Our mission is to build abundance

Throughout human history, our story has unfolded through a lens of resources. They have enabled our survival, powered our progress and made possible the vast amenities of our modern society. Yet the scarcities of resources have conversely impoverished billions of people. Campaigns for their acquisition have fueled conquests and conflicts that rank among our darkest days. Their limitations have dominated our economies, led to the vast destruction of our natural environment and devoured our future potential. Of the grand struggles humanity has faced past or present, their aggregate sum is divisible by resource scarcity as a singular factor.

The Next Giant Leap is a non-profit organization dedicated to solving this malady of resource scarcity, along with the environmental damage and climate change it causes. We intend to accomplish this goal by developing and promoting open-source frameworks, systems and ideas that can both generate energy and produce resources on a massive scale - cleanly, sustainably and inexpensively. This mission is made possible not by triumphs of ideology, but rather of technology that when combined with strategic system design can upgrade the foundations of our social infrastructure.

In fact, the tools that make this possible already exist today.

Our ascent to the information age has enabled breakthroughs from smartphones to supercomputers - but it’s also drastically increased our capabilities to mass-manufacture highly sophisticated systems at ever-lower costs. Today, we can build a car in a matter of hours or a jetliner in a matter of days - each as iterations of identical product models. This capability reflects a degree of performance, operational precision, processing power and communication capacity that would have been unthinkable for the past 99.99% of our history.

Yet while these newfound capabilities have revolutionized our world in ways large and small, they have had only minimal impact on our approach to generating energy and producing resources.

As you read this, our national electric grid is comprised of 7,600+ decentralized power plants that are owned by 3,200+ competing utility companies that transmit electricity through 450,000+ miles of high voltage power lines, relay stations and transformers. These systems do not interoperate within a cohesive, dynamic and scalable framework. They have minimal interoperability, and thus maintain limited cooperation in function. Of these 7,600+ power plants, each is unique - meaning it was designed and made to order. Unlike other complex machines built on assembly lines with interchangeable parts, most steps of power plant construction today are custom to that facility.

Put simply: our 7,600+ power plants were each built 7,600 different ways, with 7,600 different combinations of materials, under 7,600 different designs.

This approach drastically increases the time, cost and waste of building systems that generate energy - especially since they are each powered by one of many non-standardized fuel sources. Worse, the average age of a base-load power plant in the United States is 45 years. Accordingly, we are today left with an antiquated and failure-prone electric grid that’s energized by antiquated and failure-prone power systems that retain little similarity with others like them. Not only does this make us vulnerable to disasters ranging from cyberattacks to climate change, it also makes wide-scale maintenance and upgrades far more difficult and expensive.

We see things through a different lens. We envision power generation as a cooperative ecosystem on a nationwide and even global scale, with each piece mass-manufactured under a combined mindset of modularity, standardization, scalability and teamwork. This means that energy technologies are designed from the ground up to interconnect and work together as a team - leveraging the waste energy of one technology to power the functions of another. It also means that they’re designed to install and scale rapidly - days, if not hours.

As a result, this can dramatically increase the power available to society while dramatically reducing its cost to generate, allowing us to inexpensively produce our most vital resources as an sustainable byproduct.

From there, we can clean our environment, scrub greenhouse gasses from our atmosphere, expand the scale and sophistication of what we can build - and finally raise the floor for all of humanity to a subsequently higher tier.

This goal is achievable because the technology exists at this moment to achieve it. We have the technology to build power plants like we build toasters, and plug them in like we do batteries. We have the technology to generate energy and produce resources on a global scale at negligible cost. We have the technology to deploy these systems of abundance anywhere in the world. Either by promoting a way, finding a way, or building one - it is our mission to see that achieved.

We are a non-profit organization, and everything we do is open-source, meaning it is free to read, use, cite or broadcast.

We invite you to review our frameworks, read or purchase a copy of our book, or donate to our organization to help us achieve our goals. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please get in touch.