(1 percent of GDP growth results in a 2 percent poverty reduction), - Peter Diamandis

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day's walk away. Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow. Your great-great-great-grandfather's life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson's life. But now we live in a world that is global and exponential. Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later). Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today's blitzkrieg speed of development. Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution. Yet our brain — which hasn't really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years — wasn't designed for this scale or speed. And if we struggle to track the growth of singular innovations, we're downright helpless in the face of converging ones. Put it this way, in

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. "You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder," he continues, "but often it's literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn't feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo — and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you're going to try to slightly improve."

Today, 50 percent of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, with 80 percent of that land reserved for livestock.