Ben Lackey

“The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months—the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.”
― Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

“Evolutionary pressures shaped Homo sapiens to have an average life expectancy of roughly thirty years. The logic is easily understood. “Natural selection favors the genes of those with the most descendants,” explains MIT’s Marvin Minsky. “Those numbers tend to grow exponentially with the number of generations, and so natural selection prefers the genes of those who reproduce at earlier ages.”
― Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

“Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“American Airways grew veggies on Wake Island in the 1930s so that passengers could enjoy leafy greens with their midflight meal—no”
― Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think