The future is not written. It unfolds as a result of our actions, the choices we makes, and the risks we take. - Peter Diamandis

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries — cell phone, Internet — that we all seem to take for granted.

Evolutionary pressures shaped Homo sapiens to have an average life expectancy of roughly thirty years. The logic is easily understood. "Natural selection favors the genes of those with the most descendants," explains MIT's Marvin Minsky. "Those numbers tend to grow exponentially with the number of generations, and so natural selection prefers the genes of those who reproduce at earlier ages."

Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines.