This is an excellent book. The written by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler. The facts mentioned in the book was a kind of eye opener for me at least. The book actually give a different perspective about the resources as available to us today and their likely status tomorrow.
I would put this book in the category of must read book. The references and links provided in book are rich in information and content. All topics have been dealt with deep research and in my view no comments / statements in the book is without a research and supporting facts.
Some of points that had a significant impact on me are mentioned below. I have listed them randomly.
- Amount of solar energy that hits our atmosphere has been well established at 174 petawatts (1.740 × 10^17 watts), plus or minus 3.5 percent.
- Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning.
- From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.
- Ideas meet and mate and mutate. We call this process learning, science, invention
- If I have seen further, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants – Newton
- Eight exponentially growing fields were chosen as the core of Singularity University’s curriculum: biotechnology and bioinformatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; and nano-materials and nanotechnology.
- The Homebrew Computer Club was fated to change the world … At least twenty-three companies, including Apple Computer, were to trace their lineage directly to Homebrew, ultimately creating a vibrant industry that, because personal computers became such all purpose tools for both work and play, trans-formed the entire American economy. With Ted Nelson’s computing power-to-the-people rallying cry echoing across the landscape, the hobbyists would tear down the glass-house computing world and transform themselves into a movement that emphasized an entirely new set of values from traditional American business.
- Walker’s departure took place on July 19, 1963, the date he flew the X-15 past the one-hundred-kilometer mark, becoming the first man to fly a plane into space.
- On average, only two-thirds of American public school students finish high school—the lowest graduation rate in the industrialized world
- In America, for example, after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we now have the stated goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. (Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—and What We Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2010), p. 114)
- You crunch a wintergreen Life Saver in your mouth, there’s a little flash. It’s called tribo-luminescence.
- A lesson that crystallized for him at a busy intersection in downtown Shiraz, where Cohen noticed a half dozen teens and twenty somethings leaning up against the sides of buildings, staring at their cell phones. He asked one boy what was going on and was told this was the spot everyone came to use Bluetooth to connect to the Internet. “Aren’t you worried?” asked Cohen. You’re doing this out in the open. Aren’t you worried you might get caught? The boy shook his head no. “Nobody over thirty knows what Bluetooth is.”