(birds chirping)
- Right now I'm standing in my kitchen, drinking coffee.
When I think about the future
I think people will be on the moon
in a smart city that was created by robots.
Drinking coffee,
maybe video conferencing with people on Mars.
How do you do that?
It's not enough just having the electronics.
It needs to have a human feel to it.
We're still humans, even in the future.
And we need to be able to have connections.
I think that's the future.
And it's coming much sooner than we think.
- [Astronaut] Are you getting a picture now, Houston?
- [Astronaut] It's different, but it's very pretty out here.
- So growing up, I had no interest in technology.
There was no internet, there was no email.
And now technology is just part of everything that we do.
People are talking to each other all across the world.
We're natural explorers.
So we will go to foreign places to answer the big questions.
And the question now is, what's outside of our world?
(dynamic music)
- [Narrator] We have come a long way,
but man's journey into space has just begun.
- My name is Tom Soderstrom.
I am a technologist, and an engineer, and futurist.
For the last 14 years
I was chief technology and innovation officer
at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory.
And that really meant trying to figure out the technology
that's coming in the next four to five years.
And put that in the hands of scientists
that find new worlds.
But JPL, they ask the really big questions.
Are we alone?
Where did we come from?
Where is the universe going?
Is there life on Mars, or Europa, or Titan?
How do we get there?
(rocket whooshing)
30 years ago,
it was a rare event that a spacecraft was launched.
There were only a few superpowers that launched spacecraft.
Today, in terms of cost,
the barriers to entry are coming down.
It's about a 15th to launch a spacecraft.
A 20th to build it.
A third to track the spacecraft.
And we get 100 times more data.
And it's 100 times cheaper to process it.
So the real barrier to entry here is access.
And that's where cloud computing becomes important
because you can put all the data together
where people can access it.
(mystical music)
Data is abundant.
We estimate that we currently have 40 zettabytes of data.
In 2025, we'll have 175 zettabytes.
If you translate it to a human population
it's 1.7 megabytes created by every human per second.
99% of that is not analyzed.
It's estimated that 30% of it will go on the cloud
where it will be accessible by everybody.
Access to the cloud is really the democratization of space.
In the future, we'll put thousands of satellites
in space to provide internet access
to underserved or unserved countries.
All the new participants that we've never seen
in the space industry will now get access.
So I expect that we will get
a tremendous amount of innovation coming soon.
And that's really exciting.
- [Narrator] The greatest service any science performs,
therefore its most practical aspect,
is what it adds to man's fund of knowledge.
The knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in.
- Sharing goes all the way back to our beginnings.
We are storytellers, we love a good story.
And hearing a good story
from somebody you admire is the ultimate.
And that's what science is all about, sharing data.
So let me give you an example.
A few years ago, we had an earthquake in California.
The earthquake happens.
A bunch of computers start up automatically with the cloud.
And it's taking satellite images
and creates an interferogram of the ground shift.
So we then have a picture of the earth deformation.
How did it change?
JPL posted out the results.
There was a person who was interested in earthquake faults.
He saw those satellite images, and detected a new fault,
and published that out.
Which is so exciting because somebody creates something,
publishes it, somebody builds on that, publishes it.
And we're now standing on the shoulders of giants
in minutes, not years like we did before.
Today, you can be a space scientist
without owning anything at all.
All you have is your laptop at home, or your tablet,
or your smartphone, and the cloud.
The citizen scientist is able now to not have to worry
about having a PhD in AI, or being a data expert,
but just use the data that other people have created.
So people can apply their expertise and passion.
(dynamic music)
That's why innovation could be
so much faster than it was before.
- [Narrator] Science has broken the chains
that for centuries shackled humans to the planet Earth.
- If we look back at big economies in history,
you had the farming economy where everybody was spread out.
You had the industrial economy,
everything was manual labor, and it was hard work.
The next economy is the future space economy.
Simply put, it's new technologies that are accessible
and lower barriers to entry for everyone.
Meaning more people will be interested in space.
These new people will become innovators of the future.
The trappings of an innovator is that they are curious,
they are not satisfied with the status quo,
and they are reaching to do something
even beyond what you're asking.
They will need some gray hairs to guide them
to avoid the big missteps.
One of my passions is mentoring.
- My name is Lini Mestar.
I immigrated to the United States in 2007.
I had no English background.
No, didn't know anything.
I met Tom initially as a mentor
and he was my supervisor when I first started JPL.
Today, I'm a senior researcher
at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory.
A lot has happened since the last time we talked.
A lot of breakthroughs
throughout all the projects that we've been working on.
Yeah, for example,
the lunar flashlight project is getting ready to launch.
- Congratulations, that's a big deal.
- Thank you, thank you.
- It's actually gonna, your thing is gonna fly.
That's something to tell you parents.
- To the moon.
Yep, for the first time, to the moon.
- That's pretty cool.
What about that other one you're working on,
the space born computer?
- Yeah, so I actually-- - Smaller?
- Yeah, so I actually just got a patent on it.
- Did you really? - Yeah.
So it finally happened.
And this is it.
- Not only are you the first one to go to college,
but the first one to get a patent within your family.
- Absolutely, yeah.
- Fantastic, congratulations. - Thank you, Tom.
- That is you is truly incredible.
- Thanks Tom, I appreciate it.
Without you it wouldn't have happened.
- At this stage of my life
I'm able to see an innovator before they see themselves,
and give them the opportunity to exceed and excel.
And startups are really the key here
'cause today's startups is tomorrow's huge company.
It's a very ripe opportunity for startups.
So what are you working on these days?
What's your, what are you excited about?
- We're hiring like crazy.
We've got a really, really talented engineering team
behind us, including some old JPLers
that you're familiar with.
We just got our third patent granted.
- Good mentorship is not just saying, hey, you're wonderful.
But is to point out when somebody does something wrong
and say, hey, you could've done this better.
And here's what I recommend next time.
I don't think people need to be managed, they need to be led
to what is the goal and how do they achieve it.
I just try to create the opportunities for them.
- Tom, thank you so much for everything
that you've done for me.
After a long and storied career
where you were at JPL doing incredible things,
playing with new technologies.
What comes after that?
It's not riding off into the sunset.
- [Narrator] Many men here on Earth helped ready the systems
which would take a few men across that frontier.
- I had a great career at JPL
and accomplished a lot of fun things.
The new innovators were in place.
All the new technologies were there.
But I wanted to do one more adventure.
MARS stands for machine learning, automation,
robotics, and space.
So it's the biggest areas that impact our future.
And it still is.
The vision behind MARS was really to invent the future
and have people come together
from these different disciplines.
'Cause a lot of innovation happens
in the border between the disciplines.
The intent is to focus on the technologies
that can help the public sector
move forward in this future space economy,
just like the commercial sector does for the public good.
And give people access to data
where they can look at it themselves.
Today we are in Amazon's quantum computing lab
in partnership with Caltech.
Quantum computing is very different
than traditional computing.
And it has the promise of running faster
than traditional computers.
A computer does things serially.
A quantum computer does many things at once.
So you get much higher performance, but it's difficult.
It's very complicated.
It's in its beginning stages.
Quantum computing holds a lot of promise,
but how do we actually understand what it can do?
Only by testing it.
So you can test both hardware,
the software, we have simulators.
They can try it all by only changing one line of code.
And you can use many different quantum computers
without having to own them.
Now there is a lot of computer powers.
We're getting a lot of data.
And that's the promise of quantum computing.
The only way we're really gonna realize the benefits
of the future of innovation is to share.
And sharing is use the data,
publish the results and the data,
and put it out so other people can use it.
And we're seeing that happen over, and over, and over.
There are a lot of startups,
there are a lot of governments,
there are a lot of universities, and citizen scientists,
and data scientists, and machine learning experts,
that are all using each other's data.
So we're pushing the boundary farther and farther out.
And all of a sudden you can do so much more.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Scientists use this method
for a deeper purpose,
to gain an understanding of the world in which we live.
- Science questions itself all the time.
We need to question ourselves all the time.
We have now massive amounts of data,
zettabytes and zettabytes worth of data, to question.
It's no longer an opinion.
It can be a theory.
And opinion gets a lot of sway.
Science will help by looking at the data,
form your theory, and then seeing if that theory holds true
by just continuously questioning it.
So I hope and think that we will get
all the citizen scientists across the world,
invent new ideas of how to use this data.
(gentle music)
I also care very deeply about our earth.
And I think if there's one thing we need to solve
it's global climate change.
We need to solve it for our children and their children.
And it needs to become a focus.
Every country is affected.
Looking at data from space
you get a very different perspective.
There's no doubt that the ice sheets are melting.
I think we'll see a lot of investment in
being carbon neutral and carbon negative.
We need companies to take carbon
out of the atmosphere and reduce it quickly.
The good news is the future is here.
There are companies creating satellites,
trying to protect Mother Earth,
and measure things like water.
And they will be looking at the water table
all the way down to reservoirs.
And it'll help predict, from space,
floods, hurricanes, and natural disasters.
More and more and more.
There already is a company in Australia
that is reducing the water usage by 95%.
There's another company that is able to take all the data
and find forest fire within two minutes.
(jaunty music)
- [Narrator] A look at the future, looks good, eh?
- The best way to predict the future is to create it.
And I really believe in that.
All of us are now co-creating the future.
Learning and being curious is what moves humanity forward.
And that's what's gonna move us forward in space.
Curiosity about where is there life.
Curiosity about robots.
Could I make this robot hop over that ditch?
How would I do that?
All the successful innovators that I've seen
are curious people.
They're just wondering, why not?
So what are we limited by?
It's not data.
It's not compute power.
It's simply imagination.
(dynamic music)