If you stop and think about it, the form of propulsion used today hasn't changed in over a thousand years... since the invention of fireworks by the Chinese.
Drones watch for disease and collect real-time data on crop health and yields.
If you look back 600 years ago, royals' sole goal was to keep their wealth within the family.
In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!
The old newspaper adage, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' is as true today as it was a century ago.
In 1900, 180-plus out of every 1,000 African-American babies died.
Have an open mind - allow different ideas into your way of thinking.
The challenge is that the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt.
The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest market opportunities. And that's a huge thing. Solve hunger, literacy and energy problems, get the gratitude of the world and become a billionaire in the process.
The fact that the Virgin logo was on the side of SpaceShipOne on October 4th, 2004 was fantastic.
Your mindset matters. It affects everything - from the business and investment decisions you make, to the way you raise your children, to your stress levels and overall well-being.
Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the center of innovation.
Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.
Lots of people dream big and talk about big bold ideas but never do anything. I judge people by what they've done. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. So just do something.
In 1980, it cost just under $600 to take a round-trip flight within the United States.
When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.
In the 1940s, about 20% of people in the U.S. had graduated from high school, but less than 5% continued their education to get bachelors' degrees or higher.
Your mission is to find a product or service that can positively impact the lives of 1 billion people because that's the game we're playing today.
Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news.
If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.
I think people are dreaming big because they have the tools to dream big. I hope that people are dreaming big because it makes them feel good about their lives.
I live in L.A., where every coffee shop is filled with scriptwriters, producers and directors.
By 2030, just a small percentage of the global population will live in poverty.
In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.
In the early '90s, well under 5 percent of the global population was online.
There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job - they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?
I get my news from selected Google News and my social feed.
I think about things like, 'Will my kids need a college account? Will they even go to college?' I don't know if that will be the case.
Online games for data-mining have a short virtual shelf life. People get bored, especially if the game seems stagnant.
In the 1820s, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. were some of the only countries where the average population received at least two years of formal schooling.
Passion gets an entrepreneur through the startup days and the enormous efforts it takes to build a business.
In 1976, Kodak's first digital camera shot at 0.1 megapixels, weighed 3.75 pounds, and cost over $10,000.
It used to be that the only ones with access to cutting-edge technology were top government labs, big companies and the ultra-rich. It was simply too expensive for the rest of us to afford.
Human exploration is something that's been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.
I view risk-aversion as crippling America in many ways.
We are living toward incredible times where the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing.
