Global Health Expert and Data Magician Hans Rosling shows us the best stats we’ve ever seen.
Wow! Not only is the presentation amazing and incredible, the message is totally uplifting as well.
Watch in awe as Rosling’s figures come to life, painting a picture that shows how humans everywhere on earth have seen significant improvements to quality of life over the past few decades.
All the more reason to believe extraordinary things, like world peace, are now entirely within our reach.
Feeling stressed about the state of the world? Maybe the threat of war between Israel and Iran has got you feeling down, or news of an American soldier going ballistic has left you feeling hopeless.
Well, enter X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, to fill you with enough hope and optimism to get you through the week.
According to Diamandis, our brains are adapted to focus on the negative, making it seem as if future is bleak when it’s not.
The reality, however, is that the world is already awesome and it is only going to keep getting better. Not only will our world continue to improve, it will do so at an ever increasing pace.
Awesome stuff! It’s speeches like these that reinforce my belief that world peace is coming and will be here way sooner than most of us believe is possible.
What’s the best way to follow up yesterday’s Carl Sagan inspired post? With more Carl Sagan, of course! In the clip, we see Sagan being interviewed by Ted Turner. Skip to just past the 5 minute mark to hear Dr. Sagan remark:
“More than half the kids in America might be below the poverty line. What kind of future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them. This is stupid!”
To which Turner replies:
“And then what happened with the resources is they went into increasing budgets for arms, isn’t that where the money went?”
Later on, Sagan brings up the exorbitant cost of the now defunct Star Wars program, saying:
“Think of what that money could be used for: to educate, to help, to bring people up to a sense of self-confidence. To improve not just the happiness of people in America, but their economic standing…. We are using money for the wrong stuff.”
The interview happened over 20 years ago, and the words still ring true.
Too many governments around the world are blowing too much money on military budgets. This treasure being squandered doesn’t just appear out of thin air – it comes from the fruits of humankind’s labor.
We don’t need war anymore, and enough of us are finally beginning to recognize this to make a difference. No longer will humankind be fighting each other.
Instead, we’ll keep coordinating and cooperating internationally, working to dismantle the entities responsible for enable large scale conflicts as for-profit businesses.
Since the dawn of human civilization, we’ve been building a peaceful planet. And now, over the next few years, we will get to see the final pieces will come into place as world peace finally arrives. YAY!
Institutions of innovative ideas interacted this week, as Salman Khan, founder of the free online Khan Academy, met up with TED Talks to share his riveting insights into the future of the world’s education systems.
Following highlights from the Academy’s enormous supply of teaching videos used by millions, Khan spoke of his vision to harness the real power of technology to educate the world:
Perhaps most intriguing is Khan’s notion of ‘flipping the script’, where the students are assigned their lectures for outside the class, and they do the assigned homework in class when the instructor is there to help. What a great idea!
The Khan Academy, by providing free, world-class educations to anyone with access to the Internet, truly highlights the power of technology to educate our planet.
With electronic devices growing increasingly cheap and powerful, a fully-connected global population could be feasible within a decade or two. Free, universally accessible, world-class educations would do a lot to level humankind’s playing field.
More importantly, access to the net’s infinitely expanding knowledge base can help the world’s needy find ways to help themselves. The earth’s poorest, when given access to information, can learn new irrigation techniques, find out how to use the sun to make drinking water, or even locate instructions to generate one’s own electricity.
Technology is opening new doors for us all the time and empowering us as a species. Pretty soon, we’ll have a world where no one is starving, and no child dies from easily preventable diseases. This will be fantastic, since each step towards ending extreme poverty brings us that much closer to realizing world peace.
