Editor’s note: Bill Bing is formerly the founder of Durham startup Loyalese and Square 1 Ventures and currently co-founder of DAS Communications. He wrote the following post for ExitEvent, a news partner of WRAL TechWire.
DURHAM, N.C. - Amongst the constant barrage of link-bait and content marketing articles (aka “5 ways successful ____ do ____” aka SPAM) that make up my daily Twitter feed, I came across a link from Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of Singularity University (I attended SU’s 2010 graduate studies program).
To summarize, Space X just announced and showed off its new spaceship, and Peter was able to go on board and hang out with Space X founder Elon Musk. The spaceship is unreal in its design and appearance – it truly is something out of a sci-fi film. In his post Peter writes that, according to Elon, within 15 years people will be able to use the Dragon V2 to make a roundtrip to Mars for $500,000.
Think about that for a minute – flying roundtrip in a spaceship to Mars. In 15 years. My son is 2 years old, so this is not an absurdly far off time period to me. Hell, it could be a high school graduation present… you know, assuming I have a half million dollars lying around taking up space.
Oh yeah, Google just announced its plans to build a fleet of driverless cars a couple of weeks ago, and before that, Amazon confirmed plans to use drones to deliver food and other items people order from them. This is to say nothing of the advances in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, solar energy, and I won’t bore you with additional links or info—you get the idea.
My point is it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day bombardment of information without taking a step back to assess where we are and how much innovation is taking place across a broad variety of fields. The next 10-20 years will be unprecedented in the number and magnitude of breakthrough technologies and developments we see come to fruition. This sounds trite, but it’s truly remarkable.
The biggest challenge we collectively face is figuring out how to manage/govern/regulate these advances.
The full post can be read online.
