Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Ivana Korom
We all know how machines have become an important part of our labor force,
but let me tell you how they've come to dominate
in a way that might blow your mind.
We can quantify the work that the machines do
compared to the work that humans do,
and as a physicist, I want to quantify it in the units of joules,
because it's a form of energy.
So let's add up all the energy that the machines use:
all the petroleum, coal, natural gas, wind, solar and nuclear.
Just in the United States alone in one year,
our machines are using a hundred billion billion joules of energy
to produce goods and services.
That's a one with 20 zeros after it.
Comparing that to the humans, if we worked as hard as we could,
that would be about the tenth of the horsepower,
and we don't work nearly that hard,
but if we did, all the humans in the United States, in one year,
would do a hundred million billion joules of work,
and that's a one with 17 zeros after it, 3 zeros fewer than the machines,
which tells us the machines are already doing
a thousand times more work than humans can,
and that is amazing.
This, in my opinion,
is what makes modern civilization so liberating for humanity.
The machines are doing essentially all the hard work:
the mining, refining, manufacturing, assembling, transporting,
and now even the computing.
The machines are building the machines that are building the machines.
And this frees us humans up
to focus a portion of our lives on things that are more uniquely human,
like the sciences, or the arts, and the literature, or Farmville,
whatever it is that makes you feel most alive.
Despite this fantastical 1000:1 leveraging
that we've achieved in the more developed parts of the world,
there are still so many people
that have inadequate food, healthcare, educational opportunities,
and even we who have all those things,
we would like to do so much more with our lives, but we can't afford it.
Look at Congress, at battles over the budget,
to get an idea how we are fundamentally limited
in our ability to produce and provide all that we would like.
We, humans, cannot solve this by just working harder,
but can we solve it by more leveraging with the machines?
Can we get the whole world up to this 1000:1 leveraging?
And then, can we go beyond that,
let's say 10000:1, or why not even a million or a billion,
so we can do some really amazing things in civilization?
Well, the answer is we can't.
There's not enough energy on planet Earth to get the whole world up to that level.
There are not enough other natural resources,
and if we tried to move too far in that direction,
it would be an ecological disaster.
This is sad.
It seems to put a fundamental limit
on what we, humans, can hope to accomplish with our lives.
Until you realize there is no reason why we should assume
that a single planet is the definition of the human world,
our Solar System has literally a billion times more every resource
compared with what we have on Earth:
energy, water, metals, carbon, and hydrogen, you name it,
and it’s all out there, just waiting for civilization to need it.
When we put our next generation of machines, of robotics,
beyond planet Earth,
they can do some of the same things they're doing here up there:
machines building the machines that build the machines,
but in a vastly higher rate of leveraging,
without harming any sensitive environment.
Let me give you a couple of examples to show you what I'm talking about.
Imagine when the space mining companies go out there to the harmful asteroids
that are threatening to wipe out not just humans,
but so many species and ecological environments,
and convert those materials
into power stations in orbit around the Earth,
then they can beam down cleanly, safely, abundantly, essentially for free
the energy that will lift up our economy, get us off of more dirty energy sources.
Imagine that same industry spreading on Mars
to the point that they can transform the environment of that entire planet
and make it a livable world.
We call that process terraforming.
And then, we can fill Mars with forests, and lakes, and streams with fish,
and there would be birds in the sky,
and life can beautify Mars the same way it has beautified the Earth.
And if we can terraform Mars, we can also reterraform the Earth,
cleaning up the atmosphere on a global scale,
removing harmful industries, and rewilding our planet.
We can also send robotic construction crews
to every one out of the hundreds of moons and planets in our Solar System,
and do whatever is appropriate on each one:
build scientific outpost
or maybe vacation resorts or the transportation network.
We could have artists and architects controlling those construction crews
to build cities with great architectural wonders,
because when you've got a billion to one leveraging,
there's no reason, no economic motivation to skimp.
And here's my favorite:
we can build gigantic particle colliders in orbit around the Sun, near Mercury,
collecting so much energy that they can probe the depths of physics
at a scale that we can hardly dream about today
in our current level of civilization.
And we might invent warp drive, who knows.
Arthur C. Clarke said famously,
"Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic."
Well, imagine what magic is in your future when we go down this path.
This is the vision that just fills me with enthusiasm for our space program.
I wasn't always this enthusiastic,
although I've always been a strong believer in space.
For my first 10 years in the space program I worked on the space shuttle,
and then next 7 years, I worked on the space station,
and during all that time, I was very quick to point out the benefits
that exploration provides for us in life here on Earth.
Yet, despite all of this, to be honest,
I was secretly and profoundly disappointed with the prospects of space exploration,
because I knew at the end of every mission,
after the astronauts plant the flags,
and leave the boot prints on the Moon or Mars,
and after they do all that amazing science,
they have to come back to planet Earth,
or else they're going to spend the rest of their lives
just struggling to survive inside of an isolated bubble,
because there is nowhere else in our Solar System
where humans can live comfortably.
You see, the Moon looks like this,
and Mars looks like this,
and Titan, one of the moons of Saturn,
looks like this.
And this is what an asteroid looks like,
and I think you can begin to see the trend.
They all have regolith -
that's rocks, and soil, and dust on the surface.
They have sunlight, so there's energy,
and most of them have some form of volatiles,
there's either an atmosphere, or ice under the soil, or hydrated minerals,
but what they all lack is liquid water that can pool on the surface,
and with it an abundant biosphere,
a networked ecology of organisms
that collect the sunlight and process those resources,
and put them into successively more concentrated forms
which we, humans, require,
because we're a species adapted to living at the top of the food chain.
When we send astronauts off into space,
we're sending them away from their food chain.
Astronauts spend most of their time
just working to maintain their spacecraft, their isolated bubbles.
You see, there is nowhere in the Solar System
where our biosphere can thrive besides planet Earth,
and we don't have that warp drive to go to any other star systems.
And as far as terraforming Mars directly,
don't even think about asking Congress to pay for that.
That is not in the realm of the possible.
I can remember truthfully thinking these words about 20 years ago,
that unfortunately the space program is all dressed up with no place to go.
You might have guessed I don't believe that anymore,
and here's what happened that changed my perspective.
About 10 years ago, I became part of the team in NASA
that develops technologies to utilize those resources in space.
Did you know that a simple rock is 50% oxygen by weight?
If we can just get the oxygen out of those rocks,
the studies tell us that we can cut the cost of a Mars mission
by a factor of three or maybe even a factor of five.
In 2010, I was sent as a part of a team to Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii
to do just that: to show that we can extract oxygen out of rocks
and use it for space exploration.
If you've ever been to Mauna Kea, the big mountain on Hawaii,
you'll know that it's a special place.
As we're getting ready for our trip, the native Hawaiians told us
that they expect us to show respect for the mountain,
to not do anything that would symbolically desecrate it,
because this is important to them in their culture and in their history.
It's also very important to astronomers.
At above 13,000 feet,
there are over a dozen astronomical observatories,
some of the biggest and the best in the world,
staring out into the depths of the cosmos.
While I was there, I got to live at Hale Pohaku,
the dormitory where the astronomers live,
shown here at 9,200 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mauna Kea.
Staying there was really cool.
In the morning, we'd go to the cafeteria to get breakfast,
and the astronomers would be there,
except they were getting their dinner and getting ready to go to bed,
because they'd been awake all night long up at the summit,
staring off into the distance.
They would be talking excitedly about some measurement they were making
in a star far across the galaxy, somewhere I really wish we could go.
After breakfast, my buddies and I would lace up our boots,
pick up our backpacks, and hike out toward the field test site.
We would go up and over a ridge, between two cinder cones,
and down into a small valley at 8,300 feet above sea level.
On the way to the field site,
this is the view that we had every morning.
It was breathtaking.
During the night,
the winds had been blowing clouds up against the slopes of the mountain,
and they collected into a vast blanket, lying flat on the Pacific.
Now the Sun was rising over the horizon
and starting to ignite the tops of those clouds
of breathtaking pink color.
Every day looking at these views, I began to wonder
if this is one of the reasons the native Hawaiians so valued Mauna Kea,
and I don't mean the beauty of it, which was significant;
I mean the physics of it.
I mean the fact that mountains out in the middle of the ocean
change the weather pattern and collect clouds.
It turns out this was important for the Hawaiians
for a couple of reasons.
I had read the stories how the Hawaiians originally found Hawaii.
They came from Tahiti, over 2,500 miles away,
in dugout canoes across open ocean,
very much like astronauts shooting off into the emptiness of space.
Their oral tradition tells that after weeks on the open ocean,
they were out of food, nearly out of water,
and at last the navigator announced
that he could detect a hint of clouds on the horizon,
and knowing that mountains collected clouds,
they knew where the land was.
Paddling in that direction, and then arriving at the shores of Hawaii,
they thus discovered the second major benefit of those clouds.
You see, remarkably, although Hawaii was geologically young,
having just sprouted up out of the ocean,
already over 18,000 species of advanced plants and animals,
not even counting all the microbes,
had crossed the ocean before the humans ever did,
and arriving there they found there was liquid water from those clouds,
and they took root, and they did what life does:
they terraformed it, and they turned it into a world where humans could live.
Every morning on this hike,
in thinking about these things, and then turning toward the west,
this is the other view that we had.
This is our field site,
and what a contrast it was to the lush vegetation below down at Hilo.
You see, we wanted a place that was relatively unterraformed,
harsh, rugged, and rough, like the Moon or Mars.
There we had a little networked ecology of robots.
They were excavators, driving around, scooping up the volcanic soil,
dumping it into chemical processors.
They were extracting oxygen out of the soil.
They were solar concentrators,
collecting the sunlight to drive those chemical reactions forward.
After the oxygen was collected, it was stored in tanks,
and then it was provided through a fuel cell
to drive a rover around.
So machines were getting their locomotion
by using these concentrated resources collected by other machines.
We even used the oxygen to fire a small rocket thruster.
So the technologies took it from volcanic dust to rocket thrust
- dust to thrust -
and it all worked brilliantly.
Every day on this hike,
thinking about these things and contrasting them,
I began to realize:
we are not simply creating technologies to make a Mars mission more affordable.
No, it's far more important than that.
What we're doing is creating the first generation of a new life form,
a type of life adapted to live above the clouds, without liquid water,
machine life, a networked ecology
where they are feeding on the local environment,
passing the concentrated resources up the food chain to other machines,
eventually reproducing as they extract metals,
and make plastics out of the local materials,
do 3D printing, and assemble copies of themselves.
We're creating this machine life form,
this robotic ecosphere, this robotosphere,
because we're going to send it up there to those islands in the sky
to do up there what biological life has been doing down here:
terraforming those worlds, being our food chain,
and making those into worlds where we can live.
When I realized that,
that's when my enthusiasm for the space program just exploded.
I want to promise you this is not science fiction;
this is science fact.
We are doing this today.
In my lab, we have dozens of people right now
working on low-gravity space-mining robots,
vehicles that can fly down into the dark craters of the Moon
and fly back out with ice,
big robots that can do 3D printing of landing pads on Mars.
Other labs are developing the chemical processing
for the regolith, the ices in space, and the atmosphere of Mars,
and still more labs are developing 3D printing
with the plastics and the metals that can be made in space.
Every technology that's needed for this vision
is either in development now, or will be shortly.
In 2011, I pulled together a few of my collaborators
to ask the question:
how rapidly can we stand up a robotosphere in our Solar System?
And how much will it cost?
We did literature review, we did computer modeling,
and our work was peer-reviewed,
and is now published in a leading aerospace journal.
According to our estimates, we can get this accomplished in 20 years
for an annual cost of about 0.04 percent of the US federal budget.
That is something that we as a species can afford to do.
Furthermore, after you get it established,
the modeling shows that in 20 more years with little additional cost,
it will grow in the asteroid belt to have an economic output
that is a million times that of the entire United States.
A million times.
And in just 10 more years, a billion times.
That’s the point where the vision I described at the start of this talk
has become the new reality for human civilization.
Your grandchildren can grow up in a world that is so alive,
it'll make our present era seem like the Stone Age.
I think they're going to look back on us
the same way the Hawaiians look back on their ancient ancestors -
as the legendary heroes who found the way to cross the great ocean.
If somebody asked me today
do I still believe that the space program is all dressed up, with no place to go,
I'll tell them, "Absolutely not."
There is a whole universe of worlds out there,
just waiting for humanity to arrive,
and you are the generation
that has a tremendous privilege of making that happen.
Thank you so much for letting me share this enthusiasm with you today.
(Applause)