Translator: Javi Garriz Reviewer: antonella broglia
Good morning.
We have now stretched out our muscles and our minds are relaxed
free and ready to think and be stretched again.
Stretch them to break borders, since exploring is no other thing
than breaking borders.
It’s a transgression.
It is going beyond what we know and it’s a passion we are all born with.
Because as children, we have all learned
to manage ourselves in our world through transgression and exploration,
but, very often, that curiosity is lost as we grow old;
we settled down and stopped exploring.
But there are many more genes and paths to explore.
Maybe not the geographical borders of the planet, as the sources of the Nile
have already been discovered.
There are more than 2.000 people awaiting today in the Everest
to climb to its top; they take a picture and it’s turn for the next,
and we have also already reached the most important
depths of the ocean.
So what’s left to explore nowadays?
The margins of science, of knowledge;
how does our planet work and how does it work, this universe
that we live in.
We still have scientific exploration.
And we can wonder, in the 21st century,
why explore,
which are the goals of exploration nowadays.
And, maybe, the answer is, precisely,
that this planet is too small for us.
Everything is known, and it’s crowded.
The most important question that we have in science right now
is the question of the 9 billion people.
How are we going to sustain a planet with 9 billion people
in the year 2050, when today there’s already way too much population,
nearly a 30% of the population doesn’t have the necessary amount
of water and food to fulfill their basic needs.
How are we going to do it?
Where are we going to look, on such a small planet?
Maybe, we have to look at the stars.
Then, space exploration tries to find a relief
for our planet: another habitable planet,
with liquid water, allowing us to keep good conditions of life,
feeding the humans that will live maybe beyond our solar system.
We have discovered already 3,000 planets outside our solar system
through Kepler’s Mission, and everyday another three are discovered,
but, until now, none of them is habitable
and none of them has liquid water.
And, maybe, we expect to find habitable planets with liquid water
in the system of the star Alpha Centauri.
Alpha Centauri is a star distant 4,3 light years from Earth,
relatively close to us, considering galactic distances,
but this distance means
traveling to Mars and back 200,000 times.
And at the top speed we can fly in space nowadays,
the speed of the Voyager 1 probe, it would take 73,000 years
to get to Alpha Centauri.
Maybe that is not the place where we will find the answer
for the 9 billion people that will be there with us
30 years from now.
We have to search somewhere else.
And, maybe, what we have to do is not look at outer space
but look from outer space, towards our planet.
And we will find a marble, tiny, blue coloured,
because it’s full of water, from a unique marvellous ocean
in the known universe and that we haven’t explored yet.
We know its surface, but we don’t know its bottom.
and the challenges of oceanic exploration
are similar to those of space exploration,
but they get much less attention and much less resources.
And what can we find in the ocean?
We’ll find, of course, water,
that is the most scarce resource at this moment for mankind.
We will find as well, a productive ecosystem,
the biggest ecosystem in the planet that is the deep ocean,
that we barely have explored yet.
We will find mineral resources. We will find, as well,
a huge amount of energy to satisfy our necessities
without damaging the planet.
And we will find, as well, biotechnological resources,
with all the life diversity that 3,500 million years of evolution
have left in our planet.
Let’s explore this.
It’s important that we explore it because there we can find the answer.
And with this idea, the idea of a new expedition,
much like the expeditions of the Enlightenment that we all know,
of Captain Cook, of Alejandro Malaspina,
that was a Spanish sailor and scientist
that led the first Spanish global expedition
with scientific purposes, in the 18th century,
we started setting up the project "Malaspina 2010".
A circumnavigation project, with ambitious goals of exploring
the deep ocean, exploring life in the deep ocean,
and also understand how human activity
is causing damages in the ocean and impacting the conditions
to support life and what we can do
to revert this situation.
Bringing up this project means a huge exploration,
but also a huge challenge, because it requires, first,
to gather the resources to achieve it,
which came from the Ministry of Science and Innovation
back when we used to have a Ministry of Science…
Now it wouldn’t even be possible…
Also, it meant bringing together the will of 38 research institutions,
29 institutions abroad in more than 18 countries,
and coordinate more than 400 researchers and 300 people
ready to let their goals and personal interests aside
to work together cooperatively for a superior purpose.
A shared goal, which is the exploration of the deep ocean.
And finally we got, after 10 years,
all the elements lined up and we sailed away from Cádiz in 2010.
We set sail with the ship Hespérides of the Spanish army,
that circumnavigated the ocean for seven months,
through the Atlantic Ocean, that we crossed three times,
the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, to get back to Spain again
in Cartagena seven months later.
In parallel, we worked in another ship, the Sarmiento de Gamboa of the FECYT,
that is the biggest public institution in Spanish research
and coordinated all this project,
and in this ship Sarmiento de Gamboa what we got to do
was a detailed study of the Atlantic, that is a key area to understand
how the climate is changing on our planet,
and, besides, it worked as a floating university
to train an important amount of postgraduate students.
That was 10 months of navigation in the ocean,
and maybe, when we sailed away, that was the most important part:
to navigate.
It was the pleasure of being far away from everything, far from of our shores
and that feeling of absolute freedom that we feel when we sail
and that makes us go back to the sea over and over.
And, just like general Pompey exhorted his Roman soldiers
that were afraid of the ocean because they thought
it was full of monsters,
we also think that
"to navigate is necessary, to live is not",
what’s important is to navigate.
It’s that feeling of freedom that we perceived sailing in the ocean
and that we perceive every time we go to the sea.
But it’s not only about navigating: it’s about working.
And the workdays were intense: 18 hours of scientific work,
very few hours of rest,
lots of debate, lots of problem solving, working together, helping each other,
no Saturdays, no Sundays, no Christmas, no soccer matches,
no Internet, no newspapers.
We bore that work pretty well and with a lot of eagerness
because we were contributing to an exploration
that we thought was important:
the biggest research project of Spain
and the biggest oceanographic research project of the 21st century.
We had an important responsibility,
and we were out there not to find monsters:
we were there to find very small, tiny little creatures,
a millimeter in size, like those on the screen,
thanks to the macro of Joan Costa,
that we were finding in the first 5 cm of the ocean’s surface.
But we also found other creatures in the deep ocean,
like this euphausiacea up there
or the lanternfish down there,
that we found out is the most common vertebrate in the planet
and that only the stock of this lanternfish
in the ocean, that was not quantified until now,
leads us to revise and multiply by 30 the stock of fish
that exists in the ocean.
We thought there were tuna, sardines, etc.
We knew there were nychtophyles and lanternfish,
but we didn’t know they were enormously abundant,
and now we just know that these fishes
are 30 times more numerous in weight, in tons, than all the biomass
of all the fishes that we thought lived in the ocean.
Maybe only for that it was worth the journey,
but we were going far beyond that.
And, also, it was a shared exploration.
Shared with our workmates getting on board and going ashore exhausted,
after a month and a half or two months on board,
crossing oceanic basins, but shared also with
all of you through the Internet and the media.
And everyday, we made an important effort
to communicate from the ship what we were doing
and what was going on onboard.
And finally, after seven months, the prow of the ship was heading
towards Cartagena, towards home, after circumnavigating
and it was time for evaluation.
Not because exploration and expedition were finished,
but because it was right then when it started.
Because so far we had been collecting data, information and samples,
but it was necessary to deliver a treasure to society.
Alejandro Malaspina returned to Spain with a gold and silver coins treasure.
We brought chests, also full of treasures.
These chests were -80ºC freezers,
and inside them there were tiny jars containing microorganisms
from the deep ocean, summarizing 3,500 million years of evolution,
of problem solving features, of life keeping
and cellular machinery that nowadays allows us to solve problems
in as different fields as environment restoration,
decontamination of our planet, human feeding problems,
and human health issues.
But these tiny jars don’t speak.
We have to extract them, we have to amplify this ocean’s genome.
We have to read and sequence this genome obtaining thousands of petabytes in data
that demand us to use the most advanced supercomputers
in the world, such as this supercomputer, Marenostrum,
located in Barcelona,
in the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre,
inside a gothic nave, in which we are carrying out
the sequencing, the lining of the whole genome sequence
of this collection of the global genome that we are analyzing,
with which we expect to solve and give answer to many mankind’s questions,
and be able to contribute to solve the problem of the 9 billion people
in the year 2050.
Now it is the time, as well, to write and communicate
about what we are doing,
communicate it to our fellow scientists, open to the public the databases
in a free world were all the scientific information
is available for everyone, to work with it,
but also to communicate to all of you like we are doing today.
To the society who is the reason behind this project and who shares it.
And, also, our exploration doesn’t stop just in the present moment,
as we have preserved one out of five samples
for a collection that we have called "Colección Malaspina",
it is a sample bank that will remain sealed
for 20 or 30 years,
to then be delivered to a new generation of researchers,
that maybe hasn’t been born yet
or are playing in the swings, in the playgrounds,
a window to how the ocean was in the year 2010.
That’s what we would have liked to receive from our fellows.
What the sailors from the Enlightenment carried on board.
Because they brought huge scientific collections that are still examined today.
We also want to deliver something to a future generation
and that’s Colección Malaspina.
The adventure will last at least 30 years more.
And at the end we can conclude that we sailed
and we found treasures.
But these treasures mustn’t remain on the bottom of the sea,
they belong here with us, to solve the big problems of our lives.
Thank you. (Applause)