The utopian future of Earth anticipated by shows like Star Trek may be mere decades—or years—from becoming a reality.

Not only is there likely to be a functional, medical “tricorder,” a handheld instrument used to digitally diagnose and treat illness, in the coming months, but humanity may be on the verge of such an abundance of energy and information that the old rules of economy and finance no longer hold true.

“We’re going to end up in a much better place,” said Salim Ismail, founder and CEO of the exponential consultancy eXo Works on Friday at the 2017 TD Ameritrade National LINC conference in San Diego. “We’re entering the most disruptive point in the history of humanity. We’re entering an inflection point.”

Computers are a huge reason for that inflection point, said Ismail in his featured keynote, explaining that Moore’s Law, an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that the density of transistors on integrated circuits tends to double every two years. In other words, a computer’s ability to read and write information is increasing exponentially with time, and has been for almost 100 years in a smooth progression.

Ismail believes that human progress, reflected in a small subset of companies, moves exponentially, not linearly—but humans struggle to recognize exponential progress and often greet its results with hostility.

“A lot of our training and intuition teaches us linear extrapolation,” Ismail said,  juxtaposing a straight line and an exponential curve on a graph. “We’re bad at spotting this pattern and distinguishing linear versus exponential.”

Yet inevitably, once any industrial domain is powered with information technology, it starts doubling, said Ismail. Drones, for example, are doubling in their carrying capacity and range almost every nine months. The “internet of things”—appliances and furnishings connected to the internet—doubles in size every 18 months.

The result of all this doubling, said Ismail, is a disruption to major industries and a shift in social paradigm from scarcity to abundance. Photography was offered as a good example. Prior to the late 19th century, photography was rare and expensive. Even as recently as the 1990s, photography was limited by hardware, film, developing time, and cost.

“When you move to digital, marginal cost goes to zero, you can take 1,000 photographs and the cost base is the same,” Ismail said. “The domain explodes: now we’re taking billions of times more photos. You also shift the problem space from scarcity to abundance. In the scarcity space, I might still offer high-end cameras or teach courses on photography, but in an abundance problem space, we all have eight copies of our photographs on ten devices and we can’t find any of them.”

Now other industrial domains like cars, hotels and taxis, are facing a disruptive shift from scarcity to abundance, said Ismail, but in the future almost every industry dependent on physical scarcity will face similar disruption.

These future disruptions can be anticipated and even timed to some extent by tracking cost-per unit – DNA sequencing, solar modules and artificial intelligence, all moving exponentially, could change the world as we know it.

DNA sequencing has gone from costing approximately $2.7 billion in 2000 to around $800 today. Ismail predicts that it will cost $100 by the end of 2018, and only a penny by the end of the decade.

“It will be cheaper to sequence your genome than it will be to flush your toilet,” Ismail said. “Now we’re starting to write within the genome… the technology to do this has become so trivial that you can now re-sequence DNA in your bedroom. It’s very surreal.”

While the ability to write within DNA means diseases like HIV may soon be edited out of existence, a shift towards envisioning the human body as its own small, contained biome with a balance of bacteria may lead to new, inexpensive treatments for type-two diabetes and Parkinson’s Disease no more complicated than specially-made yogurts or milkshakes.

Solar cells have been doubling in price performance every 32 months, said Ismail, meaning that the cost of delivering a watt of solar power, now $0.20 cents, is lower than that of coal. As of November this year, solar will be cheaper than the energy coming of the U.S. power grid.

“In 16 years, all the world’s energy need will be delivered by solar,” Ismail said. “The Canadian oil sands will never be tapped. Fracking is done. The Keystone Pipeline? We won’t use it because oil is done… we’re looking at an abundance of energy.”

While batter technology that might offer consumers the ability to store solar power for dark and rainy days has not yet caught up to solar energy’s needs, by 2033 batteries will be sophisticated enough so that the business model of utilities companies can no longer exist, said Ismail.

Artificial intelligence may make it’s biggest impact felt through autonomous driving, according to Ismail.

“We’ll increase the traffic capacity of our existing roads and highways by 10 to 15 times,” Ismail said, which will result in a sharp decline in real estate values in inner cities. As drones take on responsibility for more local deliveries, there will be fewer slow-moving trucks – and long-distance trucks are already shifting to autonomous drivers. “This is real today. We have about 3 million truck drivers across the U.S. who will have their jobs automated.”

As a result of all this likely disruption, the biotechnology, oil, gas, transportation and real estate industries face evolution, or extinction, said Ismail.

Healthcare won’t be spared, either, because the Star Trek tricorder is coming thanks to the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE contest, which will award $10 million to the developer of the best working handheld medical diagnostic device to one of two finalists later this year.

“Within 12 months we’ll have a hand-held device that will beat most doctors in providing health care,” said Ismail. “Ask your doctor, anybody that you know in the healthcare space, and none of them know this is happening.”

Though Ismail didn’t directly discuss the financial industry, historical exponential growth is evident in one area considered “disruptive” in financial circles: flows into index funds, ETFs and smart beta products, and analysts have suggested that efficiencies created through AI, digital advice providers and block-chain technology will continue to disrupt the space.

Utopia may have to wait, Ismail said. Humans and their institutions are completely unprepared for all of this change.

“Every mechanism by which we run the world is designed for a world 200 years ago,” Ismail said. “We’ll have to rearchitect everything from the ground-up.”

The exponential growth in access to news information, for example, is disrupting democracy. Media consumers are having difficulty determining truth from fiction because information is moving faster than reason. Thus, Ismail believes that “democracy is not a functioning form of government going into the future” because information is too easily misused or faked.

As humans live longer, the institution of marriage also becomes impractical, argues Ismail.

“What happens when we expand the human lifespan past 120 years? Are we supposed to live with the same person for 100 years? That’s institutionalized torture!”