MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (82 page)

Given the way our world population is growing, we’ll need to be liberating those resources faster than ever. That exponential change we were talking about? Here’s an example:

• It took a little more than
200,000 years
—or until the year
1804
—for the population of human beings to multiply to a total of
1 billion people.

• It took only
123 years
(
1927
) for the human population to double to
2 billion people.

• But it took just
33 years
(
1960
) before there were
3 billion people
on the planet!

• It took a mere
14 years
(
1974
) for another billion to be added, for a total of
4 billion people.

This growth has not stopped. In spite of China’s one-child-per-family policy for its 1.3 billion population, and all the other efforts to stop world population growth, in the last 40
years
alone, we’ve added more than
3 billion more people!
That’s 300% more people in these four decades than it originally took 200,000 years to achieve! Today there are
7.2 billion people on the planet!
If we keep going at our current pace of growth, scientists estimate, the population will be
9.6 billion by 2050.

How can the Earth sustain so many people? If we keep consuming our natural resources at the current rate, according to Jim Leape of the World Wide Fund for Nature International, as quoted in the
Wall Street Journal,
“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce,
and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough.”

Human ingenuity and technology together have a way of keeping up with our needs.

I remember a time when we thought we were running out of oil. In the early 1970s, when I was a junior in high school, there was an oil crisis in the Middle East. If you recall, gas was rationed on odd or even days. I was wondering if we’d run out of fuel before I even got my license! Then one day in school, my engineering teacher said, “Let me read you an article.” I had already seen the
Time
magazine with a report from the Club of Rome, scaring the daylights out of everybody with predictions that our oil supply would last only a few more years, and the whole economy would collapse. This article sounded just like that, using the same language of gloom and doom. Then he showed us what he’d been reading: a newspaper article from the 1850s about an oil crisis. And the oil they were talking about was . . . whale oil!

In the 19th century, whale blubber was the main source of lamp oil. You couldn’t light your home without it. But whales were being overfished, people were worried about shortages of oil, and prices were going through the roof. But what happened in 1859? Crude oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. A whole new source became available. Before long, we had kerosene lamps and then internal combustion engines. The oil crisis of 1973? Technology had already eased that scarcity. New exploration and extraction techniques were opening up vast quantities of fossil fuels. And now with sideways drilling technologies, we have more gas than Saudi Arabia has oil! Such technologies change not only an economy but can also have an impact on geopolitical power. For the first time in almost a decade, in 2013 the United States produced more domestic oil than it imported from the Middle East.

The future is in alternatives such as wind power, biofuels, and—the grand-slam winner—solar energy. According to the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, all of the world’s energy needs can be met with 1/10,000th of the sunlight that falls on the Earth each day. The challenge has been to capture and store that power for a competitive cost. Ray predicts that the cost per watt of solar energy will be less than oil and coal in just a few years.

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

—THEODORE ROETHKE

Let’s pause for a moment and think: Where will all this new technology come from? It’s already been bubbling out of the usual places: Silicon Valley, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the world’s great universities and laboratories. But more and more, do-it-yourself inventors are using the vast resources of the internet to find ways to do things faster and better and cheaper.

Let me tell you about a teenager I met who is revolutionizing the world of prosthetics from a lab—in his bedroom! Easton LaChappelle was running a robotics program for NASA when he was 17, and he didn’t have to go to a major university to learn engineering—he had the internet.

Easton grew up in a tiny town in southwestern Colorado where there wasn’t much for a kid to do, so he entertained himself by tearing up and reassembling household gadgets. When he was 14, he decided to build his own robotic hand. Hey, why not? There was no big library in town, no university nearby, so he scoured websites like Instructables and Hack It! to teach himself electronics, programming, and mechanics. Then he used objects he had lying around—Legos, fishing line, electrical tape, small hobby motors, and a Nintendo Power Glove—to build a prototype.

By the time he was 16, he had refined his design by getting access to a 3-D printer and creating a mechanical hand out of layers of plastic. He entered his invention at the state science fair, and it was there that Easton had what he calls his “aha!” moment. He met a seven-year-old girl with a prosthetic arm that cost her parents $80,000. She would need two more over her lifetime. Easton thought, “Who can afford that?” Besides, the mechanical hand attached to the arm had only one sensor and one motion. His device was much more sophisticated, with five flexible fingers. Then and there, he decided to create a simple, functional, and affordable prosthetic to help amputees like this little girl.

Easton went back to his bedroom lab and built a full robotic limb that replicated the motion and strength of a human arm. Even more amazing, he came up with an EEG headset that converts electronic brainwaves into Bluetooth signals that control it. (Yes, these things don’t just exist in
sci-fi movies.) The arm weighs one-third less than the $80,000 version, and it’s much stronger. In fact, a person using this arm can curl more than 300 pounds! A giant improvement on the past technology. So what do you think his new invention costs to make as opposed to the $80,000 limb? $20,000? $5,000? $1,500? How about
$250
?!

After meeting President Obama in the summer before his 18th birthday, Easton interned with NASA at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, where he led a team working on robotics for the International Space Station. By the end of August, Easton was already thinking, “I’m out of here. These guys are too slow!” He missed building the things he designed, and there were too many layers of bureaucracy. He went back home to work on building a robotic exoskeleton for a boy in his high school who was paralyzed from the waist down after an accident. Easton wanted him to walk at his graduation.

When I read about Easton’s exoskeleton project, I knew I had to contact him. I’ve been working with the survivors of recent mass shootings, including the massacres at Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado. I’ve helped many of them work to turn their lives around in the aftermath of such unimaginable loss, including Ashley Moser, a pregnant mother who watched the insane killer murder her six-year-old daughter before he turned the gun on her. The two bullets he pumped into Ashley’s body killed her unborn baby and left her paralyzed from the waist down. When I met her, she was filled with suicidal thoughts. I flew her family and medical team to our Unleash the Power Within event, and together we worked to create an environment where this remarkable young woman could begin her emotional healing.

I want Ashley to walk again! So I reached out to Easton and offered to fund his project.
Since then we’ve gone into business together to create low-cost prosthetic devices that can be used all over the world and make a massive difference in people’s lives.
No matter where they live, no matter how much money they have. That’s Easton’s mission. (And by the way, Easton’s high school friend is scheduled to graduate in 2015, and Easton reports that he is currently on track to make sure he walks to the podium. Easton’s goal is an exoskeleton so thin and flexible that it can be worn under clothing! You might not know someone is wearing one.)

Easton’s other mission is to spread the word to young people all over the world that they too can become the makers of technology instead of just
consumers. “Everyone can be a creator,” Easton told me. “With access to the internet and 3-D technology, kids can do anything they want. They don’t have to restrict themselves by thinking, ‘I have to go to college to be successful, there’s really no other way.’ You really do have other options.”

There’s no doubt that Easton LaChappelle is an extraordinary person. It would be safe to call him a genius. But how many other Eastons do you think are out there—in places like India, Tanzania, Australia, Dagestan, Uruguay, Singapore—logging on to their computers and dreaming up ways to improve the world we live in? Easton used open-source technology to share his first robotic hand design, so people all over the world could copy it and improve it if they wanted.
Now all of us can be our own publishers and creators and share our ideas with anyone with an internet connection.

The floodgates have been opened, ushering in one of the greatest revolutions of our time—what people are calling the MakerBot Era or the Maker Revolution. Easton LaChappelle is simply one of the many people at the forefront of an explosion of do-it-yourself (DIY) innovation fueled by the wild growth in technology. Chris Anderson, CEO of 3-D Robotics, calls it the “New Industrial Revolution.” Now the whole world can learn what students learn at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. They can interact with the very best teachers—and one another—sharing ideas and techniques, and making devices and supplying services that used to cost millions of dollars for hundreds of dollars.

Each year, Maker Faires are held all around America, bringing together inventors, hobbyists, engineers, students, teachers, artists, and entrepreneurs in what’s called “the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth.” In 2013 over 540,000 people attended 100 Maker Faires globally, and in 2014 Maker Media, creator of the faires, is expecting that number to climb to 140 Maker Faires. President Obama recently hosted a Maker Faire at the White House, where a 17-foot robotic giraffe named Russell greeted him, and the president toured a tiny portable house and played a keyboard made of bananas.
He also met Marc Roth, from San Francisco, who was living in a homeless shelter when he started going to a local “TechShop” to learn how to use 3-D printers and laser cutters. Sixteen months later he had started his own laser-cutting business, and now runs a program to teach high-tech skills to others who need a fresh start.

Obama also gave a shout-out to two tween-age girls from North Carolina who started a robotics company instead of getting a paper route. Their motto: “If you can imagine it, then you can do it—whatever it is.”

“And that’s a pretty good motto for America,” Obama told the crowd. “This is a country that imagined a railroad connecting a continent, imagined electricity powering our cities and towns, imagined skyscrapers reaching into the heavens and an internet that brings us closer together.” He challenged every company, college, and community to support these Makers. “If we do, I know we’re going to be able to create more good jobs in the years to come. We’re going to create entire new industries that we can’t yet imagine.”

This Maker Revolution is being made possible by the explosion of new technologies and the massive expansion of the internet.
Ten years ago, the internet connected 500 million people; today it connects 2 billion people. Within six years, experts estimate another 3 billion will be joining the web, for a total of 5 billion people. Imagine the power of that much connected and unleashed creativity across the planet!
The first internet was the internet of military agencies and colleges. Then it was the dot-com internet of companies; then it was the internet of ideas; then, with social media, it was the internet of relationships. Now it’s the internet of things, of all things. Computers and sensors are embedded in everyday objects, transmitting messages back and forth to one another. Machines are connecting to other machines, which are in turn connecting to us and uniting everything in one powerful global network. And 3-D printing is how this internet will be transformed and expanded beyond our craziest dreams.

3-D PRINTING: SCIENCE FICTION TO SCIENCE FACT

You know the “replicators” they use in those
Star Trek
movies to synthesize hamburgers and hot coffee out of thin air on the starship
Enterprise
? Well, scientists say we’re not that far from creating the real thing! We’ve already been talking a lot about 3-D printing, but it’s hard to grasp what a powerful technology it can become until you’ve seen it in action. 3-D printing is really a catchall phrase for digital manufacturing, and the “printers” are actually minifactories that use computer files as blueprints to create
three-dimensional objects layer by layer.
The printers can use at least 200 different liquefied or powdered materials, including plastic, glass, ceramic, titanium, nylon, chocolate—and even living cells. What
can
you make with them? A better question is: What
can’t
you make with them?!
So far 3-D printers have been used to create running shoes, gold bracelets, airplane parts, tableware, bikinis, guitars, and solar panels—not to mention human tracheas, ears, and teeth. As you’ve already learned, there are 3-D printers, small enough to fit into a teenager’s bedroom, that are capable of turning layers of synthetic goop into a functioning prosthetic limb. And there are hangar-sized 3-D printers in China that can print out ten houses a day using layers of concrete mixed with recycled construction waste. The cost? Just $5,000 per home, and there’s almost no labor required!