Or why we disagree with Chicken Little and the Mainstream Media

With debt crises, earthquake after tsunami after earthquake, riots in developed nations and famines in developing ones, it’s easy to be sceptical about the future of humanity.

Further still, baby boomers are starting a costly retirement of decline—if the next super-virus doesn’t get them first. Things look grim, and, of course, TV ratings encourage mainstream reporting to fan the flames rather than put them out.

All of this is missing the big picture: We’re already living in the future, and it’s awesome. Crazy awesome.

Innovations that in any other time would be considered miracles now happen so often that we’ve become blasé to their news (imagine what would happen if you took your iPhone back to the 1960s).

Google, a company that didn’t exist until 15 years ago, has effectively rendered ignorance a temporary inconvenience.

We need to take a minute to look at where we are, and how great the road ahead looks.

From relentless advances in digital technology and communications to innovative new alternatives to carbon based energy sources and the sequencing of the human genome, innovation is alive, well, and changing the world for the better. And those changes are accelerating.
 

In the past 100 years the average life expectancy has almost doubled. That’s an impressive statistic on its own, but think about all the advances in science, technology, and culture that contributed to it, and how much more valuable each life becomes when it has twice as long to make its contributions.

Isaac Newton famously said “If I’ve seen further it is because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants!” Today we’re standing on the top of the tallest giants ever. As Bill Gates has said “never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time”.

In healthcare, advances and inventions from every other industry are being retooled and remade to improve quality and longevity of life. Innovations in areas such as human genomics and stem cell research may preface the most exciting healthcare advances ever! We’re even within stone-throwing distance of producing custom, made-to-order replacement organs. If that isn’t enough, MIT recently announced that its scientists have come up with a way to cure the common cold—and most other viruses in the process!

Current budgetary assumptions for the U.S. and other advanced economies assume that baby boomers will be unproductive and passive recipients of government social programs and health care.  We don’t buy it. Not only is life expectancy increasing but our productive years are expanding as well. 

In his 1984 presidential debate with Walter Mondale, 73-year-old Ronald Reagan said: "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Warren Buffet is 80 and still one of the most respected investors in the world.

Leonid Hurwicz was 90 years old when he was awarded the 2007 Prize in Economics.

Healthy productive taxpayers all! Economic contributors… not meek recipients of government largesse.

What about education? What if every child in the world has free, unlimited access to the best educational lessons available? The Khanacademy is doing just that with online video and more.

Energy is another prominent area where prophecies of doom are ubiquitous. The developed world was able to industrialize so quickly thanks to carbon fuel emissions, emissions that had a few “negative externalities” to say the least.

Solar, our next great bet, currently only powers 1% of the world’s energy—inconsequential at best, right? Not so fast. When we dig into solar’s underlying numbers we see rapidly declining costs. In fact, the amount produced globally has doubled every two years for the last 20 years. At that rate we can meet 100% of the world’s energy needs in less than 15 years!

This is clean, renewable energy that can be installed anywhere. That would mean that America would not need to import any oil! What would that mean to their balance of trade? To their budget deficit? To their debt? To climate change? Exactly!

Solar alone may not be the answer, but it’s just one of many promising energy technologies.