Peter Diamandis Offers His Top Moonshot Picks of the 21st Century To-Date

December 13, 2020 – It has been some time since I sat at my desk to compose a posting to this blog. I have recovered from knee replacement surgery but am still dealing with long-term COVID challenges that have impacted my heart. I hope, by January 2021 to rectify this.

But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share with you this latest moonshot reminiscence from Peter Diamandis, of the Ansari XPrize. Peter continues his optimism about the future by highlighting our global successes. When you consider the many challenges of the 21st century, from pandemic to climate change, it is a pleasant change to note progress in so many areas highlighted by moonshot efforts.

Not familiar with the term “moonshot?” It refers to scientific and technological discoveries and breakthroughs that represent exponential advancements in their respective fields.

Peter has highlighted eight fields of endeavour in his top 50 list. Here they are:

SPACE 

Ansari XPRIZE Being Won (2004): SpaceShipOne won the $10 million US prize by building and sending a privately built spaceship with humans aboard into space defined as a suborbital flight above 100 kilometers.

Kepler Discovers Thousands of Exoplanets (2009): In the past decade, the Kepler robotic spacecraft identified over 2,600 confirmed exoplanets. Today the number of exoplanets has grown by more than double.

Curiosity Mars Rover Sky Crane Landing (2012): Known by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the “seven minutes of terror,” the space landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars involved a complex series of autonomous maneuvers that included a Sky Crane to gently lower the mobile laboratory to the Martian surface. It was so successful that Perseverance, the newest rover currently a little more than two months away from a Martian landing, will use the same descent technology.

First Soft Landing on a Comet (2014): The European Space Agency’s Rosetta Philae lander made the first soft landing on a comet nucleus touching down on Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Since then Japanese’s JAXA, and NASA have visited asteroids to gather samples to return to Earth. Japan completed the mission this week with a small payload of asteroid samples landing in the Australian Outback.

First Man-made Object Created in Space (2014): “Made in Space” and NASA partnered to manufacture the first 3D-printed object in space.

FALCON-9 SpaceX First Stage Fly-Back (Recovery) to Earth (2015): History’s first-ever vertical landing (return to Earth) of a first stage being used on an orbital launch. Since then SpaceX has successfully landed 68 first stages ane recently reused one of its Falcon-9s for the seventh time.

SpaceX Dragon Becomes First Commercial Carrier to launch human crews to the International Space Station (2020): The successful launch marked the first time that a commercial spacecraft brought astronauts to the International Space Station for a long-duration stay.

COMPUTATION, AI & THE INTERNET

Google (2000+): Organized the world’s information like never before. Google has revolutionized the way people search for information online and disrupted the way most of us do research today. More than 228 million Google searches happen every hour.

Apple Builds the First Personal Digital Assistant (2002): The first voice-activated digital assistant, SIRI, made its debut. Today it has been joined by Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and others.

IBM’s Watson Wins Jeopardy (2010): The pivotal point for Watson, an AI developed by IBM, beat Ken Jennings, the reigning human world champion of this trivia game show in 2010.

Zoom Founded (2011): Zoom made video-conferencing go mainstream particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic where it has become the most popular virtual space online for connecting remotely.

Global Launch of IPv6 (2012): The adoption of IPv6 as a new networking standard made it possible to allocate billions of new IP addresses on the internet, making way for the “Internet of Things” to become a reality.

Neural Networks Beat Out the Competition Giving Machine Learning Its Big Break (2012): Alex Krizhevsky and colleagues, under the mentorship of Geoff Hinton of the University of Toronto’s AI Lab, devised an approach to image recognition using artificial neural networks that decimated the competition in the ImageNet computer vision annual contest, validating the neural network approach to AI.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo Beat the Best Human Player (2015): DeepMind’s first big impact on Google came when its AlphaGo AI beat Lee Sedol, the top-ranked Go player in the world.

Commercial Launch of Oculus Rift (2016): Oculus Rift focused on gaming at launch, but its success led to more competition and innovation in the fields of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

Google Announces Quantum Supremacy (2019): Google achieved a milestone by creating the first quantum computer that could perform a calculation that is impossible for a standard computer. Google’s 54 qubit processor performed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold Solved the Protein Folding Problem (2020): One of the hardest problems in computational molecular biology recently was solved using Google’s AlphaGo AI. This may lead to radical medical solutions to deal with cancer, aging, therapies, and other fields in medicine.

COMMUNICATIONS, CONNECTIVITY & THE INTERNET

Skype (2003+): The internet became a way to make cheap international, high-quality calls that also introduced people to video chat for free.

Facebook (2004+): With 2.6 billion active users per month (a third of the world’s population), Facebook quickly established the social media revolution, transforming the way billions of people shared news and personal experiences.

iPhone (2007+): The Apple iPhone was the first touchscreen smartphone with mass-market appeal and inspired the rise of Android competitors in the process. As a result, smartphones have become an integral part of day-to-day life for billions of people around the world, making the Internet accessible for more than 5 billion of us.

Bitcoin (2009+): The launch of a new electronic form of cash and its underlying blockchain technology, a general ledger that has the potential to transform everything from real estate to healthcare. Bitcoin has seen its value swing wildly over the years. Currently, a bitcoin is valued at almost $19,000 US.

Launch of 5G (2019): We are in the midst of a global rollout of 5G networks providing a much faster telecommunications standard and ushering in a new wave of mobile connectivity for both humans and their devices, the Internet of Things.

Satellite Broadband Deployment (2020+): SpaceX launched Starlink, a space-based global broadband network that currently has more than 800 satellites in low-Earth orbit, and has plans to eventually launch 12,000.  Starlink will make it possible for people living in remote parts of the planet to take advantage of multi-hundred-megabit service beginning in 2021.

EDUCATION & INFORMATION

Wikipedia (2001+): The first free, open-source encyclopedia was launched representing a repository of the world’s knowledge accessible to anyone.

YouTube (2005+): From Harvard University lectures on quantum mechanics and favorite TV episodes to “how-to” tutorials and funny cat videos, billions of pieces of content is streamed today on YouTube for free.

Amazon Kindle (2007+): Amazon released the world’s first e-book reader changing the way millions of people read, and disrupting the book publishing industry.

Khan Academy (2008+): With its free online video-based tutorials covering a wide range of subjects, the Khan Academy has become “the largest school in the world,” with nearly 50 million users across 190 countries.

MOBILITY & TRANSPORTATION

DARPA Grand Challenge (2004): DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s skunkworks, offered a $1 million US prize to the winner of its first “Grand Challenge,” the first of several autonomous vehicle trials. While no vehicles were successful in even finishing the first course in 2004, deep learning enjoyed a great technical victory in the mid-2000s that would have remarkable ramifications for the later deployment of machine learning.

Google Maps (2005+): Google Maps changed the way many people travel, and made getting lost virtually impossible.

eVTOL (2008+): Electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles that don’t require runways and have the potential to create a new transportation ecosystem began to emerge in 2008. The first eVTOL featuring the Volocity eVTOL, a German developer, recently announced 2023 plans to begin an autonomous flying taxi service in Singapore.

Uber (2011+): Uber leveraged 4G networks and the built-in GPS capabilities of smartphones to upend the taxi business changing the way we hail rides and turning into one of the most infamous tech startups of the decade.

Tesla Model S Launch (2012): The Model S changed the game for electric cars in the US, setting a standard for a new, mass-production electric car aimed at consumers. Since then Tesla has become the global leader in this segment but is increasingly feeling the heat from traditional automobile manufacturers and a number of new startups driven by climate change.

First Autonomous Car Without Safety Driver (2017): Waymo was the first company to put self-driving cars on US roads without a safety driver. By 2019, Waymo cars had driven over 10 million miles in the real world and more than 10 billion miles in simulation.

ENERGY & PHYSICS

Large Hadron Collider (2000+): The largest machine in the world, the Collider has been at the forefront of verifying our most advanced theories in physics, including the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.

GigaFactory (Nevada) Operational (2016+): This Tesla project has been built to accelerate the world’s transition to electric vehicles and other sustainable, low-carbon energy products By 2018, the GigaFactory had become the highest-volume battery plant in the world.

Higgs Boson Particle Discovered (2012): Known as the God particle, the Higgs Boson represented the last undiscovered particle in the standard physics model seen as integral to giving other particles their mass.

Gravitational Waves Discovered (2015): The US-based LIGO observatory detected the aftershock of two distant colliding black holes, unveiling a new capacity to “hear” the cosmos.

First Image of a Black Hole (2019): The Event Horizon Telescope, a global collaboration of over 200 scientists using observatories located around the world captured the very first image of a supermassive black hole, an object containing the same mass as 6.5 billion suns.

Perovskite Solar Cell Achieves 30% Efficiency, a New World Record (2020): Scientists paired perovskite with silicon in a hybrid solar cell to create a “tandem” photovoltaic system that converted a larger portion of solar energy into electricity.

FOOD & WATER

First Modern Vertical Farm (2009): Sky Green Farms launched the world’s first modern, successful vertical farming facility in Singapore, ultimately growing to over 100 9-meter-tall towers of vegetables.

First Lab-Grown Beef Patty Unveiled (2013): With a price tag of over $300,000, the first cultured beef burger patty was created by Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University, who used over 20,000 thin strands of muscle tissue. The price for laboratory-grown mean was expected to fall to $10 by 2021.

Skywater/Skysource Alliance (2019+): Pulling 2,000 liters of water out of the air per day using renewable energy, Skywater’s technology can be used even in desert environments as a water harvester..

Stem Cell-Grown Chicken Approved in Singapore (2020): Singapore approved Josh Tetric’s Eat Just, the creation of cell-cultured chicken, making the country the first in the world to allow the sale of laboratory-generated meat.

BIOTECH & HEALTH

Stem Cell Research (2000+): Stem cells are basic cells that can become almost any type of cell in the body, and are being used to grow brain, kidney, heart, and lung tissue. Stem cell research is likely to save millions of lives in the coming decades as research continues to advance.

CAR-T Therapy (2002+): Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy uses a patient’s own immune system cells to attack cancer. It’s becoming a way to “engineer patients’ immune cells to treat their cancers.”

Sequencing the Human Genome (2003): Successful completion of the international project to identify and map the human genome.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Created (2006): Scientists demonstrated that pluripotent stem cells could be generated from adult somatic cells such (fibroblasts) through genetic reprogramming or the “forced” introduction of reprogramming genes.

CRISPR / Gene Editing (2012+): This gene-editing technology made it possible to cut out pieces of harmful DNA and replace the defects with healthy genes. In 2019, for the first time U.S. doctors used CRISPR to treat a patient with a genetic disorder.

Gene Therapy (2012+): In 2012 Glybera, a treatment for a rare inherited disorder, lipoprotein lipase deficiency, became the first treatment approved for clinical use in either Europe or the United States.

Epigenetic Reprogramming, Scientists Restore Age-Related Vision Loss (2020): Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. David Sinclair successfully used epigenetic programming to reset optic nerve cells in mice, reversing eye damage. The work represents the first demonstration of the potential to safely reprogram complex tissues to an earlier age.

Messenger RNA Vaccines created (2020): Pfizer and BioNTech, and Moderna, have produced the first two vaccines based on mRNA to immunize the general population from COVID-19, the current pandemic that has infected more than 72 million and caused more than 1.6 million deaths. mRNA may yield an entirely new class of vaccines to be used for almost any disease.