Translator: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I have always been drawn towards the ocean.
Ever since I was able to walk, I've headed towards it.
And I know that my parents had a struggle when taking me to the beach
and that they envied their friends
having their kids sitting still on a blanket with a bucket,
building sand castles,
while they had to always keep a close eye on me
because I would walk off, and I did not look back.
One day, they lost me out of sight.
And it was not until they saw my hair sticking up from the surface
that they pulled me up and back on shore.
I was only four years at the time,
but I can still remember this first meeting
with a part of the world that I'd never seen before.
Looking nothing like the one above the surface,
this world had different colors,
different lights,
there was no trees, no grass,
and it was so, so silent.
And it was blue,
blue as far as my eyes could see.
And even though this moment
probably only lasted for a couple of seconds,
if I close my eyes now,
I can still recall the feeling.
And I remember feeling somehow calm
and safe.
Twenty years on, I can probably claim to spend more time in or on the ocean
than I do on land.
And that could be because I actually live on a sailboat,
but most likely, it's because I've dedicated my time
into inspire and empower ocean exploration.
I simply want to make the ocean available for everyone.
Because I believe that if we get the opportunity
to explore and to view and to learn about the ocean,
we will naturally connect with it and start to care for it too.
Therefore,
I wish to create the ultimate underwater experience
so we can be able to explore and learn more about this element we all come from.
So, imagine if we were able to break through the surface,
dive down and to roam around with a fish for hours.
Now, what if I tell you that we are?
With a small underwater drone that takes us all the way down
to 150 meters below the surface
and sends live videos straight up to our smartphones.
Two years ago, I co-founded a company called Blueye Robotics
to develop the technology we need to get this opportunity to explore,
to inspect, to learn and to view the world below the surface.
Underwater drones are not much different than flying drones
in the way that we control them with a simple game controller
and get live video up to an app.
And if you put your smartphone into a digital dive mask,
we can enhance this experience to be fully immersive.
But it's not about the experience of viewing something and film something
from a different angle;
these drones actually make us become true explorers.
With these drones,
we can discover something that no one has ever seen before.
And so, what potential reveals
when we get the access to the world below the surface?
And what difference can it make to the ocean
that more people get the opportunity to enter?
By giving us the access and democratize the opportunity to explore the ocean,
we simplify the way that scientists can perform research
in order to tell us something about the conditions of the sea.
Back in 2015,
I was on an expedition on a sailboat
and sailed across the Atlantic Sea from Africa to Brazil
together with 13 other women from around the world.
We were on a mission
to investigate the connection between marine litter and people's health.
So, every day we would troll the ocean's surface for microplastics
and take water samples that we would send into a larger research project.
And this journey became the very first big milestone for my company,
as I decided to bring along an underwater drone
to film everything in the water.
So my team and I,
we worked day and night to get the first prototype ready,
and we made it in only 10 weeks after we founded the company
and just in time for my flight to Africa.
Being on this journey
in one of the most remote areas on Earth,
far away from people,
we did not really expect to find much plastic.
Yet we found pieces of plastic
in every single water sample we took.
And some of these pieces were so small
that they were hard to tell apart from plankton,
even in a microscope.
And thus, that made me realize
how easily these tiny fragments may enter our bodies.
Marine plastic, or plastic in the ocean,
is one of the largest environmental challenges that we're facing today.
And we know for a fact that most of it sinks to the seabed,
making it very hard for us to see.
So, as you understand, there's not only beautiful wildlife and colorful corals
to discover below the surface.
But this is a chance for us to contribute.
This is a way that you and I, as individuals, can help researchers
by providing them with our findings and our data with an underwater drone.
That actually makes us "citizen scientists."
And remember that we live in a world today
where we constantly share data on what we do and where we are.
Actually, everywhere we go, we leave these small digital footprints.
So at the same time,
as we seem to know everything that's going on on land,
we have actually discovered less than 10% of the ocean space.
And that despite that the ocean covers more than two-thirds
of the surface of the planet we're all living on.
And knowing that we are all depending on the ocean
for resources such as food, energy, transport routes, medicine,
it's our biggest climate regulator,
and it's also the source to the oxygen we breathe.
Now, if you don't think this is important,
I want you to try now to hold every second breath,
because half of the amount of the oxygen we breathe
is produced in the ocean.
We must care about the ocean as if our lives were depending on it,
because it is.
And thus it's a huge mystery to me
why we,
when knowing that we know so little about the planet we're all living on,
choose to spend what seems like an endless amount
in research and exploring other planets
that, frankly, at least to me, seem far less interesting than this one.
I believe this is a question of "what's out of sight is out of mind,"
because when we look up at the sky,
we can't avoid seeing the stars or seeing the sun.
And that triggers something in us, that triggers curiosity and questions,
and, in some people,
this curiosity is so powerful
that it drives unstoppable motivation to seek the answers to what's out there.
I only wish that we can have the same curiosity
in search for sea stars or sunfish,
or corals, shipwrecks, trash or treasures.
To take care of something, we need to understand it,
and understanding starts with seeing.
If we can make the unseen seen,
that will give us the propulsion we need in order to create a change,
a change
where the oceans, in the future,
can be pristine and can be blue
as far as the eyes of a four-year-old kid can see.
Thank you.
(Applause)