Abundance – Good News for a Change

Summary

We are living in a time of abundance, not just material wealth, but a life of possibilities. Our amygdala (emotional function) has built in our need for survival. Consequently, newspapers and TV feed us as much bad news as possible. Over and over in high definition! Doom sells newspapers and TV, but the opposite of doom is true.

While at present, we view and read constantly about the atrocities in Ukraine, we are living in the most peaceful time in history. Our average life span has doubled, biotechnology is gradually eliminating disease and AI is eliminating boring jobs.

While we have problems, climate change, water and energy shortage, poverty, species extinction, etc., history shows that mankind has always fixed them, often by one minute to midnight! What fixes them? Technology and there are huge financial benefits in lower costs and more jobs. Businesses that resist change by hanging on to outdated technology, fall behind or cease to exist.

The video below explains it (see References below for the speaker)

Cost Reduction

Over the last 100 years, while per capita income increased by 3 times (3 x), costs have decreased as below (all adjusted for inflation) :

• Food 10 times (10 x less)
• Electricity 20 x (Solar energy is now around 1/3 the cost of fossil fuel)
• Transportation 100 x
• Communication 1000 x

Poverty

Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined from 36 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2015. Global literacy has increased from 25% to over 80% in the last 130 years. While there are too many people in the world, there are 2 ways to stabilise the world population. Education is paramount and making all people healthier through sanitation, biotechnology, CRISPR, etc. Anyone can educate themselves for free, using the Khan Academy for instance. See prior blog.

Water Resources

Earth is known as the blue planet as seen from space because it consists of 70% water of which 97.5% is saltwater, 2% is ice and 0.5% freshwater. Technology is now available to produce clean potable water for less than 2c a litre. With droughts becoming worse, much funding is going into new ways of producing potable water. Chinese researchers have produced a system that costs just $4 and it is now possible to harvest water from the air.

New Minds Coming Online

The power of cell phones means a Maasai Warrior in Kenya has more knowledge available than Bill Clinton 25 years ago and better communication than Ronald Reagan 35 years ago. The spread of the internet via satellites means billions of new minds are producing new ideas. Today individuals can think up and act on ideas that only big corporations could do 30 years ago. 

References

• World Poverty
• Peter Diamandis

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