Have you come across Peter Diamandas?
He’s the founder and chairman of the X Prize, and the man who made it possible for Stephen Hawking to experience zero gravity.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of Peter. I’ve read his book – Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think – which I highly recommend, and I take the time to keep up to date on his blog, which is fascinating.
Peter has a really great take on how advances in technology are positively shaping our lives and will continue to do so moving forward.
And in a recent blog, he talks about the materials science revolution we’re in the midst of, and how important the semi conductor business is, predicted to be almost $500 billion in 2018.
Apparently, each day, around a hundred terabytes of data are loaded to Facebook and our overall data growth in the next five years is expected to be 80%.
There’s also a great illustration of how materials have advanced in the last 30 years – if we had tried to build a smartphone in 1980, it would have cost around $110 million, been 14 metres tall and required around 200 kilowatts of energy.
How have advances in material technology helped you in your designs? I’d love to know.
Here’s a link to the full blog from Peter if you’d like to read it