Hi, I'm Phnam.
Hi, I'm Mardis.
Today, we're going to talk about air, water, and food.
In order to survive humans have to have access to clean water, air, and nutritious food.
Unfortunately, the seven plus billion people that we have
on this planet today don't have access to that.
Just to give you an example of how dire the situation is,
more than two billion people don't have access to reliable clean water.
With all the technology and science that we've developed over the last few decades,
you would think that that kind of problem would have been solved by now.
But it's not. It's not even close.
So what we want to share in this episode is how good design, how good science,
and how good technology working together can help us
think of a future where all of us can breathe, can eat, and can drink water safely.
The role of the designer is to solve problems.
We're also connectors.
We connect the scientists with the technologists with the innovations.
And we design solutions that are applicable to everybody.
Designers are here to create abundance.
So you don't have to worry about the air that you breathe
when you walk out the door,
or the water that you're giving your child.
Humans have been very ingenious in creating ways to give ourselves access to clean water.
So let's talk about that.
In the past we as humans would seek out a water source to drink.
And if it was clean and crystal clear we would drink it.
If it was brown we would avoid it for good reason.
And we've kind of learned from that.
The natural world has a great ability to filter.
You can even see this in ancient watering systems of previous civilizations.
And we still have an example in Yosemite National Park here,
where they've layered rocks on top of pebbles on top of sediment and sand
and used the natural environment to filter water so you can drink it today.
When we look at the present we have access to
water filtration systems in our homes and our fridges.
And these are pretty wonderful because they remove biological contaminants
as well as chlorine, salt, and dirt from the water we drink
so that we don't have to worry about what we put in our bodies.
Unfortunately these types of technologies are not available to most people on this planet.
So they fall back to solutions like bottled water.
The truth of the matter is we have to get better at cleaning up our water sources.
One of the technologies scientists are excited about right now is called graphene.
They've taken this material and turned it into what we call a graphene foam to help filter water.
And beyond sort of the normal particulates we've already mentioned,
it can really start to remove potentially radioactive materials like uranium.
Now, can you imagine if we could deploy this in not only homes
but in entire cities and countries to help raise
the standard of living through better quality water?
Let's talk about motivation.
The first motivation is we want to give access to clean water, air,
and nutritious food to everyone on this planet.
And really for the next generation of people.
In the future we might live in other places that go beyond planet Earth.
And we need to provide the same thing for these people.
The second motivation is be in harmony with nature.
Nature has shown us how to create ecosystems that are abundant but also regenerate.
We should be able to learn from that and create artificial ways of doing that for ourselves.
Nature has been amazing in providing us with food for millions of years.
So let's look at what the past, the present, and the future have to offer us.
A great example is what we call locovores.
Millions of years ago people didn't travel that far for food.
They were hunters and gatherers and it was kind of easy
because planet Earth provided us with everything we need.
But as we industrialized and we grew plants and we gardened.
And even I did it when I was a kid.
I would garden with my parents.
And we would eat that food out of the garden.
But then we started industrializing it.
Suddenly we're buying our food rather than raising our food.
We're disconnected from the food source a little bit.
But there were also a lot of really positive things where
we could get bananas in the middle of winter.
We can get fruits and vegetables anytime we want from continents far away.
When we're thinking about the future of food,
we're trying to find ways to create regenerative and non-polluting systems that can feed all of us.
Replacing animal protein with plant proteins for example
helps reduce the amount of energy or water that's being used to raise these animals.
We're also looking at other solutions like lab grown meats which satisfy our
cravings for this kind of protein, this kind of taste, and this kind of texture.
Without injecting cruelty in the process.
Another way of doing it is integrate insect protein into our diet.
They've been shown to be very nutritious and very abundant.
They also use very little resources to grow.
So there are ways to bring that into our diet in a way that actually sounds very appetizing.
In the past we as humans had a closer relationship with nature.
It was very intimate.
We interacted with plants and animals and we were outdoors a lot.
Anything we polluted with our own waste products were reabsorbed into the system naturally.
And it was almost difficult to over-pollute when we were smaller societies.
When we look at today we have access to amazing imagery from space that tells us
how much we pollute, where we pollute, and where the trends are going.
And this kind of information is important for us to know in order to prevent future disasters.
One of the great things that humans have created are air filtration systems.
Unfortunately most people don't have access to
these personal ways of filtering the air quality that's around you.
And that has led to rising numbers of respiratory diseases all over the world.
All of that technology of air filtration systems is really just
a bandaid to the problem of pollution in the air.
If we look to the future, we like to look at outer space.
So how do we create breathable environments where they don't exist?
In the future we're thinking about living on the Moon, on Mars, or in free space.
But these environments don't have any air for us to breathe.
So we need to create it.
We can do that by extracting minerals from these regions and transforming them into oxygen.
A long term idea that we've been looking into is terraforming the Moon or Mars.
And perhaps from developing that kind of technology we can come
back to Earth and re-terraform planet Earth,
and make it livable for each and every one of us.
Our aim as designers is to create abundance for everyone on this planet.
But at the same time we need to restore balance with the natural world.
Thank you for joining us on this episode today.
Please leave comments below.
Tell us what you think and share with your friends.
And until next time, bye bye.