in brief supply.
It was a origination of a new breakthrough record famous as electrolysis, detected exclusively and roughly concurrently in 1886 by American chemist Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul HÉroult, that altered everything. The Hall-HÉroult process, as it is now known, uses electricity to acquit aluminum from bauxite. Suddenly everybody on a universe had entrance to absurd amounts of cheap, light, open metal.
Save a beheading, there’s zero too surprising in this story. History’s dirty with tales of once-rare resources done abounding by innovation. The reason is flattering straightforward: nonesuch is mostly contextual. Imagine a hulk orange tree packaged with fruit. If we bravery all a oranges from a reduce branches, we am effectively out of permitted fruit. From my singular perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a square of record called a ladder, I’ve unexpected got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make a once wanting a now abundant.
To enhance on this a bit, let’s take a demeanour during a designed city of Masdar, now underneath construction by a Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company. Located on a corner of Abu Dhabi, out past a oil refinery and a airport, Masdar will shortly residence 50,000 residents, while another 40,000 work there. They will do so yet producing any rubbish or releasing any carbon. No cars will be authorised within a city’s fringe and no hoary fuels will be consumed inside a walls. Abu Dhabi is a fourth-largest OPEC producer, with 10 percent of famous oil reserves. Fortune repository once called it a wealthiest city in a world. All of that creates it engaging that they’re peaceful to spend $20 billion of that resources building a world’s initial post-petroleum city.
In Feb 2009 we trafficked to Abu Dhabi to find out usually how interesting. Soon after arriving, we left my hotel, hopped in a cab, and took a float out to a Masdar construction site. It was a tour behind in time. we was staying during a Emirates Palace, that is both one of a many costly hotels ever built and one of a few places we know of where someone (someone, that is, with a bill many opposite from mine) can lease a gold-plated apartment for $11,500 a night. Until a find of oil in 1960, Abu Dhabi had been a village of winding herders and pearl divers. As my cab gathering past a “Welcome to a destiny home of Masdar” sign, we saw justification of this. we was anticipating a world’s initial post-petroleum city competence demeanour something like a Star Trek set. What we found was a few construction trailers parked in a empty tract of desert.
During my visit, we had a possibility to accommodate Jay Witherspoon, a technical executive for a whole project. Witherspoon explained a hurdles they were confronting and a reasons for those challenges. Masdar, he said, was being built on a conceptual substructure famous as One Planet Living (OPL). To know OPL, Witherspoon explained, we initial had to know 3 facts. Fact one: Currently amiability uses 30 percent some-more of a planet’s healthy resources than we can replace. Fact two: If everybody on this universe wanted to live with a lifestyle of a normal European, we would need 3 planets’ value of resources to lift it off. Fact three: If everybody on this universe wished to live like an normal North American, afterwards we’d need 5 planets to lift it off. OPL, then, is a tellurian beginning meant to fight these shortages.
The OPL initiative, combined by BioRegional Development and a World Wildlife Fund, is unequivocally a set of 10 core principles. They widen from preserving inland cultures to a growth of cradle-to-cradle tolerable materials, yet unequivocally they’re all about training to share. Masdar is one of a many costly construction projects in history. The whole city is being built for a post-petroleum destiny where oil shortages and H2O fight are a poignant threat. But this is where a doctrine of aluminum becomes relevant.
Even in a universe yet oil, Masdar is still bathed in sunlight. A lot of sunlight. The volume of solar appetite that hits a atmosphere has been good determined during 174 petawatts (1.740 × 10^17 watts), and or reduction 3.5 percent. Out of this sum solar flux, approximately half reaches a Earth’s surface. Since amiability now consumes about 16 terawatts annually (going by 2008 numbers), there’s over 5 thousand times some-more solar appetite descending on a planet’s aspect than we use in a year. Once again, it’s not an emanate of scarcity, it’s an emanate of accessibility.
Moreover, as distant as H2O wars are concerned, Masdar sits on a Persian Gulf—which is a strong aqueous body. The Earth itself is a H2O planet, lonesome 70 percent by oceans. But these oceans, like a Persian Gulf, are distant too tainted for expenditure or stand production. In fact, 97.3 percent of all H2O on this universe is salt water. What if, though, in a same approach that electrolysis simply remade bauxite into aluminum, a new record could desalinate usually a notation fragment of a oceans? How parched is Masdar then?
The indicate is this: When seen by a lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re especially inaccessible. Yet a hazard of nonesuch still dominates a worldview.
The Limits to Growth
Scarcity has been an emanate given life initial emerged on this planet, yet a contemporary incarnation—what many call a “scarcity model”—dates to a late eighteenth century, when British academician Thomas Robert Malthus realized that while food prolongation expands linearly, race grows exponentially. Because of this, Malthus was certain there was going to come a indicate in time when we would surpass a ability to feed ourselves. As he put it, “The energy of race is indefinitely larger than the energy of a Earth to furnish keep for man.”
In a years since, copiousness of thinkers have echoed this concern. By a early 1960s something of a accord had been reached. In 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. forked out: “Unlike a plagues of a dim ages or contemporary diseases, that we do not understand, a complicated disease of overpopulation is soluble by means we have detected and with resources we possess.” Two years later, Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich sounded an even louder alarm with a publication of The Population Bomb. But it was a downstream outcome of a tiny assembly hold in 1968 that unequivocally alerted a universe to a abyss of a crisis.
That year, Scottish scientist Alexander King and Italian nobleman Aurelio Peccei collected together a multidisciplinary organisation of tip general thinkers during a tiny villa in Rome. The Club of Rome, as this organisation was shortly known, had come together to plead a problems of short-term thinkin...
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
19 of 22 people found a following examination helpful.
By popscipopulizer
In their new book `Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think', Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler disagree that, notwithstanding a problems that a record has recently total (including shrinking resources, tellurian warming, and a race blast that threatens to obscure [and in some cases already does confound] a advances in rural prolongation and medicine), we needn't drop a techno-optimism after all. Indeed, according to Diamandis, a universe is on a hill of another blast in record that will shortly move retreat from many of a stream problems, and contentment to a doorstep. Not calm to let a idea or a timeline sojourn vague, Diamandis is happy to hang a some-more accurate clarification on each. When it comes to abundance, Diamandis defines it as "a universe of 9 billion people with purify water, healthful food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and non-polluting, entire energy" (loc. 317), and, to tip it all off, a leisure to pursue their goals and aspirations unhindered by domestic repression. With regards to a timeline, Diamandis claims that it "should be practicable within twenty-five years, with conspicuous change probable within a subsequent decade" (loc. 580).
In an try to remonstrate us that this idea is practicable (and convincing he is), Diamandis takes us by a latest technological developments (and those that will shortly be entrance down a pipe) in countless fields such as H2O filtration and sanitation (including advancements in H2O desalination, nano-filtering, sewage recycling, and a smart-water-grid); food prolongation (including a subsequent era of genetically mutated foods, straight farming, in-vitro meat, and agroecology); preparation (including personalized education, a OLPC [One Laptop Per Child program], AI preparation programs, and advancements in educational games, video-games and mechanism programs); appetite (including solar and breeze power, a subsequent era of chief appetite and algal biofuel, a smart-energy-grid, and battery-encapsulated appetite storage); medical (including branch dungeon therapy and organ creation, robotic medical care-givers and surgeons, genomic medicine [based on your sold genome], and Lab-on-a-Chip record [a evidence apparatus concordant with your dungeon phone that can now investigate samples of saliva, urine and blood]), and many, many more.
According to Diamandis, a technological innovations mentioned above are being spurred on by 3 army in sold these days that are expected to move us to a state of contentment even quicker than we competence differently expect, and one that extends to all tools of a world. The 3 army are (in retreat sequence as to how they are presented), 1) a arise of a bottom billion--which consists in a fact that a world's lowest have recently begun plugging into a universe economy in a really estimable way, both as a consumer and as a writer of products (largely as a outcome of a communications revolution, and a fact that dungeon phones are now swelling even to a world's lowest populations); 2) a rising materialisation of a tech-philanthropists--a new multiply of rich people who are some-more munificent than ever, and who are requesting their efforts to tellurian solutions (and quite in a building world); and 3) a rising materialisation of DIY innovation--which includes a ability of tiny organizations, and even people to make contributions even in a many modernized technological domains (such as computing, biotechnology, and even space travel).
With regards to this final force, partial of Diamandis' purpose here is to enthuse a layperson to enter a ravel with their possess contributions towards contentment by approach of fasten one of a countless open-source creation projects accessible on line, or throwing their palm into one of a many incentivized technological prizes in existence, or in some other demeanour of their possess devising. In this regard, a authors are really successful, as a work is both lovely and inspiring, and we rarely suggest it. A full outline of a book, as good as many of a juicier sum to be found therein, will be accessible during a site newbooksinbrief dot wordpress dot com, by Sunday Mar 4th. The information in a essay will also be accessible in a precipitated chronicle as a podcast on a same site shortly thereafter.
6 of 6 people found a following examination helpful.
By Ernest Ward
This is a lovely version to a ever-popular dystopian destiny tomes. Kotler's penetrating essay total with Diamandis' resources of believe yield discernment into things to come. Well-researched, well-written and entirely enchanting page-after-page. we rarely suggest this book to anyone meddlesome in their future.
5 of 6 people found a following examination helpful.
By Kim Ellis
This book is an implausible charity with a certain messages that a universe needs today. We already have a record and believe to make a universe a some-more estimable and abounding place.
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