X Prize

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

On the other hand, Jim Tighe and the rest of the engineers had to go back to the simulator and wrestle with Melvill's control issues. They needed to demonstrate a clean, controlled flight. A few days after, Tighe had it fixed. It was now up to the pilot to deliver in practice. In between the two SpaceShipOne x PRIZE launches, the x PRIZE staff went back to Los Angeles and Santa Monica for a breather. On the evening of the final launch, Kobrick and Owens were back in the makeshift Mojave X PRIZE office. Maryniak and Angel Panlasigui, then x PRIZE office manager, were preparing all the memorabilia that was to fly as ballast to make up the weight requirement in place of the two other passengers. Kobrick recalled, "When she was getting that ready, she turns to Brooke and myself and said `Hey, is there anything you guys want to fly, something small?'

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Although Ansari had emigrated to the United States from Iran as a teenager, unable to speak a word of English, by the time of her flight she was a successful entrepreneur well known to the space community. Together with her husband, Hamid Ansari, and brother-in-law Amir, the Ansari name became famous when they made a multimillion-dollar pledge in 2004 to the X PRIZE Foundation for its suborbital challenge. The X PRIZE was officially renamed the Ansari X PRIZE in honor of the gift. Ansari's high name recognition further added to the publicity being generated around the private space industry. As each orbital client flew, it gave them and SA global free publicity through millions of media impressions. At the same time, it reignited the waning spaceflight interest of the general public.

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This time, he would need to raise about $15o million to fund a full-scale reusable Roton rocket. Walt Anderson, his primary benefactor, had persuaded Hudson not to enter the Roton in the x PRIZE competition because of personal animosity between Anderson and founder Peter Diamandis. The X PRIZE was a competition to produce the first nongovernment, reusable manned spacecraft and successfully launch it into space twice within two weeks. It carried a $1o million prize. Roton had originally been designed to be an x PRIZE competitor. Turning away from that goal required a dramatic change in the project's focus. Although still advertised as one of the potential vehicles that could be used by Space Adventures on their suborbital flights, Hudson knew he would have to go after the low Earth orbit communication satellite market in order to attract additional investors.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

The billionaire funded a joint venture to build SpaceShipOne and win the X Prize. Allen would eventually put $20 million into the project; he hoped to jump-start a new age of commercial space. In the summer of 2004, the space shuttle was still grounded when Scaled Composites’ sixty-four-year-old test pilot Mike Melvill pulled the lever that dropped SpaceShipOne from its mother ship. He rocketed into space for the first time, reaching an altitude of just over a hundred kilometers. They were the first and indeed only of the rag-tag band of X Prize competitors to actually get to space, but winning the prize required they do so twice in fourteen days.

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As for Musk, he had invested some money in the contest itself, as part of his agenda of keeping the public eye on space projects. But he had never directed his company to participate. A month after the prizewinning flights, he told a reporter that “at the end of the day, it would have been a distraction. I can make more money in contracts and revenues than I could winning the X Prize.” Despite the optimism that the X Prize produced, the reality was that the private rocketeers still lagged behind the US government. After all, Rutan had essentially replicated what the military had done four decades before. The edge of space remained just that—the edge. Getting there was symbolic but hardly monetizable in the way putting a satellite into orbit was.

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“It was a brilliant design for what Rutan was trying to do, and it’s not that traceable to future things other than potentially a suborbital tourist ride,” Griffin, the polymath who had brainstormed with Musk about a private rocket business and joined him on his trip to Russia, told me. “But, you know, the Spirit of St. Louis was not a scalable or traceable design to the Pan Am Clipper.” Even if winning the X Prize was not as impressive as it seemed on its face, the flight of SpaceShipOne provided a compelling counterpoint to a dismal string of recent space disappointments, and a lever to wedge commercial companies into the US space program. Rutan had confronted then–NASA administrator Dan Goldin in person at the X Prize announcement in 1996, asserting that “NASA” should be pronounced “nay say” for its lack of risk-taking. Goldin, who had spent much of his tenure battling just that attitude to get the agency to move faster and accept the chance of failure, could only protest that things had changed.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

The curious-looking vehicle was Rutan’s entrant in the contest known as the Ansari X Prize, which was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won for his epic, across-the-Atlantic flight in 1927. Instead of crossing an ocean, the finish line of the X Prize would be reaching an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the barrier considered the edge of space. The winner of the $10 million contest would have to fly a manned spacecraft to that height, land it safely, and then do it again within two weeks. Another rule was that the spacecraft had to be built with private funds—not government money. The organizers of the X Prize hoped that just as Lindbergh’s flight had touched off a revolution in commercial aviation, their contest would spark a new commercial space movement, one that finally would end the government’s monopoly on space.

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“But paying-man-on-the-street-type passengers, I wanted to leave that to someone else.” Allen would see the X Prize through, but then he was eager to move on to other ventures. So, he sold the rights in a deal worth up to $25 million over fifteen years. Branson, who had added Virgin Galactic to the list of companies he ran under the Virgin brand, quickly had the Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne just in time for its X Prize flights. BY SEPTEMBER, RUTAN’S team was done with test flights and was ready to go for the money. To win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, SpaceShip­One would have to fly to space twice in two weeks, while reusing at least 80 percent of the vehicle.

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Apparently romance isn’t foremost on the mind of these space tycoons, John Gedmark thought. Just out of graduate school, the twenty-three-year-old intern at the X Prize Foundation had the unenviable task of arranging the seating in SpaceX’s cramped conference room. Gedmark had sketched out the seating by hand on a yellow legal pad. Elon was at the head of the table; as host, he earned that right. To his left was Peter Diamandis, the organizer of the Ansari X Prize. Robert Bigelow, the multimillionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, who wanted to build hotels in space, sat across from the Virgin Galactic representatives.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

Two years later, Anousheh Ansari herself became the fourth space tourist when she traveled to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Since then, X Prize challenges have proliferated. After giving a talk at Google, Diamandis was approached by a guy in a T-shirt who said, “Let’s have lunch.” It was Larry Page, the Google CEO, who has since helped extend the scope of the X Prize to address humanity’s broad challenges in health, energy, and the environment. In addition to Larry Page, the board of trustees includes film director James Cameron, media guru Arianna Huffington, and astronaut Richard Garriott. Figure 20. The X Prize and emerging commercial space ventures are keeping NASA on its toes.

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Progress in that decade seemed unstoppable. He thinks that if you’d told someone in 1971 that now we’d be buying rides into space from the Russians, it would have seemed like heresy. In the late 1990s, Rutan approached the billionaire Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen with the idea of competing for the Ansari X Prize. A California foundation had offered $10 million to the first organization to fly a manned spacecraft 100 kilometers high twice in a two-week window. Rutan wanted to avoid the complications of a rocket launch from the ground by using a large airplane to carry the rocket to a moderately high altitude and then letting the rocket do the rest.

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In keeping with his ethos of intuitive, hands-on engineering, Rutan tested the stability of SpaceShipOne by throwing a model off a tower. In June 2004, a crowd of 10,000 people watched Rutan’s mother ship, White Knight, haul SpaceShipOne up into the sky. It became the first manned civilian vehicle to reach an altitude of 100 kilometers. In September of that year, SpaceShipOne won the X Prize with two flights five days apart. The only sour note came with an argument between Rutan and Allen—the investor wanted the press but not the public to see the launch. Rutan wanted to inspire the next generation to do great things. He prevailed, and sixty school buses loaded full of kids saw the historic flight.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Virgin Galactic is currently using the successors to this design to enable commercial space flight, which will cost $250,000 a ticket and is planned for the end of 2014. After the success of the Ansari X Prize, more X Prizes were created. One of X Prize’s current offerings is the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, which will award $10 million to the first team whose handheld medical diagnostic device outperforms ten board-certified physicians. Currently, twenty-one teams are competing for the grand prize. The recently launched X Prize spinoff HeroX takes this model even further, allowing companies to create their own challenges through the HeroX platform to solve local and global challenges.

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Organizations can also use work.com (a Salesforce company), in which gamification is fully integrated, or Keas, which was specifically created to improve employee wellness. Incentive competitions are another form of engagement that has been recently popularized by the X Prize Foundation and others. This engagement technique is typically used to find promising people in the crowd and move them into the community. Competitions are also used to challenge, leverage and motivate the community in order to solicit potentially radical breakthrough ideas. For Peter Diamandis, it all started with the Ansari X Prize, which rewarded $10 million to the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

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Even if the company somehow manages to achieve an impressive level of growth, the scale of its business will quickly outpace its business model and leave the company lost and directionless. Thus, ExOs must aim high. That’s why, when we look at the position statements of existing Exponential Organizations, we encounter statements of purpose that might have seemed outrageous in years past: TED: “Ideas worth spreading.” Google: “Organize the world’s information.” X Prize Foundation: “Bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” Quirky: “Make invention accessible.” Singularity University: “Positively impact one billion people.” At first glance, these statements may seem to align with the trend in recent years to rewrite corporate statements to be shorter, simpler and more generalized.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Those problems disappear, however, if the goals are defined by a peer network as well. That’s exactly the approach taken by the most celebrated sponsor of prize-backed challenges in the modern age: the X Prize Foundation. Now the source of dozens of million-dollar prizes in a wide range of fields, the organization took its original inspiration from the Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for the first successful transatlantic flight. The X Prizes began in the mid-1990s, when the aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis announced a competition that would spur innovation in the then nonexistent private-spaceflight industry.

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(To prove that the solution was a durable one, the prizewinner had to complete the mission successfully twice in two weeks.) Eight years after Diamandis announced the competition, the Ansari X Prize was awarded to the creators of SpaceShipOne, led by aerospace legend Burt Rutan and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Not only did SpaceShipOne break the government monopoly on space travel, it has also helped spur almost $2 billion in public and private funding for the civilian spaceflight industry, just as Lindbergh’s flight helped usher in the age of commercial air travel. Today the X Prize Foundation offers more than $100 million in prize-backed challenges that reward innovation in genomics, personal health care technology, automobile energy efficiency, and oil cleanup.

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Google has cosponsored a $30 million Lunar X Prize for the first group that can successfully land a robot on the moon. The foundation has dozens of prizes in development as well, some of them focused on attention-grabbing feats like space or deep-ocean exploration, but others rewarding breakthroughs in education and the life sciences. The foundation prides itself on the way it develops its new prizes, drawing on a peer network of diverse interests to “ensure the input of a variety of perspectives.” The network of advisers that created the Lunar X Prize included Internet entrepreneurs, technology historians, NASA officials, MIT aeronautics professors, and pioneers in the private-spaceflight industry.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

In addition to SU, Diamandis’s other relevant nonprofit for longevity science is the X PRIZE, which was originally focused on space. The X PRIZE, an incentive prize, began by offering $10 million for “the first privately financed team that could build a three-passenger vehicle and fly it 100 kilometers into space twice within a 2-week period.”24 Since that prize was successfully won by Burt Rutan (backed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen), the organization has branched out to tackle other issues. The second prize is a $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE. Why genomics? As Diamandis puts it, “Our goal is to greatly reduce the cost, and increase the speed of, human genome sequencing.

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27 These are the type of big questions he likes to ask, and he usually does it in the company of big names. When he was interviewed for this book, he had just returned from a “Zero-G” flight with Hollywood director James Cameron and had recently met with X PRIZE Genomics cochair Dr. J. Craig Venter, of Human Genome Project fame. Whether he thinks about it or not, Diamandis is clearly leveraging his relationships to promote the healthy longevity meme. Supporters of the Genomics X PRIZE listed on the organization’s Web site include theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking and former CNN interview show host Larry King. Connected to the cause by Diamandis, both Hawking and King act as salespeople for the cause.28 For instance, Hawking says, “You may know that I am suffering from what is known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which is thought to have a genetic component to its origin.

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It is for this reason that I am a supporter of the $10M Archon Genomics X PRIZE to drive rapid human genome sequencing. This prize and the resulting technology can help bring about an era of personalized medicine.”29 Larry King goes straight to the point when he asks, “What if we could learn how to stop heart disease from happening? What if we were able to reduce a person’s likelihood of cardiovascular disease based on his or her genetic profile, as well as on the individual’s age, gender, and lifestyle?”30 King continues, “It is my hope that by supporting the Archon Genomics X PRIZE to drive rapid human genome sequencing that we can get answers to these questions and help our Foundation save more lives in the years to come.”31 The message is that healthy life extension is possible, and the Genomics X PRIZE is contributing to achieving that goal.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

His lunch partner from Mojave, the irrepressible Burt Rutan, was about to try sending a rocket ship into space on live TV. Stucky tuned in to watch. 4. GOD IS HERE IT ALL STARTED ON A hot St. Louis day in 1996 when Rutan, the head of NASA, and about twenty astronauts gathered near the Gateway Arch to hear an entrepreneur pledge $10 million that he didn’t have. “We are announcing something today called the X Prize,” said the entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis. The rules were simple: $10 million for the first team to put a crewed spacecraft sixty-two miles above the Earth. Twice, within two weeks. Without killing the pilot. Before the end of 2004. No governments allowed. Diamandis modeled the prize on the $25,000 award offered by a New York hotelier in 1919 for the first aviator to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.

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” * * * RUTAN HAD THE brains but not the money, so when he looked out his office window one day at the fancy jet taxiing down the Mojave runway, and saw the airstair unfurl, and saw Paul Allen, one of the richest men in the world, descend, Rutan thought, God is here. Allen had flown in to discuss bankrolling an X Prize team, but he wanted to make it clear that he had no interest in sponsoring a suicide mission. He was a software developer, a profession where, as he wrote in his memoir, “Your worst outcome is an error message.” Rutan agreed. He wasn’t too worried about getting up, but he was deeply concerned about breaking apart on reentry.

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* * * ON OCTOBER 4, 2004, Stucky turned on CNN and sat through an awful series of stories from Iraq about suicide bombings and videotaped beheadings, waiting for the segment about Rutan’s spaceship. Scaled was calling the craft SpaceShipOne, and the mothership, which would carry the spaceship to its launch altitude of about 45,000 feet, White Knight, and now they were on the verge of winning the X Prize. Rutan’s best friend, Mike Melvill, had already flown to space twice—one week earlier, and back in June. The June flight had been historic. Thousands of space enthusiasts showed up. Buses ferried local schoolchildren to the airport. There were tents and RVs everywhere. “Been to two goat ropings and a county fair, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Rutan.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The prize was won but the successful solution was not replicable, and was thus of no use. The X Prize Foundation plans to prescreen all applicants, to reduce the risk of them coming up with prize-winning solutions that won’t generate the intended social impact. That risks deterring the sort of out-of-the-box thinkers that prizes may be the best means to attract, however, though the X Prize Foundation says that it “wants to attract mavericks” and by May 2007 had already received over three hundred expressions of interest in its new automotive prize. The X Prize Foundation insists it will be able to design suitable competition rules.

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The race to win a £20,000 prize offered by the British Parliament in the eighteenth century for a solution to how to measure longitude, and the struggle of clockmaker John Harrison to convince the government-appointed panel that he had won, is described in Dava Sobel’s 1995 bestseller, Longitude. Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927 to win a $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a hotelier. Now they are back in fashion. The breakthrough moment came when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize, created by Peter Diamandis, for the first privately funded space flight. In October 2006, the X Prize Foundation launched its second prize, for genomics: $10 million to the first inventor able to sequence a hundred human genomes in ten days. In March 2007 it launched another $10 million prize, for designing “super-efficient cars that people want to buy.”

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According to Diamandis, offering a prize means that “ten to forty times the amount of money gets spent” trying to solve the problem than is spent on cost of the prize. Transatlantic flyers spent a combined $400,000 to win the $25,000 Orteig prize; the twenty-six teams competing for the $10 million spaceflight prize spent $100 million. Larry Page, one of the Google founders, is a big fan, and has given money to the X Prize Foundation. “Larry says that if he were to give to a university, he’d get about fifty cents on the dollar of value, maybe two dollars if there are matching funds,” says Diamandis. “But he says he gets ten-times leverage by launching a prize, and one-hundred-times leverage by supporting a prize-giving organization.”

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

The problems are like the small ads on the world’s least romantic lonely-hearts website: ‘A technology is desired that produces a pleasant scent upon stretching of an elastomer film’ ($50,000); ‘Surface chemistry for optical biosensor with high binding capacity and specificity is required’ ($60,000). Then there are more glamorous prizes, such as those under the aegis of the non-profit X Prize Foundation. The Archon X Prize for genomics will be awarded to the team that can sequence 100 human genomes within ten days at a cost of $10,000 per genome. That is unimaginably quicker and cheaper than the first private genomic sequencing in 2000, which took nine months and cost $100m for a single human genome.

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The prize-giving model is the same each time. The X Prize Foundation identifies a goal and finds sponsors; it announces a prize and whips up the maximum possible enthusiasm, with the aim of generating far more investment than the prize itself; the prize achieved, it hands out the award with great fanfare and moves on to set other challenges. The prize winner is left with intellectual property intact, and may capitalise on the commercial value of that intellectual property, if any commercial value exists. ‘One of the goals of the prize is to transform the way people think,’ says Bob Weiss, vice-chairman of the X Prize Foundation. ‘We were trying to create a sea-change.’

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Inside it sat a 63-year-old man named Mike Melvill. The age of private space flight – and with it the potential for space tourism – was about to dawn. On the face of it, innovation prizes deserve credit for this epochal event. White Knight was one of two dozen competitors trying to win the Ansari X Prize, created by a non-profit foundation. (Some were unlikely challengers: one team was proudly sponsored by ‘the Forks Coffee Shop in downtown Forks’.) A few months later, when White Knight had flown two qualifying missions in quick succession, Rutan’s team secured the $10 million prize. But that’s far from the whole story.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

The foundation’s suborbital space flight challenge leveraged a $10 million purse into $100 million of team expenditures. But winning an X Prize is only the beginning. “It’s also about launching new industries that attract capital, that get the public excited, that create new markets.” And since the Ansari X Prize was won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen, more than $1 billion has been invested in the suborbital market. Though there has yet to be a commercial flight into space, hundreds of private customers have bought tickets for suborbital flights. Will the Automotive X Prize prove decisive in moving the needle in the same way? It depends on how you measure success.

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To be sure, the challenge of producing a worldwide fleet of electric cars (along with the infrastructure to charge them) is more than one company, and even one country, can do on its own. Indeed, if the X Prize Foundation is successful, there will soon be a dozen low-emission vehicles ready for the mass market and a host of new entrants poised to nibble away at the heels of the automotive industry incumbents. “It’s time to shake things up,” says Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, a unique foundation that organizes large-scale innovation contests as a way to turn nascent ideas into radical breakthroughs that will benefit humanity. “We’re still using the internal combustion engine after a century and we’re still getting twenty miles to the gallon—just like we were forty years ago!”

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After Lindbergh’s nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, the number of people who bought airplane tickets in the United States went from about 6,000 to 180,000 in eighteen months: a thirty-fold increase.18 The first X Prize, modeled after the Orteig Prize, captured the public’s attention in 2004, when the contest awarded $10 million to designer Burt Rutan and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen for building the first privately funded spaceship that traveled 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. Today, the X Prize Foundation is just one of many organizations that have latched on to incentivized challenges as a way to unleash fundamental breakthroughs in society.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

INDEX 23andMe 274, 297–9 42 100, 273 2001: A Space Odyssey 76, 102, 133 A Abengoa Solar 193 activated carbon 216–17 adenine 37–9, 46 aerosols 168–70 af Ekenstam, Robin 103, 104 Africa 252, 253, 302 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil) 274–5 agriculture 221–40, 253 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise 163 AInimals 92, 94, 96, 102–4, 105 algae 187, 210–12 Algenol Biofuels 187, 189 alleles 45, 48 Allen 83, 84 Amundsen, Roald 178 Anderson, Chris 291–5 Andrews, Lori 27 Angier, Natalie 47 Annas, George 27 Ansari X Prize for Spaceflight 135 Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation 208, 210–12 Arcadia 237–8 Arcadia (Stoppard) 281 Archer, David 177 Archon X Prize 50, 51 Aristotle 97 ARPANET 152 Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) 40–1, 51–2 artificial intelligence 73–107 Artificial Intelligence: AI 75 Asimov, Isaac 76–7 augmented reality 162–4 Augustine Commission 136 Australia climate change scepticism 168, 171 farming 221–40 Internet 157 mousepox virus 63–4 autocatalysis 270 B Bacillus subtilis 100, 273 Bacon, Francis 96–8, 99 bacteria 56–7, 61, 302 Bedau, Mark 66, 280 Bedford, James 15 Berners-Lee, Mike 169–70 Berners-Lee, Tim 154, 159 ‘Better World Shopper’ 163 Bezos, Jeff 141 BigDog 84 Bigelow, Robert 137 Billen, Abigail 31 Binney, Don 218 biochar 208–10, 212–20 biofuels 56–7, 61, 186–9, 210–12 biomass 209–10 bionics 14, 29, 301 biotechnology 35–70 bioterrorism 63–6, 68 BioTime 53–4 Birchall, Martin 20 bird flu 69–70 black carbon 169–70 Black Phantom 212–14, 219, 299, 301 Blackburn, Elizabeth 18 Blackstone Ranch 234 Blackwell, Paul 213 Blasco, Maria 18, 19 Blayney 235–7 Blenheim 210–12 blood transfusion 33 Blue Brain 90, 91 Blue Origin 141 Blundell, James 33 Bonaparte, Napoleon 146 Bongard, Josh 95 Boree Creek 237–8 Borman, Frank 135 Boston Dynamics 74–5 Bostrom, Nick 13, 17, 18, 22–31, 62, 65, 66 carbon-chauvinism 102 existential risk 63 and Kurzweil 267, 269 Bourke, Joanna 149 Brand, Stewart 108–9, 128, 270, 276 Branson, Richard 135, 141 Breazeal, Cynthia 76–82, 84–6, 90–2, 94, 101–2, 269, 277–8 Bréon, François-Marie 169 Brin, Sergey 273–4, 297 Broad Institute 40 Broecker, Wallace 173, 174, 177–86 Brooks, Rodney 76, 82, 83–4, 89, 103, 104, 105 Brown, John Seely 156, 282–3, 284–91, 292, 304 Buck, Vicki 207–8, 210–20, 288, 299 Burke, James 160, 161, 162 Burma 157 C C-3PO 76, 83, 102 cadmium 195, 196 California NanoSystems Institute 118 cancer 19, 40–1, 46–7 Candide (Voltaire) 218 carbon cycle 209 carbon dioxide (CO2) 57, 167–8, 170–1, 175–7, 186, 302 and agriculture 228–31, 233–5 biochar 209–10 biofuels 187–9 industrial uses 183–4 carbon nanotubes 110–11 carbon neutrality 243–4, 245 carbon scrubbers 179–85, 259–60, 299 Carbonscape 208, 212–20, 299, 301 carrying capacity 128–9 Castillo, Claudia 19–20, 33 Çatağay, Tolga 273 Catholic Church 106 Cave, Nick 304 Celera Genomics 36 Celsias 208 Cerf, Vint 151–64, 187, 245, 268, 283, 284, 299 Chappe, Abraham 146 Chappe, Claude 146 Chappe, René 146 charcoal 208–10, 212–20 chess 82, 83, 86 China 157, 200 Chomsky, Noam 303 chromosomes 44, 45–6 Chu, John 155 Chui, Alex 15 Church, George biofuels 57, 211 bioterrorism 63, 65–6 genome engineering 52, 56, 60–3, 64, 70, 105, 186–7, 203 genome sequencing 50–1 human genome project 35 human machines 89 IVF 106 and Lackner, Klaus 189 licensing 66–7 Personal Genome Project 36–7, 39, 41–50, 273, 299, 300, 301 Ćirković, Milan 65 cities 250, 252–3 Claramunt, Xavier 137 climate change 143, 164, 167–72, 174–7, 208 and agriculture 228–31, 233–5 Maldives 241–9, 256–62 Northwest Passage 178 Clinton, Bill 35–6 clouds 169 Cobar 231–5 Collins, Mike 135 Collins, Paul 192 Columbia University Medical Center 31 Columbus, Christopher 303 Comer, Gary 177, 178 Commercial Spaceflight Federation 138 Complete Genomics 51 Connections 160 Consortium for Polynucleotide Synthesis 68 Copenhagen Accord 256 Cornell University 93–6, 98–101, 210 couchsurfing.org 158 Coughlan, Anna 221–2, 239–40 Coughlan, Michael 221–2, 239–40 ‘Couldn’t Be Done’ (Tim Finn) 208 Crichton, Michael 122 cryonics 15–16 Cuba 157 cytosine 37–9, 46 D dance 155 De Cari, Gioia 262 de Grey, Aubrey 14, 16, 17–18, 21, 34 ‘Death Clock’ 12–13 deductive reason 97 Deep Blue 82–3 del Cardayré, Stephen 61 Desertec Industrial Initiative 193 Deutsche Bank 193 diatoms 117–18 diesel 56–7 Dijkstra, Edsger 82 DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) 38–9, 40, 297–8 naked 46 nanotechnology 113, 119–20 Parkinson’s disease 273–4 Door into Summer (Heinlein) 142 double helix 38 double pendulum 98–9 Dragon 136 Drexler, Eric 109–17, 125, 127–30, 286, 287, 299, 300 critics 123–4 Grey Goo 121–3 and Kurzweil 268, 269 E E. coli 56–7, 61, 64 E85 cars 188 EasyJet 20 education 284–5, 288 Egypt 157 Ehrenreich, Barbara 303 Eigler, Donald 113, 125 Einhorn, Thomas 31 Einstein, Albert 140 Eisenberger, Peter 184 electricity 285–6 Eliza 86–7 Ember, Carol 147 enhancement 26–9 Endy, Drew 66 energy 191–2, 193–5, 202, 204 fossil fuels 168, 191–2, 193, 302 solar 190–1, 192–3, 195–205, 206, 274, 295, 302 Engines of Creation (Drexler) 109, 110–11, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127–8, 300 Enlightenment 267 Enriquez, Juan 33, 278–82, 293 Eros (Asteroid) 134 Estep, Preston 16 ethanol 187 Ethiopia 199, 200 Etiwanda Station 231–5 Eureqa 101 evolution 70, 105, 279–80, 281–2 existential risk 63 Exxon Mobil 56 EZ-Rocket 142 F Falcon 9 136 farming 221–40, 253 Feynman, Richard 112, 113 Finn, Tim 208 Flannery, Tim 215 flu 64–5, 69–70 Følling’s disease 44, 58 foot-and-mouth disease 68–9 forests 253–4 Forster, E.

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‘Craig Venter’s first complete human genome sequence cost a hundred million dollars, layered on top of the three billion spent by the competing publicly funded effort,’ says George. Yet, as I write, in mid-2010, a firm called Knome (co-founder, George Church) will charge you just under a hundred thousand dollars to do the same. Nine teams worldwide are currently competing for the Archon X Prize in genomics which will award ten million dollars to the first team ‘to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less’ at a cost of ‘no more than $10,000 per genome.’ (I don’t have to tell you who’s leading the team most people figure will win.) But the ambitions of the prize may already seem out of date.

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This heralds diagnoses that go beyond ‘Mr Stevenson, I’m sorry to tell you you have cancer’ to ‘Mr Stevenson, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve sequenced your cancer and therefore we have a personalised set of treatments for you.’ Hopefully I should be able to avoid many conditions altogether by pre-empting them. ‘Imagine the day when you and your doctor sit down to review a copy of your own personal genome,’ says the blurb for the X Prize. ‘This vital information about your biology will enable your physician to inform you of your disease susceptibilities, the best ways to keep yourself healthy and how to avoid or lessen the impact of future illness.’ In the same chapter of The Art of War that talked of the power of personal knowledge in battle, Sun Tzu also wrote, ‘It is best to win without fighting.’

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

To put this in plainer language, experts have said that if the passengers on the space shuttle Challenger had been equipped with Baumgartner’s suit, they might have lived through their midair crack-up. And along just these lines, some six months after Baumgartner’s jump, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo powered up its engines for the first time. SpaceShipOne, you might remember, was the craft that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. This original X Prize was a demonstration project, both proof that a private company could produce an affordable, reusable spaceship and the necessary first step in opening the space frontier. The idea behind SpaceShipTwo is the next step: tourism—taking paying customers on suborbital cruises. And that goal is not far away.

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Danny Way jumped over the Great Wall of China on a shattered limb; Ian Walsh paddled into a wave the size of an apartment building; Dean Potter caught hold of a climbing rope while falling at terminal velocity into the Cellar of Swallows. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke famously told us. Hopefully one thing is now clear—flow is that advanced technology. It is also very disruptive technology—which is exactly what we need right now. In 2011, I cowrote a book with X Prize founder and Singularity University cofounder Peter Diamandis called Abundance. In it, we explore how exponentially growing technology combined with three other emerging forces gives humanity the power to significantly raise global standards of living over the next two to three decades. This is not the place for too much detail, but the most important thing to know is that abundance is not guaranteed.

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FLOW TO ABUNDANCE 187 skydiver Felix Baumgartner was heading: See: www.redbullstratos.com. 188 “Felix is an action sports athlete”: Andy Walshe, AI, April 2013. 189 “At a certain RPM”: John Tierney, “24 Miles, 4 Minutes and 834 M.P.H., All in One Jump,” New York Times, October 14, 2012. 190 lived through their midair crack-up: See Summary Report: Findings of the Red Bull Stratos Scientific Summit, California Science Center, January 23, 2013. Ansari X Prize in 2004: See: www.xprize.org. SpaceShipTwo’s flight was a test burn: “Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Makes Test Flight,” USAToday.com, April 29, 2013. Paying customers going rocket man before 2015: Elizabeth Howell, “Virgin Galactic: Richard Branson’s Space Tourism Company,” Space.com, December 20, 2012. 192 Arie de Geus: Arie de Geus, The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment (Harvard Business Review Press, 2002). 193 “We are the ones”: Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (New Press, 2006).

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

The team wavered in and out of the number one slot; during the final months of the competition, the team was often in the top echelons. There emerges an uncanny parallel to SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded human spaceflight, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize. According to some, this small team, short on resources with a spend of only $25 million, put the established, gargantuan NASA to shame by doing more for so much less. PA competitions do for data science what the X Prize did for rocket science. Mindsourced: Wealth in Diversity [Crowdsourcing is] a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of the work is all that counts.

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Netflix Prize team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos: “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos Is the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize!!!!” September 17, 2009. www2.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/bpc.html. Regarding SpaceShipOne and the XPrize: XPrize Foundation, “Ansari X Prize,” XPrize Foundation, updated April 25, 2012. http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize. Netflix Prize team PragmaticTheory: PragmaticTheory website. https://sites.google.com/site/pragmatictheory/. Netflix Prize team BigChaos: Istvan Pilaszy, “Lessons That We Learned from the Netflix Prize,” Predictive Analytics World Washington, DC, Conference, October 21, 2009, Washington, DC. www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/dc/2009/agenda.php#day2–13.

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See artificial intelligence (AI) airlines and aviation, predicting in Albee, Edward Albrecht, Katherine algorithmic trading. See black box trading Allen, Woody Allstate AlphaGenius Amazon.com employee security access needs machine learning and predictive models Mechanical Turk personalized recommendations sarcasm in reviews American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) American Public University System Ansari X Prize Anxiety Index calculating as ensemble model measuring in blogs Apollo 11 Apple, Inc. Apple Mac Apple Siri Argonne National Laboratory Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Arizona State University artificial intelligence (AI) about Amazon.com Mechanical Turk mind-reading technology possibility of, the Watson computer and Asimov, Isaac astronomy AT&T Research BellKor Netflix Prize teams Australia Austria automobile insurance crashes, predicting credit scores and accidents driver inatentiveness, predicting fraud predictions for Averitt aviation incidents Aviva Insurance (UK) AWK computer language B backtesting.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David
Published 1 Apr 2013

He points out that waste bags tossed out by Apollo crews might make for an interesting biology experiment. Are any microbes still alive among the garbage and human waste left on the moon? If so, can we see evidence of adaptation to the harsh lunar environment? In May 2012 NASA and the X Prize Foundation of Playa Vista, California, announced that the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, is also recognizing NASA guidelines to guard lunar historic sites and preserve ongoing and future science on the moon. I’ve been wondering if one of those teams might have their robot recover Alan Shepard’s golf balls that he hit during his Apollo 14 moon landing mission.

…

(Illustration Credit 3.2) Today the public can experience brief stints of weightlessness without going into space and at relatively reasonable costs, either by high-altitude jet fighter flights or on plane rides such as those offered by the Zero Gravity Corporation. Outreach to Space In 1998 I formally organized the ShareSpace Foundation, asking my good friends and fellow space supporters actor Tom Hanks and Peter Diamandis, Chairman of X Prize Foundation, to serve on an advisory board for the group. The foundation’s mission is to open the space frontier to all by educating new generations, fostering affordable spaceflight experiences, and advocating the quest for exploration. I’m now looking for a future home for ShareSpace as it aims to create a threefold approach to invite the public and our youth to learn about and participate in space via three E’s: experiences, education, and exploration.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Max Kulich’s sketches for the Audi CitySmoother Courtesy of Max Kulich The Architectural Reseasrch Office’s sketches for the Flea Theater in New York Courtesy of Architectural Research Office Joshua Davis’ skethes for IBM Watson Courtesy of Joshua Davis IBM Watson on the Jeopardy set Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television Advent, Thunderbird, Starchaser, Ascender, and Proteus Courtesy of the Ansari X-Prize Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne Courtesy of the Ansari X-Prize Chapter 9 Einstein blouses https://www.google.com/patents/USD101756 Sarah Burton: Kate Middleton wedding dress Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth – WPA Pool/Getty Images Sarah Burton: three dresses from the Autumn/Winter 2011-12 Alexander McQueen ready-to-ware collection Photo by Francois Guillot, AFP, Getty Images Norman Bel Geddes: Motor Coach no. 2, Roadable Airplane, Aerial Restaurant and Walless House Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin © The Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, Inc.

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Wheeler in Burlington, Vermont; inventor Kane Kramer; Tracy Mayhead, technology teacher at the William Law C of E Primary School; Pascale Mussard, artistic director of Hermès Petit h; Chloe Nguyen, Kamal Shah and Erica Skerrett of Rice 360; Michael Pavia of Glori Energy; architect and designer Emily Pilloton of Project H; Allison Ryder and Kevin Young of Continuum Innovations; robotics designers Manuelo Veloso of Carnegie Mellon and Joydeep Biswas of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; and chemist Bayden Wood of Monash University. We would like to especially thank the following people for graciously sharing their work with us: artist Cory Arcangel; the staff of the Ansari X-Prize; Frank Avila-Goldman and Shelley Lee of the estate of Roy Lichtenstein; artist Thomas Barbèy; computer scientist and designer Bill Buxton; Stephen Cassell, Ethan Feuer and Jennifer Wachtel of the Architectural Research Office; sculptor Bruno Catalano; Kwanghun Chung of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; technologist Joshua Davis; journalist Steve Cichon; Sarah Edelman of Alessi S.P.A.; artists Chitra Ganesh and Simone Leigh; Saul Griffith and Diana Mitchell of Otherlab; Alan Kaufman of Nubrella, Inc.; inventor Ralf Kittmann; CheMong Jay Ko of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; designer Jeff Kriege; Per Olag Kristensson of the University of Cambridge and Antti Oulasvirta of Aalto University; designer Max Kulich; furniture maker Joris Laarman; Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Global, LLC; artist Christian Marclay; Mukesh Maheshwari of Ercon Composites; Amy McPherson of Volute; Kirstie Millar of Visual Editions; artist Yago Partal; Sally Radic of the estate of Philip Guston; photographer Jason Sewell; photographer Peter Stigter; Skylar Tibbits of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; JP Vangsgaard of Liquiglide; sculptor Zhan Wang; artist Craig Walsh; and Marjolein Cho Chia Yuen of GBO Innovation Makers.

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/arts/design/the-clock-by-christian-marclay-comes-to-lincoln-center.html?_r=0> Smith, Tony. “Fifteen Years Ago: The First Mass-Produced GSM Phone.” Register. November 9, 2007. Accessed May 11, 2016. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/09/ft_nokia_1011/> Snelson, Robert. “X Prize Losers: Still in the Race, Not Doing Anything, or Too SeXy for The X Cup?” The Space Review. September 26, 2005. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker, 1995. Soble, Jonathan. “Kenji Ekuan, 85; Gave Soy Sauce Its Graceful Curves.”

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

Unless the research is underwritten by a large corporation or by the government, the laser propulsion system will never be built. Here is where the X Prize may help. I once spoke with Peter Diamandis, who created the X Prize back in 1996, and he was well aware of the limitations of chemical rockets. Even SpaceShipTwo, he admitted to me, faced the problem that chemical rockets are an expensive way to escape the earth’s gravity. As a consequence, a future X Prize will be given to someone who can create a rocket propelled by a beam of energy. (But instead of using a laser beam, it would use a similar source of electromagnetic energy, a microwave beam.) The publicity of the X Prize and the lure of a multimillion-dollar prize might be enough to spark interest among entrepreneurs and inventors to create nonchemical rockets, such as the microwave rocket.

…

However, there is one way in which the average person may realistically go into space: as a tourist. Some entrepreneurs, who criticize the enormous waste and bureaucracy of NASA, think they can drive down the cost of space travel using market forces. Already, Burt Rutan and his investors won the $10 million Ansari X Prize on October 4, 2004, by having launched SpaceShipOne twice within two weeks to just over 62 miles above the earth. SpaceShipOne is the first rocket-powered spacecraft to have successfully completed a privately funded venture into space. Development costs were about $25 million. Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen helped to underwrite the project.

…

Water as utility, 7.­1, 7.­2 Water in space, search for, 6.­1, 6.­2 Watson, James, 3.­1, 3.­2 Watson, Thomas Wealth. See Economics Weightlessness problem in space Weiser, Mark, 1.­1, 1.­2 Wells, H. G., 3.­1, 3.­2 Westphal, Christoph What Is Life? (Schrödinger) Wilde, Oscar Wilmut, Ian Wilson, E.­ O.­ Wind power Wisdom WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) Work life in 2100 X-Men movies X Prize, 6.­1, 6.­2 X-­ray lithography X-­ray vision Yoshida, Hiroshi Young, Larry Youth preservation Yucca Mountain waste-­disposal center Yudkowsky, Eliezer Zhang, Jin Zhang, Pei Zubrin, Robert 1.­1 Jeffrey L. Ward 1.­2 Jeffrey L. Ward 1.­3 Daniel Mihailescu/AFP 1.­4 Miguel Alvarez/AFP 2.­1, Top Courtesy of Professor Yann LeCun 2.­1, Lower Left Courtesy of Professor Ashutosh Saxena 2.­1, Lower Right Jason Kempin/WireImage 3.­1 Bruno Vincent/Getty Images 4.­1 Jeffrey L.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna
Published 11 Jan 2011

Where else would we get ideas such as using ocean waves to generate electricity, feeding atmospheric CO2 to algae to produce biofuel, floating sulfur-dioxide balloons into the stratosphere to reflect more sunlight, and engineering giant parachutes to pull supertankers across the ocean? Competitions like those sponsored by the X-Prize Foundation are not a silver bullet but a symbol of the revolution in incentives under way to innovate solutions to problems that world leaders could never otherwise solve. We need more X-Prize competitions and fewer proposals for a toothless World Environment Organization. One of the enduring images frequently deployed to capture the planetary crisis is of a lone polar bear stranded on a tiny floating ice patch.

…

The goal is not to find a single breakthrough, but to create an innovation space such as the GreenXchange, in which Nike, Best Buy, Yahoo!, and Salesforce operate an online commons to track and share eco-innovations seeking investment. Nobody holds a monopoly on providing incentives to those interested in saving the planet. Companies and charities together fund huge competitions such as Coke’s clean water prize and the X-Prize, which awards $250 million in prizes across fifteen areas but has inspired $2.5 billion in investment among the competing teams to find solutions to cancer, emission-free driving, and human genome sequencing. Richard Branson has put $25 million into a “Carbon War Room” to fund emissions reductions in “battle theaters” such as industrialization, transport, electricity, and deforestation.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

A Harvard- and MIT-educated medical doctor and aerospace engineer, Diamandis “gave up on NASA” and resolved to become the Commodore Vanderbilt of outer space. He founded the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, to promote private-sector space exploration. Later, he established the X Prize Foundation, which awarded cash to teams competing to solve various technical challenges such as prototyping “universally accessible” personal helicopters or landing an entirely privately funded robot on the moon, as stipulated by the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Like a lot of lucky, wealthy people, Diamandis had developed some curious ideas about why some people are rich and others poor, and about the secrets to success in business.

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Tradehill TripAdvisor Trump, Donald Tumblr Tunney, Justine 20Mission 23andMe Twitch.tv Twitch Partners Twitter Uber Udacity Ulbricht, Ross Union Square Ventures Urbit Vanity Fair van Oudenaarden, Tom VC Taskforce Verge Verizon Vice Vinge, Vernor von Bolschwing, Otto Wagon Wallis, Stewart Wall Street Journal Week, The Wells Fargo WhatsApp Whetstone, Rachel White Ops Whitesides, George T. Wikipedia Wilders, Geert Wilson, Déa Wink Wired Wolff, Stephen S. Worldwide Developers Conference Wozniak, Steve Xerox X Prize Foundation Yahoo Yarvin, Curtis Guy Y Combinator Yelp YouTube YouTube Kids Zachary, Gregg Pascal Zenefits Zuckerberg, Mark ZunZuneo Zynga About the Author Corey Pein is an investigative reporter and a regular contributor to The Baffler. A former staff writer for Willamette Week, he has also written for Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

“The “let's just go and do it” mentality will help us finally get off the planet and irreversibly open the space frontier. The capital and tools are finally being placed into the hands of those willing to risk, willing to fail, willing to follow the dreams.” (Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation and CEO of the company Planetary Resources.) Of course this twenty-first century breakthrough that we call the New Space economy will not come just from new space commerce. It will also come from the amazing new technologies here on Earth. Vital new terrestrial technologies will accompany this cosmic journey into tomorrow.

…

Konstantin Tsiokovsky, the Russian astronautics pioneer, who first conceived of practical designs for spaceships, famously said: “A planet is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” Well before Tsiokovsky another genius, Leonardo da Vinci, said, quite poetically: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” The founder of the X-Prize and of Planetary Resources, Inc., Dr. Peter Diamandis, has much more brashly said much the same thing in quite different words when he said: “The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will go to Mars.” The New Space Billionaires Peter Diamandis is not alone in his thinking. From the list of “visionaries” quoted earlier, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX; Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic; and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and the man who financed SpaceShipOne, the world’s first successful spaceplane have all said the future will include a vibrant new space economy.

…

The terms “the Singularity ” and “Abundance” are used interchangeably throughout this book to refer to breakthrough technologies and the rise of super intelligence that are presumed to accelerate global innovation and the means to cope with problems of all types, from clean energy to climate change to overpopulation. It was Ray Kurzwiel, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) guru, who popularized the term Singularity. Dr. Peter Diamandis, who in cooperation with others founded the International Space University and then went on to found the Singularity University and also breathed life into the wonderful X-Prize initiative, simply calls it “abundance.” And before him R. Buckminster Fuller called it “transcendence.” No matter what you call it, the idea is to go ahead and think outside the box. Indeed the trick is to think outside the limits of the 6 sextillion-ton spaceship we call Planet Earth. Fuller, Kurzweil, Diamandis and other space enthusiasts, including the authors, are trying to convince our economic and political leaders that the trick is to think outside constraints of the current world economic systems and the resources we have trapped within the orb we call Earth.

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

There has already been one of those this century, and it was at best only a heavily qualified success. Announced in 2007, the Google Lunar X Prize offered $20m to the first company to land a rover on the Moon and send back high-definition video, with a variety of smaller prizes for achievements on the way to that goal. Although the original deadline was relaxed, no one won it; in early 2018, the prize was cancelled. Some of the competitors, though, are running still; SpaceIL, which is behind the Israeli mission launched in early 2019, and iSpace, the Japanese team which plans to launch an orbiter in 2020 and a lander in 2021, are Google Lunar X Prize veterans, as are MoonExpress and Astrobotic in the United States.

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That which is easily spread can only be gathered in with much ado. There are already worries about preserving some or all of the Apollo landing sites in their current, abandoned and historic state in the face of the visits that will surely come. Such concerns led to a $1m bonus prize for visiting a historic site that was originally part of the Google Lunar X Prize to be withdrawn. In “Artemis” (2017) by Andy Weir, a novel which makes a strong case for tourism as the most plausible basis for a lunar economy, the main draw is a trip to the visitor centre at Tranquility Base, where visitors can gaze in awe at the landed Eagle and the first footsteps. On Mr Varley’s Moon, frat boys from Delta Chi Delta trash Tranquility Base, but re-enactors armed with patience, robots and meticulously digitalized photographs put it back just the way it had been, re-creating each of Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s steps in replica moonboots and being winched out by a crane when they were finished.

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program
by Melvin Croft , John Youskauskas and Don Thomas
Published 1 Feb 2019

Two aerospace companies—Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin—are developing two radically different designs for passenger-carrying spacecraft intended to (initially) launch fare-paying thrill seekers on brief suborbital flights above one hundred kilometers, which is the generally accepted definition of “space.” Virgin Galactic, owned by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, partnered with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and the Spaceship Company of Mojave, California, to produce SpaceShipTwo. In 2004 Rutan and his team claimed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, after successfully launching the prototype SpaceShipOne three times above the 328,000-foot mark utilizing an air-dropped, rocket-powered, composite-hulled airplane. The design featured a unique feathering mechanism of the twin-boomed tail that allowed a relatively benign, hands-off reentry into the atmosphere, with minimal frictional heating.

…

According to the company’s website, “Our frequent flight schedule will allow you to launch your experiment multiple times to iterate on findings, improve statistics, or rapidly collect data. As human flights begin, you’ll also be able to fly with your payloads for hands-on experimentation.” Each of the designs has its own unique benefits in terms of flight environment and safety. Though these two competing projects have been in the works since the success of the X-Prize flights, they have been met with many challenges that have precluded the initiation of this new industry of private space travel. The first SpaceShipTwo built, christened VSS Enterprise, was lost in a tragic accident during a powered test flight on 31 October 2014, killing test pilot Michael Alsbury and critically injuring Pete Seibold, who miraculously survived after being hurled out of the disintegrating vehicle at supersonic speeds.

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See SAFSP (Secretary of the Air Force Special Projects) air locks, 67–68, 111, 114, 153, 296, 330 Al-Bassam, Abdulmohsen Hamad, 262, 264, 266–67, 275 Aldridge, Edward “Pete,” 168, 199, 201–2, 203, 340, 360, 364, 369 Aldrin, Buzz, 131 Algranti, Joe, 92 Allen, Joseph, 15, 23 Aller, Robert, 21–22 Al-Mashat, Ali, 262–63 Al-Saud, Salman Abdulaziz, 272, 391; background of, 262, 266–67; on launch, 257–58; as Muslim, 264, 270, 272; as payload specialist, 139, 258–59, 267–69, 270–73; post-astronaut career of, 274–76; selection of, 263–64, 265–66 Alsbury, Michael, 387 altitude chambers, 15, 19–20, 39–40, 345 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 361 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), 235 Americom satellite, 293 Anderson, Michael P., 378–79 anemia, 228, 238, 293 animals in space, 113, 114, 118–19, 148–49 Ansari X-Prize, 386 Apollo missions, 13, 79, 227, 367, 385 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, 88, 206, 227, 241–42 Arab League, 258–59, 262–63 Arab Organization for Education, Science, and Culture, 262 Arabsat (Arab Satellite Communications Organization), 262 Arabsat satellite, 258–59, 262–63, 272 Arab States Broadcasting Union, 262 Arab Telecommunication Union, 262 Aramco, 266–67 Armor, James B., Jr., 195, 221 Armstrong, Neil, 357 Arnold, Ricky, 385 ASSESS (Airborne Science/Spacelab Experiments System Simulation), 17 Association of Space Explorers, 274, 337 Astro-1, 154, 369, 370, 371 Astronaut Office, 163, 169, 283, 313, 352, 365 astronauts: Canadian, 85–87, 101–2; European, 57, 61–62, 138–39, 143, 150, 153–54, 262; Mexican, 277–80.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

You may not know the answer to a question, and your friends may not—but if they repeat your question, odds are their friends will, because once you’ve moved out to the third ring on your social network you’re dealing with scores or even hundreds of people. This creates some spectacular feats of collective answering. Peter Diamandis, the head of the X Prize Foundation, was wondering about the viability of mining asteroids—which led him to speculate on the total volume of gold ever mined on Earth. He did a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate, then posted it as a status update: “Total gold ever mined on Earth is 161,000 tons. Equal to ~20 meters cubed . . . pls check my math!!”

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Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973): 1360–80, accessed March 26, 2013, sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/granstrengthweakties.pdf; Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10–22, 51–53. what Malcolm Gladwell called connectors: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2000), 38–41. Peter Diamandis, the head of the X Prize Foundation: Peter H. Diamandis, “Instant Gratification,” in Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future, ed. John Brockman (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 214. Facebook’s news feed analyzes: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York, Penguin, 2011), 37–38, 217–43.

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See also blogging audience effect, 52–58, 67 cognitive benefits of, 51–61, 75 compared to writing in past, 48–50, 67–68, 71–72, 104–5 daily volume of, 46–47 debate-oriented, 68–72 fan fiction, 47–48, 51, 153–55 marginalia, 82 quality of, 48 question-answering sites, 72–77 for student writing instruction, 185–88 text messaging, 66–67 tummlers, role of, 79–80 word processors, benefits of, 99 writing skills, digital instruction, 184–88, 191–92 written word access techniques, 120–22 historical view, 116–20 index for, 121 libraries, 121–22 and note taking, 120–21 Socrates view of, 68–69, 117–18 Xbox, 91 X-Files (TV show), 154 xkcd, 116 X Prize Foundation, 230 Yahoo! Chinese dissident identified by, 273, 277 Yahoo Answers, 74 Yeats, William Butler, 52 Ye Mengde, 118 Yglesias, Matt, 78 YouBeMom, 76, 241 YouTube abusive comments on, 80 face blurring tool, 274 MadV videos, 101 Zalinger, Jason, 43–44 Zimmerman, George, 264–65 Zittrain, Jonathan, 242 Zuckerberg, Mark, 237 Zuckerman, Ethan, 63, 275

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline
by Cathy O'Neil and Rachel Schutt
Published 8 Oct 2013

In 2002, the TV network Fox issued a prize for the next pop solo artist, which resulted in the television show American Idol, where contestants compete in an elimination-round style singing competition. There’s also the X-prize company, which offers “incentivized prize competitions…to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefits of humanity, thereby inspiring the formation of new industries and the revitalization of markets.” A total of $10 million was offered for the Ansari X-prize, a space competition, and $100 million was invested by contestants trying to solve it. Note this shows that it’s not always such an efficient process overall—but on the other hand, it could very well be efficient for the people offering the prize if it gets solved.

…

Josh is also known for pithy data science quotes, such as: “I turn data into awesome” and the one we saw way back in the start of the book: “data scientist (noun): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.” Also this gem: “I am Forrest Gump, I have a toothbrush, I have a lot of data and I scrub.” Josh primed his topic with a thought experiment first. Thought Experiment How would you build a human-powered airplane? What would you do? How would you form a team? Maybe you’d run an X prize competition. This is exactly what some people did, for $50,000, in 1950. It took 10 years for someone to win it. The story of the winner is useful because it illustrates that sometimes you are solving the wrong problem. Namely, the first few teams spent years planning, and then their planes crashed within seconds.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More
by Charles Kenny
Published 31 Jan 2011

Another approach is that of using prizes to provide an incentive to research. Prizes played a role in the development of accurate timepieces required to measure longitude at sea; they also provided the incentive for Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic nonstop. More recently the model has been exploited by the X-Prize Foundation, which offered $10 million to the first company to launch a reusable three-passenger vehicle one hundred kilometers into space twice within two weeks. The foundation is already working to develop a prize based around the creation of a cheap and effective diagnostic tool for tuberculosis and is considering a range of prizes in education.

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(Pritchett) White Man’s Burden, The (Easterly) Women educating in diarrhea treatment gender equality for improved maternal and child health services income and reproductive health practices literacy rates for offering scholarships to girls TV’s effect on fertility rates of views of educated violence against voting rights of World Bank World Health Assembly World Health Organization World Intellectual Property Organization World Trade Organization X-Prize Foundation Zhan, Zhaoguo Copyright © 2011 by Charles Kenny All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg
Published 13 Apr 2017

But it may be possible to discern the largest trends and most obvious changes to human life and today’s civilization. IN DEFENSE OF CONDITIONAL OPTIMISM Peter Diamandis, the author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, has been a lightning rod for both hope and praise and unbridled criticism. As an entrepreneur and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, he is an unapologetic advocate for technology and its benefits to humanity. Reading his book is a superb antidote to arguments that condemn civilization to irreversible disaster, either from climate change, food and water shortages, civil unrest, or, likely, a terrible combination of them all.

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See also individual cities free economic zones in, 64–65, 75 GDP of, 62 multinational interest in, 63–64 new cities in, 19, 23 obesity in, 173 urban population growth of, 19 Streetline, 152 Success, recognizing, 214–15 Surveillance systems, 110, 111, 117, 203–4, 205–6 Sustainability, 174–75, 185, 199–200 T Telepresence (TP), 55, 77, 83, 193–95, 210 Tianfu Software Park, 104–6 Tomorrow City, 67–68 Townsend, Anthony, 66, 176, 178, 180, 186 Transcontinental Railroad, 188 Transport, importance of, 182–84, 189 Travel, future of, 201–2 Trias, Xavier, 151 Tsunami warning systems, 203–4 U U-Life, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81–82, 193 United Arab Emirates, 41, 47, 183. See also individual cities U.S. Green Building Council, 78 W Wang Lijun, 112 Washington, D.C., 184 Water, 197 Worksites, remote, 166–67, 201–2 World Bank, 171 X X Prize Foundation, 196 Z Zhejiang University, 114, 203 ZTE Corporation, 117 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK was born out of my desire to tell the story of building smart cities from the perspective of a small group of men and women in a multinational company. An idea and value proposition developed and incubated by a small team in Saudi Arabia and Dubai in 2005–2006 has since swept the globe and become a large industry, setting the standard for a better, more sustainable urban future.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
by Robert Bryce
Published 16 Mar 2011

In 1919, a hotelier named Raymond Orteig offered $25,000 to the 278 GUSHER OF LIES first pilot who could fly nonstop between New York and Paris. Eight years later, a previously unknown American named Charles Lindbergh collected that prize.67 More recently, aviation whiz Burt Rutan, backed by billionaire Paul Allen, collected the $10-million Ansari X Prize, which was offered to the first privately built vehicle that could fly to the edge of space, return to earth, and repeat the feat within two weeks. In 2004, their creation, SpaceShipOne, made two trips into low-earth orbit, and Rutan and Allen claimed the $10-million prize. In doing so, they ushered in an era of privately financed spaceflight.68 In early 2007, British billionaire Richard Branson offered a prize (called the Virgin Earth Challenge) that relates directly to energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions: He offered $25 million to anyone who could invent a technology that would remove 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere.69 And while Branson’s prize is laudable, a better solution would be one that prevents the release of carbon dioxide.

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Available: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/ articles/1014biz-algae1014.html. 65. Paul Israel, Edison, 410–421. 66. Credit to Vaclav Smil for first suggesting this idea. 67. http://www.charleslindbergh.com/plane/orteig.asp. 68. Leonard David, “SpaceShipOne Wins $10 Million Ansari X Prize in Historic 2nd Trip to Space,” Space.com, October 4, 2004. Available: http://www .space.com/missionlaunches/xprize2_success_041004.html. 69. John Tierney, “A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan,” New York Times, February 13, 2007. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/ science/earth/13tier.html?

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., 26, 68, 267 Allen, Paul, 278 Allowables, 89, 90, 91, 93 Al-Qaeda, 30–31, 33, 73, 264 and Iraq, 57 and Saudi Arabia, 56, 241 Alternative fuels, 7–8, 9, 44–45, 60–66, 116 and thermodynamics, 126–128 See also Renewable fuels American Coalition for Ethanol, 162 American Fuels Act of 2007, 158–159 Andreas, Dwayne, 151, 152–155 Andreas, Mick, 151 Angola, 75 Annan, Kofi, 81 Ansair X Prize, 278 ANWR. See Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Apollo Alliance, 4, 121 Arab cultural knowledge, 265–266 Arabic language, 265 Arab-Israeli war (1973), 67 Arab oil embargo, 66–69 and fuel shortages, cause of, 93, 95–96 of 1973, 67–68, 78–79, 93, 95–96 Arab world engagement with, 266, 288 oil price collapse in, and reform of, 71–76 Archer, Bill, 154 Archer Daniels Midland Co.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

They pledged to divert to this foundation one percent of Google’s profits, with three goals: to ascertain the quality of water and health care and other services country by country; to gather enough information to try to predict and prevent catastrophes, whether these be forces of nature or disease; and to make energy-renewable investments. Page and Brin sound more like social workers than hardheaded businessmen when they extol Google Earth as a vehicle to spot imminent disasters and offer to make “a gift” of this technology to disaster relief organizations. Google put up thirty million dollars to fund the X Prize Foundation’s Google Lunar X Prize, which would be awarded to the private team that designs the best robotic rover to traverse the moon’s surface and send high definition video images back to earth. Google also launched Google Health, an effort much like the one announced by Microsoft and by AOL cofounder Steve Case’s Revolution Health Group LLC.

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See Federal government Kamangar, Salar Karmazin, Mel first visit to Google on Google ads on new media satellite radio problems Katzenberg, Jeffrey Kedar, Ruth Kelly, Kevin Kennedy, Jim Keywords advertiser bidding on advertising relevance to Khosla, Vinod Kindle Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Knol, encyclopedia Kordestani, Omid on expansion of Google as Google billionaire on Google founders role at Google Kotick, Bobby games business in China Krane, David Lack, Andrew Lashinsky Adam Law of increasing returns Lawsuits Authors Guild Viacom Yahoo Lee, Alissa Lee, Kwan Lemann, Nicholas Lerer, Kenneth Lessig, Lawrence Levinson, Arthur Libraries book digitization partners complaints against Google Link analysis Lippman, Andrew B. Lively Loudcloud Lunar X Prize McAndrews, Brian McCaffrey Cindy McCain, John MacFarlane, Seth Mack, Connie McNamee, Roger Magazines/magazine ads decline of online, increase in readers outlook for future Mahalo.com Malseed, Mark Management at Google as controlled chaos emulation by others executive management meetings as networked management orchestra conductor metaphor Stanford University as model structure, development of turnover 2009, weaknesses See also Schmidt, Eric Marketing companies Massage program Mayer, Marissa dating Page on Google founders hiring of role at Google Media companies Innovator’s Dilemma trap wave makers versus wave riders See also New media; Old media Meeker, Mary Meetings executive management product strategy Mehdi, Yusuf Metered payments Micropayments Microsoft anti-Microsoft tribe Bing search engine Cashback failure criticism of Google and Facebook versus Google Live Search monopoly charges Passport and personal data profit-making mission Yahoo bid Millard, Wenda Harris Mills, Elinor Mobile phones Android platform Google Voice new media ventures of smart phones Monopoly and Google and Microsoft Moonves, Les Moore’s law Moritz, Michael and Campbell on CEO, need for as investor on IPO on value of Google view of Schmidt Motwani, Rajeev on Google founders role at Google on Schmidt Mountain View Bayshore Parkway facility Mountain View Googleplex culture of expansion of facilities of See also Google employees Movie industry complaints against Google decline, causes of new media ventures of piracy problem Mozilla MTV Networks MTV Overdrive Murdoch, Rupert acquisitions of MySpace acquisition outlook for newspapers Quarterlife Music companies album sales, drop in disruption by digital wave new media companies Musicstation.com Myers, Jack Myhrvold, Nathan P.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

“In 1984, thirty base pairs”—thirty rungs on the helical ladder of six billion nucleotides that make up our DNA—“was a good month’s work,” Church told me. “Now it takes less than a second.” Craig Venter, who knows as much about how to sequence a genome as anyone, agrees. “I spent ten years searching for just one gene,” he said. “Today anyone can do it in fifteen seconds.” Indeed, the X Prize Foundation has offered $10 million to the first group that can sequence one hundred human genomes in ten days at a cost of $10,000 or less per genome. As many as two dozen teams are expected to compete. In 2007, seizing on the cascade of genetic information that had suddenly become acessible, deCODE and two California companies, 23andme and Navigenics, began to sell gene-testing services directly to consumers.

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Craig- Viagra VIGOR (Vioxx Gastrointestinal Outcomes Research) study- Vilsack, Tom Vioxx: benefits of as blockbuster drug congressional hearings on deaths attributed to and FDA and heart attacks introduction of and Merck- promotion of and public trust studies of taken off the market viruses: bringing the dead back to life manipulation of multiplying research on synthesis of as ubiquitous vitamin A vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E Voltaire Vowell, Denise Vytorin Wakefield, Andrew Walpole, Robert warfarin Washington, George water, and agriculture Watson, James Waxman, Henry Weeks, John Weil, Andrew Weldon, Dave Wells, H. G. Whole Foods Organics and you Whole Foods Credo whooping cough Williams, Wendy M. Wimmer, Eckard Windaus, Adolf Winfrey, Oprah Wired Wolpert, Lewis Women’s Health Initiative woolly mammoth World Bank World Food Program World Health Organization (WHO), and vaccinations X Prize Foundation yellow fever Zulu, Winstone ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Specter writes about science, technology, and global public health for the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1998. Specter previously worked for the New York Times as a roving correspondent based in Rome, and before that as the Times’s Moscow bureau chief.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

The microwave oven was a success not just because of the radical leap from military communications to cooking, but also because lots of researchers from Amana, Litton, and their Japanese competitors worked on the design and improved the technology of the magnetron. Sometimes this coordination happens spontaneously. But we can also think of things that help it along. Prizes, like the eighteenth-century Longitude Prize or the twenty-first-century Ansari-X Prize for private spaceflight, can help crowd investment into a neglected area. No doubt, part of the reason the technology press hypes new technologies, like the Internet of Things or solar energy, is not only because it makes for more exciting stories, but because it also has a functional role of drawing attention to up-and-coming areas and encouraging coordinated investment.

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INDEX accounting, treatment of intangibles in, 202–4 advertising spending, 50 Aghion, Phillipe, 41, 62, 173 AirBnB, 24, 51; contestedness and, 115; legal travails of, 187; scalability of, 67; and synergies, 82 Akzo Nobel, 167 Allen, Robert, 83 Amana, 80, 85, 183 Amazon, 111, 191, 194–95, 197 American Airlines, 49 Andreessen, Marc, 23 Andrews, Dan, 96 Angry Birds, 65 Ansari-X Prize, 85 Anslow, Louis, 127 Appert jar, 64 Apple, 23–24, 51, 87, 104; and spillovers, 72–73, 110; and synergies, 86 applied knowledge, 65 Arrow, Kenneth, 62, 147 Arthur, Brian, 62, 80 assets, definition of, 19–21 Atkinson, Anthony, 118 Atlas, Charles, 18 authority, of managers, 189 automated bank teller machines, 127 Autor, David, 123 Awano, Gaganan, 56 banking, 158–59, 162–66 Barth, Mary, 204 basic knowledge, 65 Baumol, William, 28 Baumol’s Cost Disease, 28 Beatles, the, 59, 61, 240 Bell, Daniel, 4 Beniger, James, 30 Berliner, Joseph S., 195 Bernstein, Shai, 171, 172 Bessen, James, 114–15, 127 Black Cap pub, 150 Blaug, Mark, 54 blocking patents, 113–14 Bloom, Nicholas, 82, 129, 195 Bodypump®, 17–18, 21 Bonnet, Odran, 128 Bono, Pierre-Henri, 128 Boulevard of Broken Dreams, The (Lerner), 178, 220 Braggion, Fabio, 132–33, 134 branding, 49, 76 Brexit, 122, 141–42, 143 British Airports Authority (BAA), 1–2 British Airways, 49 British Coachways, 162 Brooker, Charles, 183 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 30, 82, 123 Buffet, Warren, 19 Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), 39–41, 244n3 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 76 Bush, Vannevar, 232 business climate, changes in, 31–34 Callaghan, James, 127 capital, 10; definition of, 19–21; human, 54, 119; social, 156, 236 Capital (Marx), 126 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 19, 121, 128, 136 capitalism, 158, 243n3 capitalization, versus expensing, 202–4 Chapelle, Guillaume, 128 Chen, Ester, 204 Chesbrough, Henry, 83 Citibank, 40 Clayton, Tony, 42 clusters, 147–48, 235–36 Coase, Ronald, 190–91, 192 Coca Cola Company, 9–10, 49 code of laws, of Ur-Nammu, 75 codified knowledge, 65 Collecchia, Alessandra, 40 collective intelligence, 217 ComCab, 82 competitive advantage, 185–87 computerized information, 43–45 Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, 4, 42 contestedness, 87–88, 115, 132; venture capital and, 177 Cook, Tim, 51 copyright, 76–79, 165, 213 Corbyn, Jeremy, 223 Corrado, Carol, 4, 5, 42, 43, 45 cost of intangible investment, 28 Cowen, Tyler, 93, 228 Coyle, Diane, 4, 36 “creative class,” the, 215 Criscuolo, Chiara, 96 crowdfunding, 166 CT scanners, 59–61, 104, 204 cult of the manager, 184 Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, 79 DARPA, 218, 226–27, 232 data, 63 David, Paul, 151–52 Davies, Richard, 168 de Soto, Hernando, 153 Digital Copyright Exchange, 213 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 76 Dillow, Chris, 110, 136, 188 disbenefits, 79 Disney, 78–79, 209 diversified investors, 205 Dodgson, Mark, 197 Doerr, John, 176 Domesday Book, 2–3 dot-com bubble, 4, 42, 145–46 Downing, Kate, 148 DunnHumby, 23 economic competencies, 43–45 economies of scale, 185 Edgerton, David, 146 Edmans, Alex, 170, 171, 172–73 education and training, 51–52, 170, 228–30 Einstein, Albert, 127 e-mail, 217 EMIDEC computer, 59 EMI Records, 59–61, 104, 204 employment strictness, 32 End of Accounting, The (Lev and Gu), 201, 220 endogenous growth theory, 62 Engelbart, Douglas, 217 Enron, 42 Entrepreneurial State, The (Mazzucato), 232 EpiPen, 85–86, 112, 239 Ericsson, 104 esteem, inequality of, 122–23, 141–42; intangibles’ effects on, 129–40 expensing, versus capitalization, 202–4 Facebook, 34, 67, 170, 175, 217, 222 Fang, Vivian W., 171 fast followership, 110 Federal Reserve.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

Today the entrepreneurial spirit of your very own employees, customers, and partners – empowered by new technologies – can literally change the world. X PRIZE has proven the value of jugaad by leveraging this bottom-up approach of “better, faster, cheaper” to the point of sending a man into space for a fraction of what NASA spends. This compelling new book, Jugaad Innovation, articulates how you can start to accomplish amazing things on a shoestring. It is a vital read.’ – Peter H. Diamandis, Founder and Chairman, X PRIZE Foundation ‘Jugaad Innovation throws cold water in the faces of CEOs, reminding them of the immense power of grassroots, do-it-yourself, cheap, quick, simple innovation.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs
by Gina Keating
Published 10 Oct 2012

Scientists at the Loomis lab raced to make breakthroughs in radar and nuclear fission that would change the course of World War II; Hastings hoped the results of the Netflix Prize would come fast enough to put an end to the war with Blockbuster. He favored a contest along the lines of the 20,000-pound Longitude Prize, awarded in 1714 by the British government to the developers of a method for measuring longitude at sea, or the $10 million Ansari X Prize awarded in 2004 to the developers of the first reusable civilian spacecraft. The $1 million cash prize would go to the first team to improve Cinematch’s predictive powers by 10 percent, with $50,000 Progress Prizes awarded to the leaders at each anniversary of the contest’s start date. The contest would be open to anyone of any educational level and background, from any country allowed to do business with the United States.

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A ABC Media Player, 166 Accenture, 92, 95–96, 104, 107 Adams, Tom, 113 Aintitcool.com, 38 Allmovie.com, 31 Amazon Blockbuster alliance attempts, 95–96, 126 cross-promotion with Netflix, 47, 50 DVD rental service, 103, 125–26, 162 visitors, number of, 103 Ansari X Prize, 187 Antioco, John. See also Blockbuster background of, 72, 110–11 and Blockbuster Online, 89, 91–95, 104–5 Blockbuster’s future, plans for, 77–78, 112–13 Blockbuster turnaround by, 73–79 Carl Icahn disagreements with, 115–16, 120–21, 123–24, 151–52, 160, 170–71, 205–10 compensation/bonuses, 112, 123, 152, 205–7 credit agreements, revising, 154, 157, 209 DVD revenue-sharing agreements, 60–61 and Hastings alliance attempts, 66–67 leaves Blockbuster, 208–10 online subscribers, Hastings offer for, 181–82, 204–5 personality of, 71–72 sells Blockbuster shares, 219 video streaming, early plans for, 77–78 AOL, Blockbuster alliance attempt, 95–96 Apollo 13 founding story, 3–4 Blockbuster restriction, 169 as untrue, 6 Apple, 39 Arnault, Bernard, 53 Artisan Entertainment, 79 AT&T Labs, 188–89, 195–96 B Backer, Marla, 209 Becker, Jessie, 64, 252 Bell, Robert, 188–96 BellKor, 190–96 Bennett, James, 187, 194 Bernays, Edward, 17 Best Buy, 51 Bevin, Bryan, 159, 177, 217 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 241 Bezos, Jeff, 96.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
by Tony Robbins
Published 18 Nov 2014

According to an NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, 76% of Americans—an all-time record—think that their children’s lives will be worse off than their own! But you’re going to get an insider’s look at what’s coming from some of the most brilliant minds of our time. We’ll hear from my friends Ray Kurzweil, the Edison of our age, and Peter Diamandis, creator of the X Prize, about new technologies coming online: 3-D printers that will transform your personal computer into a manufacturing plant, self-driving cars, exoskeletons that enable paraplegics to walk, artificial limbs grown from single cells—innovations that will dramatically change our lives for the better in the very near future.

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If he wants, he can access free courses in economics from Yale and math from MIT. We’re living in a whole different universe now, and we’re just at the beginning of the beginning. And things are getting better, faster, every day. “The future is going to be a whole lot better than you think,” says my dear friend Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, aerospace engineer, medical doctor, entrepreneur, and all-around great human being. “Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation, in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.” What does this mean for you?

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It’s always a privilege to spend time with either of these extraordinary men. They provide a window into a future reality that few on earth can even bear to imagine, and they work every day to make that world a reality. Ray and Peter, you absolutely blow me away, and it’s been a privilege to partner with you at Singularity University and in the new Global Learning X Prize. I’m excited about what we’ll create together. Thanks again for the insights we were able to share in this book. Thanks also to Easton LaChappelle for brimming with creative ambition for the greater good, and to Juan Enriquez for showing us how even what we call “life” is being redesigned and refashioned into fresh opportunity as we speak.

Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle

The GLXP was closed quietly with this announcement by its founders: “After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar X Prize teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31, 2018, deadline,” they said. “This literal ‘moonshot’ is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30M Google Lunar X Prize will go unclaimed.”3 But this has done little to deter the private sector in their plans to harvest resources from the moon.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

—Dileep George, AI scientist; pioneer of hierarchical models of the neocortex; cofounder of Numenta and Vicarious Systems “Ray Kurzweil’s understanding of the brain and artificial intelligence will dramatically impact every aspect of our lives, every industry on Earth, and how we think about our future. If you care about any of these, read this book!” —Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO, X PRIZE; executive chairman, Singularity University; author of the New York Times bestseller Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think HOW TO CREATE A MIND ALSO BY RAY KURZWEIL Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life The Age of Intelligent Machines HOW TO CREATE A MIND THE SECRET OF HUMAN THOUGHT REVEALED RAY KURZWEIL VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

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For example, a Gallup poll released on May 4, 2011, revealed that only “44 percent of Americans believed that today’s youth will have a better life than their parents.”1 If we look at the broad trends, not only has human life expectancy quadrupled over the last millennium (and more than doubled in the last two centuries),2 but per capita GDP (in constant current dollars) has gone from hundreds of dollars in 1800 to thousands of dollars today, with even more pronounced trends in the developed world.3 Only a handful of democracies existed a century ago, whereas they are the norm today. For a historical perspective on how far we have advanced, I suggest people read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which he describes the “life of man” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For a modern perspective, the recent book Abundance (2012), by X-Prize Foundation founder (and cofounder with me of Singularity University) Peter Diamandis and science writer Steven Kotler, documents the extraordinary ways in which life today has steadily improved in every dimension. Steven Pinker’s recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) painstakingly documents the steady rise of peaceful relations between people and peoples.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
Published 2 Jan 2003

He ordered a few model rockets and shot them off at the end of his subdivision, moving up in power, week after week, until he got into the more impressive equipment. He began reading more about the amateur rocketry scene: the people who felt that NASA was nothing more than a trucking company, the ones who were competing for a $10 million “X Prize” to launch a ship into outer space with three people onboard. But what really appealed to him was the engineering. The timing couldn’t have been better. Despite the opportunities to innovate on Doom III, Carmack felt, as he said, “near the peak of the existing bodies of knowledge in graphics.” Once he had made the leap into arbitrary 3-D with Quake, there wasn’t much further to go beyond optimizations.

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On Saturdays he met with his team of rocketeers, including Ferrari whiz 234 Bob Norwood, to work on what he called his vertical-landing hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles. Carmack fashioned a Lunar Lander-style craft complete with a bucket seat in the middle for him or his wife, Anna. Next up: maybe a shot at the $10 million X Prize, which required the winner to launch three people into orbit and back two times within fourteen days. Those who knew Carmack expected him to have a decent shot. John Romero, meanwhile, was happy to set his sights closer to home. Living with Stevie Case in their sprawling house in the Dallas countryside, he decided to get back, as he said, to his roots: designing and programming games.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Published 27 Sep 2018

. • Beth Rogowsky, a TDLC postdoctoral fellow, Paula Tallal at Rutgers, and Barbara Calhoun at Vanderbilt University showed that there was no statistical difference between learning using spoken or written materials, and no relationship between preferred learning style and instructional method in either immediate or delayed comprehension.25 That there is no benefit in adapting to a student’s preferred learning style means that the large industry that promotes training and testing materials for individual learning styles is not adding value to the classroom. • Paula Tallal was instrumental in the 2014 launch of the $15 million Global Learning X-Prize, which incentivizes innovation in education and whose goal is to develop open-source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills within eighteen months. The beneficial impact of research done for the Global Learning X-Prize will reverberate throughout the world for decades to come. The Future of Machine Learning 185 • TDLC Science Director Andrea Chiba presented research on how all learning changes the structure of the brain at the 2014 International Convention on the Science of Learning in Shanghai,26 much to the surprise of many delegates who believed that children come into the world with a set potential and that education is wasted on those who are less capable or too old to learn.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

BLUE ORIGIN—BY CONCERNED ONLOOKER The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin [blueorigin.com], a company that is working to “develop a crewed, suborbital launch system.” What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the SpaceshipOne team had any effect on Blue Origin’s plans? What are your visions of future private space flight? NEAL: Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don’t have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain’s chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good. Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

Consequently, even if no alarm clocks, rolodexes, voice recorders, or digital cameras were ever bought because of the smartphone's multifunctionality, the material savings represented by such a loss of demand would be largely obliterated by the expanding claims for the same kind of resources ranging from aluminum and glass to wires and microprocessors. There are other examples of astonishing claims of future dematerialization that can be contrasted with efforts to further expand material consumption. Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize will award $10 million for the design of a portable (maximum weight of 5 lbs) device “capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases” (Qualcomm, 2013), a first step toward dematerializing routine doctor's office appointments. But at the same time, Matternet, the Internet of material products, is “creating the next paradigm for transportation using a network of unmanned aerial vehicles” (Matternet, 2013).

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President's Materials Policy Commission (1952) Resources for Freedom, A Report to the President by the President's Materials Policy Commission, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. Princen, T., Maniates, M. and Conca, K. (eds) (2002) Confronting Consumption, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Qualcomm (2013) Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/competition-details/overview (accessed 23 May 2013). Rafiqul, I., Weber, C., Lehmann, B. and Voss, A. (2005) Energy efficiency improvements in ammonia production—perspectives and uncertainties. Energy, 30: 2487–2504. Reeves, G.M., Sims, I. and J. C. Cripps. 2006.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

The problem with the BigApps contest is that it leaves both user needs and likely user behavior out of the equation, instead beginning with an enormous data dump and asking developers to make something cool out of it.”18 The data-centrism of city apps contests is all the more curious because it ignores the key incentives of the wildly successful philanthropic grand challenges that inspired them. The Ansari X PRIZE, the granddaddy of modern innovation contests, challenged competitors to build a reusable spacecraft that could fly twice in one week, an unheard-of feat. By defining a single difficult problem, it captured the imagination of the nation’s brightest engineers and most ambitious entrepreneurs, leveraging $100 million in privately funded research with just $10 million in prize money.

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., 63, 259 “air-gapping,” 269 AirPort, 128 air transportation, 63 digital technology in, 32–33 Albritton, Dan, 301–2 Alexander, Christopher, 142–44, 285–86 Alfeld, Louis Edward, 81–82, 86 Allan, Alasdair, 271 Altair, MITS, 153 Altman, Anne, 65 Amar, Georges, 106, 133 Amazon Web Services, 263–64 American Airlines, 63–64 American Express, 62 Amin, Massoud, 35 Amsterdam, 279 analog cellular, 53 Angelini, Alessandro, 91–92 Ansari X PRIZE, 202–3 API (application program interface), 150 Apple, 49, 128, 148, 271 Siri of, 233 apps, 121–26, 144–52, 183, 213, 235 to address urban problems, 156–59 badges for, 148 contests for, 156, 200–205, 212, 215, 225, 227–30 for navigation of disabled, 166 situated software as, 232–36 “Trees Near You” as, 201–2 variety of, 6 Apps for Democracy, 156, 200–201, 203 Arab Spring, social media in, 11–12 Arbon, 37 Arcaute, Elsa, 313–14 Archibald, Rae, 80 Archigram, 20–21 Architectural Association (London), 20 Architectural Forum, 142 Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky), 111–12 Arduino, 137–41 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), 259 ARPANET, 111, 259–60, 269 ArrivalStar, 293 Arup, 32 Ashlock, Philip, 158–59 Asimov, Isaac, 73–75, 88 Association for Computing Machinery, 260 Astando, 244 AT&T, 35–37, 51–52, 111, 260, 272 dial-up Internet service at, 36 Atlanta, Ga., 66 Atlantic, The, 75 AutoCAD, 302 AutoDesk, 302 automobile, as new technology, 7 Ayers, Charlie, 252 Babajob, 178–79 “Baby Bells,” 195 Baltimore, Md., 211 Banavar, Guru, 66–67, 69, 90, 306 Bangalore, 66, 178–79 Cisco’s smart city engineering group at, 45 as fast-growing city, 13 Ban Ki-moon, 181–82 Banzi, Massimo, 137 Baran, Paul, 259–60 Barcelona, 10, 246–47 destruction of wall of, 43 Barragán, Hernando, 137 Barry, Marion, 199 Batty, Michael, 85–87, 295–97, 313, 315–16 Becker, Gene, 112–13 Beijing, 49, 273–74 Belloch, Juan Alberto, 223 Beniger, James, 42–43 Bentham, Jeremy, prison design of, 13 Berlin, 38 Bernstein, Phil, 302 Bettencourt, Luis, 312–13 Betty, Garry, 196 Bhoomi, 12–13 big data, 29, 87, 191, 292–93, 297, 305–6, 316, 319 “Big Ideas from Small Places” (Khanna and Skilling), 224 BlackBerry Messenger, riots coordinated via, 12 blogosphere, 155 Bloomberg, Michael, 147, 205–6, 304 Boing-Boing, 156 Booz Allen Hamilton, 30 Bosack, Len, 44 Boston, Mass., 212–17, 239–41, 306–7 “Adopt-A-Hydrant” in, 213 Discover BPS, 240–42 Office of New Urban Mechanics in, 213–16 “What Are My Schools?”

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

In Star Trek’s vision of the twenty-third century, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy used the handheld device to immediately diagnose disease with three input recording functions—GEO (geographical), MET (meteorological) and BIO (biological) (Figure 15.3).65–67 In 2015, just before Star Trek’s fiftieth anniversary, Qualcomm is awarding a $10 million X-Prize to the team that produces the best version of a modern tricorder.68 There’s a big difference, however: this device isn’t meant to be used by Bones or a doctor, but rather a device that is fully operated by the patient. Moving From Autocratic to Semi-Autonomous Medicine We know the road to medical emancipation is within our reach.

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Sullivan, “Salesforce and Philips Partner in Ambitious Health Data Venture,” Venture Beat, June 26, 2014, http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/26/salesforce-com-and-philips-partner-in-ambitious-health-data-venture/. 63. M. Lev-Ram, “What’s the Next Big Thing in Big Data?,” Fortune, June 2, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/06/02/fortune-500-big-data/. 64. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 65. H. Waters, “New $10 Million X Prize Launched for Tricorder-Style Medical Device,” Nature 17, no. 7 (2011): 754. 66. A. S. Brown, “Star Trek Comes Back to Earth,” The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, Fall 2012, http://www.tbp.org/pubs/Features/F12Brown.pdf. 67. “The Dream of the Medical Tricorder,” The Economist, November 29, 2012, http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567208-medical-technology-hand-held-diagnostic-devices-seen-star-trek-are-inspiring. 68.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

I wrote this book to get us all talking and thinking—and asking the big questions. Asking big questions is sometimes more powerful than the solution itself because it inspires knowledge of the world to solve it and, as such, brings diverse ways of solving problems. An example of asking a big question is the Ansari X Prize, launched in 1996 by Peter Diamandis, in which twenty-six teams from all over the world competed for a prize of $10 million to create a private spacecraft that was capable of carrying three passengers into sub-orbital space two times within two weeks. Those teams spent more than $100 million, developed breakthroughs, and launched a new space race which we are seeing the benefits of today.

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969
by Francis French , Colin Burgess and Walter Cunningham
Published 1 Jun 2010

When the spacecraft reached an altitude exceeding 62 miles for the second time in a week (the first flight in the same craft had been under the command of Mike Melvill) Binnie earned his astronaut wings. A non government consortium called Scaled Composites, founded in 1982 by famed aero designer Burt Rutan, claimed the $10 million Ansari X Prize as the first team to achieve this historic feat. Peter Diamandis, who headed the X Prize Foundation, spoke enthusiastically of the historic event later that day. “What we have here, after forty years of waiting, is the beginning of the personal spaceflight revolution,” he stated. To many, this audacious event was almost like a ceremonial passing of the torch to a new generation of spacefarers.

The Soil Will Save Us
by Kristin Ohlson
Published 14 Oct 2014

The Soil Carbon Challenge was finally kicked off when a few of them attended a conference and heard a government scientist say that he didn’t think land management made much of a difference to soil carbon storage and that it was too hard to measure the carbon accrual anyway. Organizers of the challenge suggest that it’s something like an “X Prize” for farmers and ranchers, although the award dollars come not from a billionaire but from fees paid by the participants. The hope is that this grand quantification will prod governments and institutions to develop incentives to encourage carbon-rich farming and grazing. Perhaps this careful monitoring of change could even lead to soil carbon being at the heart of the US farm bill and our public land policy.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

The Constant Fire quotes William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying: Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. And this theme is developed further: Sacredness is something intensely private and individual. Which completely nonplussed me. Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I’m one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize? Why not? Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching? Why, when we all have the same brain design? Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique? (But “unique” is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so’s “unique experience of the sacred.”)

…

(Except possibly in specialized venues, out of the way of the mainstream discourse, where such disagreements are explicitly prosecuted.) A certain person who was taking over as the president of a certain organization once pointed out that the organization had not enjoyed much luck with its message of “This is the best thing you can do,” as compared to e.g. the X-Prize Foundation’s tremendous success conveying to rich individuals “Here is a cool thing you can do.” This is one of those insights where you blink incredulously and then grasp how much sense it makes. The human brain can’t grasp large stakes, and people are not anything remotely like expected utility maximizers, and we are generally altruistic akrasics.

…

If I had to give advice to some new-minted billionaire entering the realm of charity, my advice would go something like this: To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000. Repeat as desired. To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years. Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilities—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

The vehicles come in a pair: SpaceShipTwo, a sleek bullet of a spaceplane with a unique tail that pops up to a 45-degree angle on descent to slow the aircraft with a controlled stall after it has taken its passengers to the edge of space, and WhiteKnightTwo, a 747-sized four-engine giant that carries SpaceShipTwo aloft, along with a cabin full of other passengers who will get a zero-G parabolic ride on the way back. Both are descended from SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne, which won Scaled the Ansari X-Prize for the first commercial flight to space in 2004. Like everything else Scaled makes, the spacecraft are constructed almost entirely of fiberglass and carbon fiber. It’s a matter of some irritation to Burt Rutan, who retired in 2011, that the landing gear is still steel and aluminum; they are among the last vestiges of the metal-aircraft era that Scaled was created to end (thus the Composites in its name).

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Contests are one way to separate the individual experts from the crowd. It might be a $1,500 first-place prize for the undergraduate who writes the best paper about long-term pavement performance in a contest the Federal Highway Administration has run since 1988.23 It might be the $500,000 the Department of Transportation has kicked in to the X-Prize for innovation in renewable fuels for the aviation industry. 24 Or it might be the million dollars Prize4Life is offering through InnoCentive for finding a cure for ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease). In each of these cases, the network of experts has value only because that network contains many different types of people.

Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle
Published 2 Jan 2019

Mojave Airport serves as a hub for business activity for the region, and within its confines stands Virgin Galactic, where billionaire Richard Branson is slowly realizing his spaceflight dream. Branson has been working on a plan to democratize space tourism since 2004; he has named his newest spacecraft Unity. This modern craft is patterned after a decade of pioneering work by Burt Rutan, the man who built a rocketplane to win the Ansari X Prize. Rutan won the multimillion-dollar cash award in 2004 for flying SpaceShipOne twice in one week to the edge of space. He subsequently merged his efforts with Branson, though Rutan later left the company to pursue other space ventures. But his unique and innovative rocketplane design concepts live on.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

For a systematic examination of the relationship between funding, research and innovation, see Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. 26. Even if they could probably make a lot of money on such innovations without prize competitions. It should also be noted that many of the most productive prize competitions have been established privately, such as the X Prize Foundation. 27. ‘The world’s most pointless rocket has been launched at last’, The Economist, 16 November 2022. 7. China, paper tiger 1. Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. 2. Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, Westview Press, 1996, p.56. 3.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

That said, it’s important not to apply the experience of vaccine development to government innovation policy generally. A prize works if the innovation is easy to specify: for example, Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize for flying nonstop from New York to Paris, and the winners of the $10 million Ansari X Prize for carrying three people one hundred kilometres above the Earth’s surface won twice within two weeks. The requirement for winning a prize for a vaccine may be relatively easy to specify (for example, a particular effectiveness rate), but not all innovations are so easily pinned down. Indeed, the precommitment to buy delivered COVID-19 vaccines, not a just a prize, was necessary because the innovation required both the formula and a successful manufacturing process.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

Imagine that you could go anywhere in the world, at any time, to do anything, instantly, and without the cost and time of traveling there. This is the world envisioned by another good friend, Dr. Harry Kloor—scientist, entrepreneur, and science-fiction filmmaker. He has written multiple Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and helped establish the ten-million-dollar ANA Avatar X-Prize. He is also the founder of Beyond Imagination—a start-up building humanoid avatars that you will be able to hire by the day to do your bidding. Early uses of avatars will likely be for industrial and rescue jobs that are too dangerous or require too much force for humans to do themselves. But Kloor also pictures a world where avatars will be caregivers to the infirm.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

The funding agency DARPA, for example, was able to harness the collective creativity of dozens of university research labs to build self-driving robot vehicles by offering just a few million dollars in prize money—far less than it would have cost to fund the same amount of work with conventional research grants. Likewise, the $10 million Ansari X Prize elicited more than $100 million worth of research and development in pursuit of building a reusable spacecraft. And the video rental company Netflix got some of the world’s most talented computer scientists to help it improve its movie recommendation algorithms for just a $1 million prize. Inspired by these examples—along with “open innovation” companies like Innocentive, which conducts hundreds of prize competitions in engineering, computer science, math, chemistry, life sciences, physical sciences, and business—governments are wondering if the same approach can be used to solve otherwise intractable policy problems.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

It was an incentive prize that led to today’s $300 billion global aviation market.1 By the time I finished reading The Spirit of St. Louis, the concept of an incentive prize for the “demonstration of a suborbital, private, fully reusable spaceship” had formed in my mind. Not knowing who my “Orteig” would be, I wrote “ ‘X’ PRIZE” in the margin of the book. The letter X was a variable, a placeholder, to be replaced with the name of the person or company that put up the $10 million purse. How I decided on $10 million as the purse size, raised the money, and created the rules, I’ll get to shortly. My first step, after realizing that an incentive prize might help me fulfill my personal moonshot, was to learn everything I could about prizes, their history, and how and why they worked.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Look at Daniel Schreber’s vision of wires and nerves, or Kafka’s and Rilke’s visions of giant switchboards linking mortals to (and simultaneously denying them access to the source code of ) gods and angels. Or the writings of Heidegger or Derrida: meshes, relays, endless transmission. The Internet reifies a logic that was already there. Instant Gratification Peter H. Diamandis Chairman/CEO, X PRIZE Foundation In mid-2009, I made a seven-day, round-the-world business trip from Los Angeles to Singapore, India, United Arab Emirates, and Spain. It was a lecture tour—all work. As I landed in each of these countries, I tried an experiment and tweeted my landing, asking if any friends were in that country.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

See: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/water-abundance-xprizes-1-5m-winner-shows-how-to-source-fresh-water-from-the-air/. 350 and 400 million gallons a day: Adele Peters, “A Device That Can Pull Drinking Water from the Air Just Won the Latest XPrize” Fast Company, October 20, 2018. See: https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-drinking-water-from-the-air-just-won-the-latest-x-prize. “smart grid for water”: Trevor Hill, The Smart Grid for Water: How Data Will Save Our Water and Your Utility (Advantage, 2013). saving us trillions of gallons a year: Ibid. In the US alone, we lose at least an estimated 1.7 trillion gallons of water per year to water main breaks. Climate Change for Optimists Forty billion tons of CO2: According to Maxwell Rosner’s Our World in Data, 35.46 billion tons of CO2 were emitted in 2017.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

What made sense to the Nobel Prize Foundation in 1895 doesn't make sense for the challenges and opportunities for research in the twenty-first century. Perhaps there should be a Nobel Prize for interdisciplinarity,32 a Fields Medal for teamwork, a Grammy for breaking new ground. There are glimmerings of this in, for example, the Breakthrough prize or the X prizes. If we did the same in the arts, pushing beyond prizes that reward work in single genres or art forms, we could reimagine the whole economy of prestige, from the Oscars to the Booker. And the results would be spectacular. Taking a more open and experimental approach to metaideas means trying more things – many more.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

The telephone system theft case that Mudge dissected for me in an unassuming DARPA conference room was, of course, a mere penetration test, demonstrating that anyone with access to the victim’s network could exfiltrate any data he chose without detection, despite all the system’s sophisticated security software. Now this hacker’s challenge is to fix, rather than merely demonstrate, that epic problem: Like most DARPA initiatives, CINDER functions as an open, X-Prize-style invitation for ideas. While Mudge won’t reveal the project’s budget, qualifying DARPA-funded projects typically receive anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars in government capital. More than fifty entrants, ranging from tiny companies to the defense giant Raytheon, have publicly signed up to submit ideas—many more in secret.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya
Published 12 Jan 2018

No return to the Moon scenario is possible without a lander that can bring a crew to the surface and stay for at least one week. ( 12 ) A key feature was the Crew Productivity Figure of Merit that the Northrop Grumman team of the astronaut Ken Cameron, Paul Houk, and I developed and applied to the Altair. ( 13 ) Despite that cancellation, I believe that there have been some promising lander development studies in the past decade, including the Morpheus project at NASA JSC, the Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project (RLLDP) at NASA MSFC, and the Lunar-X Prize teams’ efforts, notably Moon Express’ collaboration with RLLDP. Do you think that a fleet (say 4-6) of pressurized rovers could be our first habitats, assuming they could be shielded properly? Something Habot-like? You refer to the Habitat Robot (Habot) project that I did for John Mankins at NASA HQ in 2003–2004.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

SpaceX had once looked like it too would be a one-trick pony. The company’s original plans were to have the smallish Falcon 1 function as its primary workhorse. At $6 million to $12 million per flight, the Falcon 1 was by far the cheapest means of getting something into orbit, thrilling people in the space industry. When Google announced its Lunar X Prize in 2007—$30 million in awards to people who could land a robot on the moon—many of the proposals that followed selected the Falcon 1 as their preferred launch vehicle because it seemed like the only reasonably priced option for getting something to the moon. Scientists around the world were equally excited, thinking that for the first time they had a means of placing experiments into orbit in a cost-effective way.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Consensus is then achieved through one-token, one-vote systems that can help achieve thoughtful discussion and make it harder for disrupters, trolls, and saboteurs to cause damage. Challenges: Online contests with a panel of judges. Think of preblockchain models like the Goldcorp Challenge (mentioned earlier), the X Prize, or the numerous innovation challenges conducted by many Western governments. The goal of challenges is to engage citizens in innovation and the creation of public value. Online Citizen Juries and Panels: Citizens chosen at random serve as policy jurors or advisers on a topic. The jury uses the Internet to share information, ask questions, discuss issues, and hear evidence.

Southwest USA Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The vessel is designed by legendary aerospace engineer Bob Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne was the first privately funded (by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen) manned vehicle to reach outer space twice in a row, winning him the $10 million 2004 Ansari X-Prize. It’s not all about tourism, however. Spaceport America has been used by UP Aerospace to launch cheap cargo carriers into low Earth orbit since 2006 and has banked over a million dollars in deposits for future scientific research trips. It’s also the new home of the X-Prize competition (the race for private development of reusable spacecraft), as well as other aerospace-themed expositions to be held throughout the year. Studies estimate that Spaceport America will pump hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the state, particularly in the neighboring towns of Alamogordo and Truth or Consequences.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
by Jason Fagone
Published 25 Sep 2017

Named one of the “Ten Young Writers on the Rise” by the Columbia Journalism Review, he is a contributor to the Huffington Post Highline and has written for GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Philadelphia magazine. Fagone is also the author of Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, the X Prize, and the Race to Revive America and Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. COPYRIGHT THE WOMAN WHO SMASHED CODES. Copyright © 2017 by Jason Fagone. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

The lesson, for pundit John Tierney, is that while “NASA still doesn’t have the money to go back to the Moon, much less head to Mars…[s]omeone else is on the job.” Let people like designer Burt Rutan and his backer, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, privatize space flight—employing the reusable spacecraft with which they won the 2004 Ansari X Prize to do the work NASA can no longer afford to do (John Tierney, “Go West, Young Astronaut,” New York Times, December 6, 2005). 49. Timothy Williams, “In Bryant Park’s Rebirth, Some Chafe at Growing Corporate Presence,” New York Times, December 5, 2005. Williams quotes Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried of Manhattan as stating: “Parks have never in this city’s history been thought of as entities that would fund themselves, and I think that’s a dangerous concept.

Frommer's New Mexico
by Lesley S. King
Published 2 Jan 1999

En route, they recall the accomplishments of the first astronauts and cosmonauts, including America’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and the early Soviet orbital flights. Spacecraft and a lunar exploration module are exhibited. The museum also presents an exhibit on the first successful private flight in space— winner of the Ansari X-Prize. Most fun is a simulator in which visitors get to land the Space Shuttle. At Tombaugh Theater, IMAX projection and Spitz 512 Planetarium Systems create earthly and cosmic experiences on a 2,700-square-foot dome screen. 12 SOUTHEASTERN NEW MEXICO While traveling this area, you’ll likely see signs pointing into thick groves of pecan trees directing you to the Nut House, 32 Ivy Lane, in La Luz (& 575/437-6889).