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Feature

Rocket Man
Brian Caulfield, 02.13.12, 6:00 PM ET

Its not easy to follow Grover from Sesame Street, especially when the throng of hungover Consumer Electronics Show attendees packed into the cavernous Palazzo Ballroom of the Venetian in Las Vegas endured product pitches from Qualcomms Paul Jacobs and Nokias Stephen Elop even before the fuzzy purple Muppets demo of an augmented reality app for kids. But this is Peter Diamandis, the fast-talking, hand-chopping impresario of the tech and space worlds. The system is broken, access to health care is inconvenient, inefficient, bureaucraticat worst, its even inaccurate, he intones, striding on the stage in the standard tech mogul uniformwhite shirt, blue jacket and jeansas MRI-like images dance behind him on a gigantic screen. Stats roll off his tongue: an average 21-day wait for a doctors appointment; the 2-hour delay in the office; a coming shortage of 91,000 doctors. Thats just in America. The crowd listens keenly, less for Diamandis subject mattera deadly topic, even at an electronics showor his matterof-fact style than this track record and his cash. Diamandis is launching his latest payload: a $10 million X Prize, his seventh contest, to whoever develops the first medical tricorderyes, that all-purpose handheld that was standard equipment among Star Trek medics. The good news is we do have incredible technologies like wireless sensors, cloud computing, lab-on-a-chip technologies and digital imaging, he says. Our goal is to revolutionize health care, to provide it literally in the palm of your hand. Diamandis has throw weight. A Harvard M.D. who never practiced, he has keen interests in space and ocean exploration, genomics and the Internet, telecom and artificial intelligence, hyperfast electric cars and epic environmental disasters. He knows just about everyone in these fields and has persuaded half of them to become a trustee or big backer of his X Prize Foundation: The Ansari family funded the original prize, a private spaceflight vehicle; Googles Larry Page and Sergey Brin raised $30 million to put a robot on the moon; Bill and Melinda Gates are sponsoring a better device to detect tuberculosis; Qualcomms Jacobs is helping turn Dr. McCoys everything machine into reality. Diamandis also has leads on some of tomorrows promising entrepreneurs via Singularity University, a boot camp for startups he launched with futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. For Diamandis the glass isnt just half-full; its constantly overflowing. Life, he says in a new book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (see excerpt, p. 78), is so bountiful that its possibilities are limitless, if only we can find a way to tap into them. And hes the guy to show us how, bringing together the best and the brightest, the richest and the most driveninto a combustible mix that can change the world. He always tries to find the one thing where something can be done that needs to be done, that nobody is doing and that he knows he can make happen, says Robert Zubrin, chairman of the Mars Society, a space advocacy nonprofit. And he makes it happen. By dint of brillianceor bravado. Its easy to buy into the hype, drink the Tang. Or Americanos, which Diamandis has ordered, decompressing after his talk at CES. Our mission is to drive radical breakthroughs, he says, challenging teams from around the world to literally make the impossible possible. You begin to believe he could make almost anything happen. Until he starts talking about his latest ambition: to become a billionaire by mining asteroids. The corners of his eyes crinklenot with a hey-Iwas-just-kidding smile, but in utter seriousness. BORN TO GREEK IMMIGRANTS from the isle of Lesbos (the politically incorrect Diamandis jokes that both his parents were lesbians), Peter spent his childhood on Long Island, N.Y., where, transfixed by space, he was inspired first by the Apollo 11 moonwalk and then the near-death adventure of Apollo 13. While Peter dreamed of becoming an astronaut, his folks pushed him to become a doctor so he could take over his dads ob/gyn practice. So I said, Okay, Ill try to do both.

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Meantime, he experimented with rockets. I had pounds and pounds of potassium chloride and magnesium, and I blew up a variety of things. You used to be able to mail-order all of this stuff. If I did anything close to what I did back then I would be flagged as a terrorist, he says. He and a friend threw a homemade bomb into the kids pool to see how big a splash it would make. Big. The explosion cracked the pool. It scared the sh-- out of me, Diamandis says. Later, he and a high school pal built a four-stage rocket, Mongo, hauling it out to Roosevelt Field on Long Island, where Charles Lindbergh had taken off in the Spirit of St. Louis on the first successful transatlantic flight in 1927. Mongo didnt fare as well. Its engines were designed to ignite those of the rocket in the stage above it, but the timing was off. The next stage ignited, and we had this rocket chasing us around the field, Diamandis says. Still not cured, he started at M.I.T. but led a double life, studying premed and running a space group he cofounded. The Students for the Exploration & Development of Space now has chapters on more than 35 campuses. I learned how to manage people and raise money, Diamandis says. When I got my first $5,000 donation it felt like a million-dollar check. He was a standout premed student as well, winning awards for his undergraduate life sciences research and admission to Harvard Medical School. But with just a year left to graduate he darted back to M.I.T. to get a degree in aeronautics and astronautics, then returned to Harvard to finish his M.D. But galaxies, not gynecology, beckoned. Since he jumpstarted it, the International Space University he cofounded in 1987, in Strasbourg, France, has expanded from a summer program for high-achieving students into an accredited, world-class research institute. Diamandis, not yet 30, decided it was time to get into the space business. But International Microspace, founded in 1988 with $2.5 million in private funds, turned into a five-year slog. After winning a contract from the governments Star Wars program to put small payloads into orbit, the company struggled to raise another $10 million to build a launch vehicle designed to shoot 500- to 800-pound satellites into low-earth orbit. IMI was acquired. The Clinton Administration scrapped the program. It was a chicken-and-egg situation, Diamandis explains. In order for us to attract money, we needed to get contracts. The only people with big contracts was the government, and the government wasnt willing to take any risks. Such a failure allowed me to see how powerful an incentive prize could be: I didnt have to back any one solution. THE X PRIZE DIDNT ACHIEVE LIFTOFF for years. In late 1993 Diamandis studied awards won by 19th-and early20th-century explorers and adventurers, particularly the $25,000 Orteig Prize, grabbed by Lindbergh. It got him thinking how prizes, drawing on competition, bold and clear goals, greed, teamwork and high visibility, could produce highly creativeand sometimes crazyapproaches to problems. They also played into his infatuation with showmanship. I called it the X Prize, says Diamandis. X stood for the name of the benefactor, who remained nonexistent for a long time. Diamandis announced the prize for the private spaceship in 1996, surrounded by Lindberghs grandsons, a head honcho at the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA administrator Daniel Golden. All show and no go: Six years passed before he found a backer. Everyone kept saying no, Diamandis recalls. No one had the balls and the deep-hearted desire. Not until telecom entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, who in 2002 told a reporter she wanted a jaunt in space. Diamandis pounced and got a meeting with Ansari, her husband, Hamid, and his brother Amir. As soon as he said, reusable flight, suborbital, we just looked at each other, recalls Amir. Two years later a craft by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and aerospace designer Burt Rutan made two trips into space in 14 days and captured the prize. (Anousheh Ansari later got her wish, a flight to the space station, in 2006.) Diamandis was finally launched. The Ansari X Prize paid out $10 million26 spacecraft contestants shelled out $100 million competing for the purse. It probably wasnt wasted outlay, since the prize spurred Richard Branson to create a commercial space tourism company and may have inspired Amazons Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk of SpaceX to quicken their rocket research. The X Prize Foundation is a mini-industry, with 50 employees. It is holding competitions in education, global development, energy and the environment, life sciences and space and undersea exploration (see box, p. 76). Its board of trustees crackles with celebrities: director James Cameron; Huffington Post cofounder Arianna Huffington; inventors Dean Kamen and Kurzweil; Craig Venter, the entrepreneur and biologist who raced the U.S. government to decode the human genome; Indian billionaire Ratan Tata, who presides over the worlds fifth-largest steel empire; Larry Page; Tesla Autos Elon Musk. But is Diamandis delivering world-class breakthroughs? A Northrop Grumman-sponsored contest produced a verticaltakeoff-and-landing lunar vehicle. Three rivals won a contest to build low-emission, 100-mpg cars that could be mass-produced. And last October $1 million went to a team that designed a highly efficient way to clean up oil spills,

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spurred by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Impressive but hardly planet-transforming achievements. Critics of the prizeand they are legionargue that entrepreneurs need seed money up front rather than a shot at a prize. You could say, Look, if youll undertake this work, Ill give you $500,000 to fund this research, says Lewis Branscomb, former head of the National Bureau of Standards and onetime chief scientist at IBM. Thats probably a more powerful incentive. Provided, of course, you bet on the right team in the first place. When fusion power is finally developed, its not going to be developed in a giant lab. Its going to be developed by two crackpots working in a garage, says Mars Societys Zubrin, pointing to tinkerers like Wilbur and Orville Wright, David Packard and William Hewlett, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Exactly the kind of people who could be encouraged by the X Prize. THE CAMPUS OF SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY has a spooky feel. An enormous, partly disassembled blimp hangar looms behind the Spanish-colonial-style building that once served as naval officers headquarters at the Moffett Federal Airfield, not far from Google HQ in Mountain View, Calif. Renovation is under way on the 1930s-era structure, replacing linoleum floors, worn fixtures and faded paint. Open since 2008, SU offers entrepreneurial basic training. The flagship ten-week graduate program is highly competitive: Last year 2,200 applied for 80 spots and paid $25,000 apiece to hear lectures by and network with the likes of venture capitalist Tom Byers, Net evangelist Vint Cerf and lifestyle enthusiast Tim Ferriss. The inspiration for the university derives from Kurzweils kooky idea of singularity: the notion that some day, exponential leaps in technology may even allow people to live essentially forever. (Imagine the impact on Medicare and Social Security.) Graduates are lucky if they leave with the germ of a startup or a research idea. The mission, says Daniel Kraft, the baby-faced M.D. and executive director of the universitys FutureMed program, which focuses on disruptive technologies in health care, is to start impacting big global challenges. Meantime, little dents will do: Matternet, which intends to use drones to deliver food and medicines to sites inaccessible by road; Getaround, a car-sharing service; and BioMine, which wants to extract valuable metals from discarded electronicsall started at SU. Im trying to start a gold rush, says Diamandis. He has taken a personal interest in several companies with an eye on the heavens: Zero Gravity Corp., which offers weightless flights at $5,000 a pop to tourists and researchers; Space Adventures, which books flights to space station aboard spacecraft; and Rocket Racking League, a (currently) virtual Nascar in the sky. His grandest scheme by far: mining precious and rare earth metals on asteroids, where trillions of dollars are just waiting to be made. The idea isnt new. Many wandering rocks get close to Earth; last November a 400-meter-wide example passed within a mere 201,000 miles of us. Then what? Some asteroids might be slowed and eased into orbit near Earth, perhaps with giant harpoons or rotating screws that burrow into the surface. Once secure, machines might conduct surface mining, cut, crush or vaporize rock. Diamandis isnt talking specifics yet. And heaven knows how it would be financed. Its clear hes not in it for the money. Between what the foundation pays him and fees from a handful of boards he sits on and speaking engagements, he pulls in maybe $350,000 a year. (His various equity stakes are worth $9 million-plus.) For him the motivation is similar to those competing for an X-Prize: dreams of the future. ABUNDANCE A quick glance at the headlines lets us know the score: dark days ahead. With growing concerns about population size, economic meltdowns, energy shortages, water and food shortagesthis list goes onalarmists are having a field day. For the first time in a long time parents are predicting a worse life for their children than their own. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. We are now entering a period of radical transformation. Progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology and many other breakthrough technologies will let us make greater gains in the next two decades than weve made in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. If that sounds like hogwash, there are good neurological reasons for this reaction. Before we turn our attention to where were going, lets first address why its so difficult to believe we can ever get there. Every second our senses are deluged with data, more than we can possibly process. To deal with this overload, the brain is continuously sifting and sorting, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical to the brain than survival, the first filter most of this incoming information encounters is the amygdala, an almond-shaped portion of the temporal lobe responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate and fear. Its also our early-warning system, an organ on high alert, constantly scanning our environment for anything that could threaten survival. Anxious under

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normal conditions, once stimulated, the amygdala becomes hypervigilant. But so potent is this response that once turned on, its difficult to shut off, and this is a problem in the modern world. These days were media-saturated. Thousands of news outlets compete for our mind share by vying for the amygdalas attention. The old newspaper saw If it bleeds, it leads works because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear. Our early-warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger in the bush variety. Things have changed. Many of todays dangers are probabilisticterrorists might attack, the economy could nose-diveand the amygdala cant tell the difference. Worse, the system is designed not to shut off until the threat has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in impossible-to-avoid news media continuously scaring us in their attempt to capture market share and you have a brain convinced its living in a state of siege. What does the world really look like? Turns out its not the nightmare most suspect. Violence is at an alltime low, personal freedom at a historic high. During the past century child mortality decreased by 90%, while average human life span increased by 100%. Food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever (groceries cost 13 times less today than in 1870). Poverty has declined more in the past 50 years than the previous 500. In fact, adjusted for inflation, incomes have tripled in the past 50 years. Even Americans living under the poverty line today have access to a telephone, toilet, television, running water, air-conditioning and a car. Go back 150 years and the richest robber barons could have never dreamed of such wealth. Nor are these changes restricted to the developed world. In Africa today a Masai warrior on a cellphone has better mobile communications than the President did 25 years ago; if hes on a smartphone with Google, he has access to more information than the President did just 15 years ago, with a feast of standard features: watch, stereo, camera, videocamera, voice recorder, GPS tracker, video teleconferencing equipment, a vast library of books, films, games, music. Just 20 years ago these same goods and services would have cost over $1 million. Four powerful forces are starting to emerge, each with enormous world-changing potential, none more important than the accelerating rate of technological progress. Right now all information-based technologies are on exponential growth curves: Theyre doubling in power for the same price every 12 to 24 months. This is why an $8 million supercomputer from two decades ago now sits in your pocket and costs less than $200. This same rate of change is also showing up in networks, sensors, cloud computing, 3-D printing, genetics, AI, robotics and dozens more industries. Biotechnology has been on such a wild, exponential ride that a state-of-the-art lab, complete with automationwhat would have cost millions of dollars just ten years agocan now be had for under $10,000. Our second force is the do-it-yourself innovator. A DIY revolution has been steadily brewing these past 50 years but lately has begun to boil over. Backyard tinkerers have moved from custom cars and home-brew computers into once esoteric fields like neuroscience, biology, genetics and robotics. Today these small teams of motivated DIYers can accomplish what was once the sole province of large corporations and governments. The aerospace giants felt it was impossible, but Burt Rutan flew into space. Craig Venter tied (some say beat) the mighty U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome. Right now high school and college students are using the tools of synthetic biology to complete real-world projects that rival the output of major biopharmaceutical companies. With 440 patents and a National Medal of Technology, Dean Kamen is one of the greatest DIYers in history. Lately hes turned his attention to the problem of water scarcity, which until recently was considered an impossible boondoggle. When you talk to experts about water, he says, theyll tell you with 4 billion people making less than two dollars a day, theres no viable business model, no economic model and no way to finance development costs. But the 25 poorest countries already spend 20% of their GDP on water. Four billion people spending 30 cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. Its $400 billion a year. I cant think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year. Kamen is in beta trials with his Slingshot, a water purifier that can turn anything wet (polluted water, seawater, even latrine water) into the purest water on Earth at a rate of 1,000 liters per machine per day for less than 0.02 cents a liter. Our next force is moneya lot of moneybeing spent in a very particular way. The high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy techno-philanthropists who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates is focused on eliminating malaria; Naveen Jain is crusading against poverty in India; Pierre and Pam Omidyar are bringing electricity to the developing world. The list goes on and on, a force unrivaled in history. Lastly, the very poorest of the poor, the so-called Bottom Billion, are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become the Rising Billion. The creation of a global transportation network was the initial step down this path, but its the combination of the Internet, microfinance and wireless communication technology thats truly transformational. Over the next decade, and for the first time ever, 3 billion new voices will join the global conversation. What will these people desire? What will they create? If for no other reason than the law of large numbers and the power of their potential, this puts the Rising Billion in the same category as exponential technology, the DIYers and the technophilanthropists: a potent force for abundance.

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Alone, each of these forces has enormous potential. But acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, these innovations take the once unimaginable and turn it into the now actually possible. And abundance for all becomes: Imagine whats next. Adapted from Abundance: Why the Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think (Free Press, 2012) by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, available Feb. 21. EYES ON THE X PRIZE ANSARI X PRIZE $10 million won Oct. 4, 2004 by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen for the first private reusable spacecraft to carry people 100km above Earth twice within two weeks. LUNAR LANDER CHALLENGE $1 million won Oct. 30, 2009 by Masten Space Systems for a vertical-takeoff-and-landing lunar vehicle. AUTOMOTIVE X PRIZE $10 million split three ways on Sept. 16, 2010 for low- emission (or electric), 100-mpg-plus cars. OIL CLEANUP X CHALLENGE $1 million won on Oct. 11, 2011 by Elastec/American Marine for hyperefficient mop-up of oceanic oil spills. ONGOING CONTESTS Archon X Prize ($10 million for sequencing 100 genomes in ten days or less); Google Lunar X Prize ($20 million for landing a robot on the moon); Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize ($10 million for creating Star Trek device). Special Offer: Free Trial Issue of Forbes

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