Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
Hello, everybody.
I want to tell you about this robot.
In the last couple of months, this robot has been to an alien world,
to discover new forms of life that we haven't dreamt about,
but this alien world is right here on Earth,
at the bottom of our ocean.
Before I tell you that story, I want to give you a football score.
Somebody told me people in Brazil like football.
So, it's only the half-time score,
but the score is Mars 1, Mariana Trench 0.
Mars, you know, is another planet, maybe lifeless, full of rocks.
The Mariana Trench is the deepest place in the world's ocean,
and it doesn't have a robot in it today,
but, as I said, it's only half-time and, over the next decade,
you're going to see a series of robotic explorations
that's going to go to the bottom of this place in the ocean
and tell us all about the wonderful living things on Earth
that we don't know about.
So, where's the Mariana Trench?
The Mariana Trench is in the top left of the picture here.
It's near the island of Guam.
And the Mariana trench itself is a very long piece of the Earth's crust,
which is where two tectonic plates are moving,
and where these tectonic plates meet we have very deep places.
And, along the Mariana Trench, there are many little hollows,
all of them very deep.
One of them, called The Challenger Deep, is 10.6 kilometers deep,
and that's the place that's the deepest part of the ocean.
So, in the last couple of months, we've seen a very famous expedition
to go back to that Mariana Trench.
Just how deep is this?
Well, the Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is high.
It's twice the depth of the Matterhorn,
and there's huge pressures at the bottom of this trench.
You know, people say going into space is difficult;
We go from 1 atm to 0 atm.
That's not nearly as difficult as going to the bottom of the ocean,
where we go from 1 atm to 10,000 atm.
This is a picture of a very famous piloted craft,
made by the movie director James Cameron.
And James Cameron was also partially responsible
for funding the expedition of the robots built by my colleagues
Doug Bartlett and Kevin Hardy.
And together, two months ago, they went back to the bottom of the ocean.
This is a very special craft.
You see that, right at the bottom, there's a little sphere.
This craft is a few meters high.
Right at the bottom, there's a tiny little sphere
that's kept at 1 atm,
and inside that tiny little sphere is enough for one person,
or maybe it has space for two-thirds of a person.
The rest of the craft suffers the high pressures
that occur as the craft goes to the bottom of the ocean.
You also see that it's the kind of craft designed by a movie director
because it has lots of lights to take movies,
and it's my privilege today to show you just a few glimpses of those movies,
taken two months ago.
Here's a picture of that craft, the James Cameron Submarine,
taken from the robot that I showed you just a minute ago.
And, because the robots and the piloted craft
went to the bottom of the ocean at the same time,
they were able to take movies of each other,
and that's more fun than just taking movies by yourself.
Piccard and Walsh went to the bottom of the ocean
in a vessel called the Trieste, a very large, expensive vessel,
and that was only a few months before Yuri Gagarin went into space
for the first time.
And scientists in 1960 were very excited.
We thought: "This is the time for two great explorations,
the space age
and the time when we explore the bottom of the deep sea."
Well, we were half right,
we were right about the age of space exploration,
but it took 52 more years
before we ever went back to the bottom of the ocean,
and that was accomplished by James Cameron just two months ago.
This should be a little movie.
Maybe you could play the first movie for me.
This is a movie taken from the robot,
and you see in the dimmed background there the James Cameron lander,
and in just a second, it should start to take off
and move across the ocean surface.
You see, it's starting to move now.
The light on the right-hand side of the screen is from a robotic arm
that Cameron has set up to take movies,
and you see it kicking up a little dust from the bottom of the ocean.
If I could have the second movie -
I'll show you a montage taken from inside the James Cameron robot.
This is looking through actually an IMAX camera.
If it's not 3D, it's not real, according to Cameron.
This is the little robotic arm from the piloted craft
and, in the background there, you see the robot.
This is the second pilot of the piloted craft.
That's a guy called Rod Allen, who didn't get to do much driving.
James Cameron wanted to do it itself.
So, you see the arm of the robot lying on the ocean floor.
This is in a test about 4 kilometers deep, not the bottom of the ocean.
So, let me tell you a little bit more about this robot.
What's it designed to do?
This robot is designed to go to places we haven't been to for 52 years,
and it's designed to sample life.
It has lots of experiments on board,
and I have to tell you that the most exciting kind of life
is going to be viruses and bacteria,
and the protists that you heard earlier today.
Actually, there's only about 200 people in the world
who even know what a protist is, and most of you are here today.
So, of course, we're also interested in other kinds of life.
So, on this robot, there's a little arm that comes down, folds down,
when it gets to the bottom of the ocean,
and it's got a baited trap in it.
And this trap is designed to catch any kind of new forms of life,
whether they're invertebrates, or maybe an eel,
or, on favorable occasions, maybe a fish.
I'll try to show you more about that baited trap as we go on.
Like the James Cameron craft, these are completely untethered objects.
There's no cable that's going down 10.6 kilometers into the ocean.
This robot is smart enough to -
once we let it go, it goes all the way to the bottom of the ocean,
it can sit there for many days, do lots of experiments,
and when it knows it's running out of battery power,
it's smart enough to decouple itself from the ocean bottom
and float to the surface.
And hopefully, the ocean is calm enough, as you see in this test,
and then we can go and pick up the robot, after it's finished its mission.
This is what the robot looks like in the water.
It descends very smoothly and quickly to the bottom of the ocean.
To go all the way to the bottom of the ocean, it takes about two hours.
It's a very quick descent,
and that's the same time as the James Cameron piloted craft.
And, when these vessels have finished their work,
they let go of the ocean floor
and they can ascend to the surface in just one hour.
This is quick by comparison with some of the older experiments.
So, let's talk a little bit about why we want to understand this ocean.
This photograph was taken from the robot.
It's after the arm has gone down on the ocean.
The blue container there is to take a sample of water
from the bottom of the ocean.
It's able to contain itself and adapt to the pressure
as we bring it up from 10,000 atm to 1 atm at the surface of the ocean.
And beyond that, is the baited trap.
Now, I have a question for you:
what kind of food do you put in the trap
to attract life on the bottom of the ocean?
What do you think? What would you put in the trap?
What do they eat down there at 10,600 meters?
Yeah, you're right. It's chicken.
(Laughter)
So, we put chickens in the trap.
They're so hungry at the bottom of the ocean.
You know, what do you live on at the bottom of the ocean?
You're sitting there, waiting for somebody to die
10 kilometers above you.
When they finally die, they float down, you know.
Sometimes, they get carried away with currents.
Sometimes, they make it right on to you and you grab hold of them when they die.
In some of the other photographs my colleagues have taken,
we see evidence of big whales or maybe killer whales
that have sunk all the way to the bottom of the ocean.
Their skeletons have come to the bottom.
But I have to tell you that, within a day or so,
the invertebrates living on the bottom of the ocean
are able to clean any kind of carcass that floats to the bottom,
whether it's a chicken or a whale.
Well, this is going to be a great story of exploration over the next ten years.
It's taken us 52 years to get to the bottom of the ocean.
But I want to use it as a way of exciting you about the ocean.
Let's just think for a second of all of the ways that we use the ocean.
50% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean,
these microbes in the ocean.
So, every second breath, you should really say,
"Thank you, ocean."
We use the ocean to transport all our goods across.
Everything that Brazil exports,
everything that Europe and North America import,
most of it, 98% of it, comes across the ocean.
We use the ocean to drill for oil and gas.
We use the ocean to catch protein, fish.
But we tend to use the ocean for other things as well.
And so, in your coffee break, in a couple of talks,
you can go upstairs here and sit, and look out on the ocean.
And like most human beings, when you come to the edge of the ocean,
you'll stand and look out at the ocean.
You won't turn back and look at the land
because we, human beings, have always been inspired by the ocean.
So, it's covering 71% of our planet.
It's owned by everybody, and it's owned by nobody,
but we really don't take care of it.
And let's think of all the ways that we're abusing the ocean right now.
For about a third of our fisheries, we're catching too many fish,
an unsustainable number of fish.
Even though it's the main protein source
for more than a billion people in the world, it's still abused by us.
We're taking too much of this bountiful resource.
We're adding carbon dioxide to the water of the ocean.
About a third of the carbon dioxide that human beings have made
in the last 150 years has dissolved in the [ocean].
In a way, that's good because it's not heating up the planet,
like the other two-thirds, but it's made the ocean more acidic.
So, everything that makes a calcium carbonate shell
is having trouble excreting that shell and, if we keep going that same way,
eventually, it will be thermodynamically impossible
to have organisms with calcium carbonate shells.
That would be the first time in 55 million years
that we've ever had an ocean like that.
We're doing more things to the ocean: we're making it warmer,
it's heating up dramatically, over the last 30 years,
and it's expanding, because we're heating it up.
Like most things, when you heat it up, it expands,
and that's where sea level rise comes from.
So, a combination of the thermal expansion of the ocean
is about half of sea level rise, and the melting of the glaciers
because of the trapping of greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide and other gases, are warming up the planet
and melting ice that is currently on land.
So, think of all those ways that we're abusing our ocean.
It's our friend, it provides us with oxygen,
but, somehow, we don't take care of it.
I hope that all of you will take it as a personal matter,
especially during these two weeks of Rio+20,
to know that the ocean's our friend. We should take care of it.
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)