Subtitles section Play video
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(Applause)
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(Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked.
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Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray.
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Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines.
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Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead.
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Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyberattacks.
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Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado.
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Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria.
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Crisis. Death. Disaster.
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Oh, my God.
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Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips
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I collected over the last six months --
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could have easily been the last six days
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or the last six years.
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The point is that the news media
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preferentially feeds us negative stories
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because that's what our minds pay attention to.
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And there's a very good reason for that.
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Every second of every day,
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our senses bring in way too much data
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than we can possibly process in our brains.
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And because nothing is more important to us
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than survival,
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the first stop of all of that data
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is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe
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called the amygdala.
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Now the amygdala is our early warning detector,
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our danger detector.
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It sorts and scours through all of the information
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looking for anything in the environment that might harm us.
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So given a dozen news stories,
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we will preferentially look
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at the negative news.
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And that old newspaper saying,
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"If it bleeds it leads,"
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is very true.
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So given all of our digital devices
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that are bringing all the negative news to us
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seven days a week, 24 hours a day,
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it's no wonder that we're pessimistic.
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It's no wonder that people think
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that the world is getting worse.
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But perhaps that's not the case.
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Perhaps instead,
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it's the distortions brought to us
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of what's really going on.
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Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made
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over the last century
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by a series of forces
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are, in fact, accelerating to a point
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that we have the potential in the next three decades
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to create a world of abundance.
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Now I'm not saying
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we don't have our set of problems --
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climate crisis, species extinction,
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water and energy shortage -- we surely do.
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And as humans, we are far better
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at seeing the problems way in advance,
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but ultimately we knock them down.
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So let's look
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at what this last century has been
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to see where we're going.
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Over the last hundred years,
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the average human lifespan has more than doubled,
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average per capita income adjusted for inflation
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around the world has tripled.
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Childhood mortality
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has come down a factor of 10.
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Add to that the cost of food, electricity,
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transportation, communication
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have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold.
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Steve Pinker has showed us
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that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever
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in human history.
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And Charles Kenny
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that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent
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in the last 130 years.
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We truly are living in an extraordinary time.
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And many people forget this.
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And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher.
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In fact, we redefine what poverty means.
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Think of this, in America today,
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the majority of people under the poverty line
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still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators,
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television, mobile phones,
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air conditioning and cars.
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The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet,
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could have never dreamed of such luxuries.
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Underpinning much of this
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is technology,
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and of late,
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exponentially growing technologies.
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My good friend Ray Kurzweil
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showed that any tool that becomes an information technology
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jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law,
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and experiences price performance doubling
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every 12 to 24 months.
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That's why the cellphone in your pocket
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is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster
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than a supercomputer of the '70s.
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Now look at this curve.
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This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years.
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I want you to notice two things from this curve.
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Number one, how smooth it is --
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through good time and bad time, war time and peace time,
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recession, depression and boom time.
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This is the result of faster computers
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being used to build faster computers.
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It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges.
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And also, even though it's plotted
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on a log curve on the left,
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it's curving upwards.
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The rate at which the technology is getting faster
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is itself getting faster.
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And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law,
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are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies
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available to all of us.
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Cloud computing,
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what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing;
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sensors and networks; robotics;
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3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute
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personalized production around the planet;
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synthetic biology;
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fuels, vaccines and foods;
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digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I.
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I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy
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by IBM's Watson?
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I mean, that was epic.
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In fact, I scoured the headlines
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looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could.
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And I love this: "Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents."
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Jeopardy's not an easy game.
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It's about the nuance of human language.
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And imagine if you would
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A.I.'s like this on the cloud
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available to every person with a cellphone.
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Four years ago here at TED,
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Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university
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called Singularity University.
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And we teach our students all of these technologies,
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and particularly how they can be used
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to solve humanity's grand challenges.
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And every year we ask them
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to start a company or a product or a service
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that can affect positively the lives of a billion people
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within a decade.
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Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students
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can touch the lives of a billion people today.
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30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous.
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Today we can point at dozens of companies
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that have done just that.
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When I think about creating abundance,
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it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet;
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it's about creating a life of possibility.
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It is about taking that which was scarce
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and making it abundant.
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You see, scarcity is contextual,
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and technology is a resource-liberating force.
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Let me give you an example.
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So this is a story of Napoleon III
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in the mid-1800s.
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He's the dude on the left.
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He invited over to dinner
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the king of Siam.
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All of Napoleon's troops
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were fed with silver utensils,
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Napoleon himself with gold utensils.
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But the King of Siam,
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he was fed with aluminum utensils.
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You see, aluminum
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was the most valuable metal on the planet,
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worth more than gold and platinum.
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It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument
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is made of aluminum.
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You see, even though aluminum
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is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass,
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it doesn't come as a pure metal.
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It's all bound by oxygen and silicates.
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But then the technology of electrolysis came along
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and literally made aluminum so cheap
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that we use it with throw-away mentality.
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So let's project this analogy going forward.
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We think about energy scarcity.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
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we are on a planet
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that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy
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than we use in a year.
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16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface
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every 88 minutes.
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It's not about being scarce,
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it's about accessibility.
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And there's good news here.
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For the first time, this year
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the cost of solar-generated electricity
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is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India --
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8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees.
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The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year.
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Last month, MIT put out a study
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showing that by the end of this decade,
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in the sunny parts of the United States,
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solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour
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compared to 15 cents
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as a national average.
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And if we have abundant energy,
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we also have abundant water.
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Now we talk about water wars.
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Do you remember
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when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft
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back towards the Earth,
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in 1990 after it just passed Saturn?
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He took a famous photo. What was it called?
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"A Pale Blue Dot."
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Because we live on a water planet.
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We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water.
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Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater,
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two percent is ice,
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and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet,
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but here too there is hope.
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And there is technology coming online,
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not 10, 20 years from now,
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right now.
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There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials.
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And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning,
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one of the great DIY innovators,
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I'd like to share with you -- he gave me permission to do so --
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his technology called Slingshot
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that many of you may have heard of,
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it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator.
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It's able to generate
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a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day
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out of any source -- saltwater, polluted water, latrine --
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at less than two cents a liter.
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The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed
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to do a major test
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of hundreds of units of this in the developing world.
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And if that pans out,
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which I have every confidence it will,
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Coca-Cola will deploy this globally
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to 206 countries
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around the planet.
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This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology,
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that exists today.
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And we've seen this in cellphones.
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My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration
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of cellphones in the developing world
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by the end of 2013.
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Think about it,
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that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya
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has better mobile comm
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than President Reagan did 25 years ago.
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And if they're on a smartphone on Google,
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they've got access to more knowledge and information
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than President Clinton did 15 years ago.
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They're living in a world of information and communication abundance
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that no one could have ever predicted.
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Better than that,
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the things that you and I
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spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for --
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GPS, HD video and still images,
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libraries of books and music,
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medical diagnostic technology --
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are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing
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into your cellphone.
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Probably the best part of it