From Malthus To Mars

“A compact, insightful, and practical guide for leaders and managers to flourish in our coming Exponential Age” —Azeem Azhar, founder, Exponential View In 1798, the influential cleric, scholar, and economist Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would soon run out of food, as linear food production growth would be unable to feed the exponentially growing population. Fast forward 200 years, and the world's population has grown almost 10 times, and we are closer to colonizing Mars than we ever will be to running out of food. The reason? Innovation. Innovation driven by mass digitization and the convergence of exponentially growing technologies. We know that exponential laws often follow predictable patterns, and this allows us to predict when futuristic applications will become possible and economically feasible. In From Malthus to Mars, Nicolai Chen Nielsen and Lars Tvede outline the wild future that we are speeding into. Wild, among other things, in terms of anti-ageing, compact farming, robotics, radically new energy solutions, and a fast, fluid, and flexible world of work. The authors map concrete forecasts for when upcoming technologies will break through and change our world, and they paint a picture of what the future in the coming years will look like. We will learn that while the future is destined to bring a multitude of new opportunities and enhanced abundance, it will also bring increased demands for us as individuals and as organizations. To equip us to thrive in the future, Nielsen and Tvede outline eight key mindsets. These mindsets will help us navigate future trends, reach our most desired future, and give us the ability, as we understand trends, to apply exponentiality and make decisions under uncertainty. The authors also present ten shifts that winning organizations of the future must consider in order to transform themselves and their industries, again and again. ​Between them, Nielsen and Tvede have founded/co-founded 13 companies, advised more than 30 Fortune 500 companies, developed thousands of leaders, and published 20 books.

This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.

This book is inspired by the author’s work as part of a major international and interdisciplinary research group at the University of Konstanz, Germany: “What If—On the Meaning, Relevance, and Epistemology of Counterfactual Claims and Thought Experiments.” Having contributed to great discoveries, such as those by Galileo and Einstein, thought experiments are especially topical in the twenty-first century, since this is a concept that bridges the gap between the arts and the sciences, promoting interdisciplinary innovation. To study thought experiments in literature, it is imperative to examine relevant texts closely: this has rarely been done to date and this is precisely what this book does as a pilot study focusing on selected works of philosophy and literature. Specifically, thought experiments by Thomas Malthus are analyzed side by side with short stories and novels by Vladimir Odoevsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Bogdanov and Aleksei Tolstoy, Alexander Chaianov and Nina Berberova.

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