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3,623
right so this is allowing you to dream of this really ambitious idea of sending many many many people to mars in what or years time i guess yeah and you've designed this outrageous rocket to do it help us understand the scale of this thing well visually you can see that's a person yeah and that's the vehicle
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a little more yeah the thrust level of this is really this configuration is about four times the thrust of the saturn v moon rocket four times the thrust of the biggest rocket humanity ever created before yeah yeah as one does em yeah
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i think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this can i show this yeah absolutely so this is the first time just to show what we're talking about so a couple of key things that are important in having a tunnel network first of all you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city
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3,631
whoa good brakes yeah i mean it's yeah it's either going to smash into tiny pieces or go quite fast but you can picture then a in a tunnel running quite long distances exactly and looking at tunneling technology it turns out that in order to make a tunnel you have to in order to seal against the water table you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six
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3,632
and looking at tunneling technology it turns out that in order to make a tunnel you have to in order to seal against the water table you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six so to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere or near vacuum so actually it sort of turns out that automatically if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table it is automatically capable of holding vacuum huh so yeah and so you could actually picture what kind of length tunnel is in future to running i think there's no real length limit you could dig as much as you want
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yeah i intend to stay with tesla as far into the future as i can imagine and there are a lot of exciting things that we have coming obviously the model is coming soon we'll be unveiling the tesla semi truck ok we're going to come to this so model it's supposed to be coming in july ish yeah it's looking quite good for starting production in july
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there's obviously autopilot in model s right now what are we seeing here yeah so this is using only cameras and so there's no or radar being used here this is just using passive optical which is essentially what a person uses the whole road system is meant to be navigated with passive optical or cameras and so once you solve cameras or vision then autonomy is solved
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right many other people are going the you want cameras plus radar is most of it you can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras like you can probably do it ten times better than humans would just cameras so the new cars being sold right now have eight cameras in them they can't yet do what that showed
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but part of that is possible because you've already got a fleet of driving all these roads you're accumulating a huge amount of data of that national road system yes but the thing that will be interesting is that i'm actually fairly confident it will be able to do that even if you change the so it's fairly easy if you say i'm going to be really good at one specific that's one thing but it should be able to go really be very good certainly once you enter a highway to go anywhere on the highway system in a given country so it's not sort of limited to la to new york
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3,643
i think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof the thing is to consider the time scale here to be probably on the order of or years so on average a roof is replaced every to years but you don't start replacing all roofs immediately but eventually if you say were to fast forward to say years from now it will be unusual to have a roof that does not have solar is there a mental model thing that people don't get here that because of the shift in the cost the economics of solar power most houses actually have enough sunlight on their roof pretty much to power all of their needs if you could capture the power it could pretty much power all their needs you could go off grid kind of
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so the key to the economics of the cars the semi of these houses is the falling price of lithium ion batteries which you've made a huge bet on as tesla in many ways that's almost the core competency and you've decided that to really like own that competency you just have to build the world's largest manufacturing plant to double the world's supply of lithium ion batteries with this guy what is this yeah so that's the progress so far on the eventually you can sort of roughly see that there's sort of a diamond shape overall and when it's fully done it'll look like a giant diamond or that's the idea behind it and it's aligned on true north
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one of your core ideas about what makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy help us picture this how many if you like does it take to get us there it's about a hundred roughly it's not it's not a thousand most likely a hundred
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see i find this amazing you can picture what it would take to move the world off this vast fossil fuel thing it's like you're building one it costs five billion dollars or whatever five to billion dollars like it's kind of cool that you can picture that project and you're planning to do at tesla announce another two this year i think we'll announce locations for somewhere between two and four later this year yeah probably four
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i thought that was the sped up version but i mean that's amazing and several of these failed before you finally figured out how to do it but now you've done this what five or six times we're at eight or nine and for the first time you've actually one of the rockets that landed yeah so we landed the rocket booster and then prepped it for flight again and flew it again so it's the first of an orbital booster where that is relevant so it's important to appreciate that is only relevant if it is rapid and complete
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this is such a strange thing your software is in millions of computers it probably powers much of the internet and i think that there are like a billion and a half active android devices out there your software is in every single one of them it's kind of amazing you must have some amazing software headquarters driving all this that's what i thought and i was shocked when i saw a picture of it i mean this is this is the world headquarters
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and i have to say the most interesting part in this picture that people mostly react to is the walking desk it is the most interesting part in my office and i'm not actually using it anymore and i think the two things are related the way i work is i want to not have external stimulation you can kind of see on the walls are this light green i'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls
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my office is the most boring office you'll ever see and i sit there alone in the quiet if the cat comes up it sits in my lap and i want to hear the cat purring not the sound of the fans in the computer so this is astonishing because working this way you're able to run this vast technology empire it is an empire so that's an amazing testament to the power of open source tell us how you got to understand open source and how it lead to the development of i mean i still work alone really i work alone in my house often in my bathrobe when a photographer shows up i dress up so i have clothes on
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when you grow from having people or people working on a project to having people which i mean right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel we have people involved in every single release and that's every two months roughly two or three months some of those people don't do a lot there's a lot of people who make small small changes but to maintain this the scale changes how you have to maintain it and we went through a lot of pain and there are whole projects that do only source code maintenance is the one that used to be the most commonly used and i hated with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical and interesting and everybody else hated
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so is my second big project which was only created for me to maintain my first big project and this is literally how i work i don't code for well i do code for fun but i want to code for something meaningful so every single project i've ever done has been something i needed and so really both and kind of arose almost as an unintended consequence of your desire not to have to work with too many people absolutely yes
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were you this sort of computer genius you know were you the star at school who could do everything what were you like as a kid yeah i think i was the prototypical nerd i mean i was i was not a people person back then that's my younger brother i was clearly more interested in the rubik's cube than my younger brother
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i don't know if it's essential going back to the i'm not a people person sometimes i'm also shall we say myopic when it comes to other people's feelings and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people and i'm not proud of that but at the same time it's i get people who tell me that i should be nice and then when i try to explain to them that maybe you're nice maybe you should be more aggressive they see that as me being not nice
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really want to hug you and get you into the community but that's not everybody and that's not me i care about the technology there are people who care about the i can't do to save my life i mean if i was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that island was the make a pretty i'd die there
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who are they and how do you relate to them well so this is kind of in technology the whole tesla versus edison where tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man and people love tesla i mean there are people who name their companies after him
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the other person there is edison who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and is i mean his most famous quote is genius is one percent inspiration and percent perspiration and i'm in the edison camp even if people don't always like him because if you actually compare the two tesla has kind of this mind grab these days but who actually changed the world edison may not have been a nice person he did a lot of things he was maybe not so intellectual not so visionary but i think i'm more of an edison than a tesla so our theme at ted this week is dreams big bold audacious dreams you're really the antidote to that i'm trying to dial it down a bit yes that's good
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so obviously open source in science is making a comeback science was there first but then science ended up being pretty closed with very expensive journals and some of that going on and open source is making a comeback in science with things like and open journals changed the world too so there are other examples i'm sure there are more to come but you're not a visionary and so it's not up to you to name them no
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is the project grows and becomes something you want to show off to people really this is more of a wow look at what i did and trust me it was not that great back then i made it publicly available and it wasn't even open source at that point at that point it was source that was open but there was no intention behind using the kind of open source methodology that we think of today to improve it it was more like look i've been working on this for half a year i'd love to have comments and other people approached me
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want to sell your result then it's a huge deal don't get me wrong but if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project the big part was getting the community then the community grew gradually and there's actually not a single point where i went like wow that just took off because it i mean it took a long time relatively so all the technologists that i talk to really credit you with massively changing their work
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like before i stepped into the room she would say ok that's so because i was not i was a geek i was into computers i was into math i was into physics i was good at that i don't think i was particularly exceptional apparently my sister said that my biggest exceptional quality was that i would not let go
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and i notice that in many other parts in my life too i lived in silicon valley for seven years and i worked for the same company in silicon valley for the whole time that is unheard of that's not how silicon valley works the whole point of silicon valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot and that's not the kind of person i am but during the actual development of itself that stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people talk about that a bit
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3,679
most interesting part to me is the last if statement because what happens in a singly linked list this is trying to remove an existing entry from a list and there's a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle because if it's the first entry you have to change the pointer to the first entry if it's in the middle you have to change the pointer of a previous entry so they're two completely different cases and that's better and this is better it does not have the if statement and it doesn't really matter i don't want you understand why it doesn't have the if statement but i want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case
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i've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at ted for the last two days because there's a lot of vision going on right and i am not a visionary i do not have a five year plan i'm an engineer and i think it's really i mean i'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying i want to go there but i'm looking at the ground and i want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before i fall in this is the kind of person i am
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no no it doesn't piss me off for several reasons and one of them is i'm doing fine i'm really doing fine but the other reason is i mean without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing would never have been what it is and it's brought experiences i don't really enjoy public talking but at the same time this is an experience trust me
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now this despite the fact that i lived in nigeria i had never been outside nigeria we didn't have snow we ate mangoes and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to my characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the british books i read drank ginger beer never mind that i had no idea what ginger beer was
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i was startled it had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something all i had heard about them was how poor they were so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor their poverty was my single story of them years later i thought about this when i left nigeria to go to university in the united states i was my american roommate was shocked by me she asked where i had learned to speak english so well and was confused when i said that nigeria happened to have english as its official language she asked if she could listen to what she called my tribal music and was consequently very disappointed when i produced my tape of mariah carey
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i must say that before i went to the u s i didn't consciously identify as african but in the u s whenever africa came up people turned to me never mind that i knew nothing about places like namibia but i did come to embrace this new identity and in many ways i think of myself now as african although i still get quite irritable when africa is referred to as a country the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from lagos two days ago in which there was an announcement on the virgin flight about the charity work in india africa and other countries
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but it would never have occurred to me to think that just because i had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all americans this is not because i am a better person than that student but because of america's cultural and economic power i had many stories of america i had read tyler and updike and steinbeck and gaitskill i did not have a single story of america when i learned some years ago that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful i began to think about how i could invent horrible things my parents had done to me
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what if my roommate knew about my nigerian publisher a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house now the conventional wisdom was that nigerians don't read literature he disagreed he felt that people who could read would read if you made literature affordable and available to them shortly after he published my first novel i went to a tv station in lagos to do an interview and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said i really liked your novel i didn't like the ending now you must write a sequel and this is what will happen
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now things changed when i discovered african books there weren't many of them available and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books
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but because of writers like achebe and camara laye i went through a mental shift in my perception of literature i realized that people like me girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form could also exist in literature i started to write about things i recognized now i loved those american and british books i read they stirred my imagination they opened up new worlds for me but the unintended consequence was that i did not know that people like me could exist in literature
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my mother was an administrator and so we had as was the norm live in domestic help who would often come from nearby rural villages so the year i turned eight we got a new house boy his name was fide the only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor my mother sent yams and rice and our old clothes to his family and when i didn't finish my dinner my mother would say finish your food don't you know people like family have nothing so i felt enormous pity for family then one saturday we went to his village to visit and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed that his brother had made
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so after i had spent some years in the u s as an african i began to understand my response to me if i had not grown up in nigeria and if all i knew about africa were from popular images i too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars dying of poverty and aids unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner i would see africans in the same way that i as a child had seen family this single story of africa ultimately comes i think from western literature now here is a quote from the writing of a london merchant called john lok who sailed to west africa in and kept a fascinating account of his voyage after referring to the black africans as beasts who have no houses he writes they are also people without heads having their mouth and eyes in their breasts
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now i've laughed every time i've read this and one must admire the imagination of john lok but what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling african stories in the west a tradition of sub saharan africa as a place of negatives of difference of darkness of people who in the words of the wonderful poet rudyard kipling are half devil half child and so i began to realize that my american roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story as had a professor who once told me that my novel was not authentically african now i was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel that it had failed in a number of places but i had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called african authenticity in fact i did not know what african authenticity was the professor told me that my characters were too much like him an educated and middle class man
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they were not starving therefore they were not authentically african but i must quickly add that i too am just as guilty in the question of the single story a few years ago i visited mexico from the u s the political climate in the u s at the time was tense and there were debates going on about immigration and as often happens in america immigration became synonymous with mexicans
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i grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries and so as a child i saw jam disappear from the breakfast table then margarine disappeared then bread became too expensive then milk became rationed
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all of these stories make me who i am but to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me the single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete they make one story become the only story of course africa is a continent full of catastrophes there are immense ones such as the horrific rapes in congo and depressing ones such as the fact that people apply for one job vacancy in nigeria but there are other stories that are not about catastrophe and it is very important it is just as important to talk about them
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there are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all do you know which group you're in if you don't you're not alone because the breast has become a very political organ the truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press politicians radiologists and medical imaging companies i will do my best this morning to tell you what i think is the truth but first my disclosures i am not a breast cancer survivor i'm not a radiologist i don't have any patents and i've never received any money from a medical imaging company and i am not seeking your vote
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the machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive screening the average young woman with an is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a hummer it's just way too much equipment one scan costs times what a digital mammogram costs and sooner or later we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price malcolm gladwell wrote an article in the new yorker on innovation and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius rather big ideas can be orchestrated if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about it's like the essence of ted he quotes one innovator who says the only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick
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and physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems now take a look at this cartoon that accompanied article and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers
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may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the united states preventive services task force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their now everybody rushed to criticize the task force even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies it took the senate just days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage radiologists were outraged by the guidelines the pre eminent in the united states issued the following quote to the washington post the radiologists were in turn criticized for protecting their own financial self interest
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the pre eminent in the united states issued the following quote to the washington post the radiologists were in turn criticized for protecting their own financial self interest but in my view the radiologists are heroes there's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause but that very fact is telling where there is this much legal smoke there is likely to be some fire the factor most responsible for that fire is breast density breast density refers to the relative amount of fat pictured here in yellow versus connective and epithelial tissues pictured in pink and that proportion is primarily genetically determined
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the factor most responsible for that fire is breast density breast density refers to the relative amount of fat pictured here in yellow versus connective and epithelial tissues pictured in pink and that proportion is primarily genetically determined two thirds of women in their have dense breast tissue which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them and although breast density generally declines with age up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause so how do you know if your breasts are dense well you need to read the details of your mammography report radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram if the breast is less than percent dense that's called fatty replaced the next category is scattered densities followed by dense and extremely dense
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well many biologists will tell engineers and others organisms have millions of years to get it right they're spectacular they can do everything wonderfully well so the answer is bio mimicry just copy nature directly we know from working on animals that the truth is that's exactly what you don't want to do because evolution works on the just principle not on a perfecting principle and the constraints in building any organism when you look at it are really severe natural technologies have incredible constraints think about it if you were an engineer and i told you that you had to build an automobile but it had to start off to be this big then it had to grow to be full size and had to work every step along the way or think about the fact that if you build an automobile i'll tell you that you also inside it have to put a factory that allows you to make another automobile
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we took their advice and we modeled the animals moving in the horizontal plane as well we took their three legs we collapsed them down as one we got some of the best mathematicians in the world from princeton to work on this problem and we were able to create a model where animals are not only bouncing up and down but they're also bouncing side to side at the same time and many organisms fit this kind of pattern now why is this important to have this model because it's very interesting when you take this model and you perturb it you give it a push as it bumps into something it self stabilizes with no brain or no reflexes just by the structure alone it's a beautiful model let's look at the mathematics
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they can embed sensors and actuators right in the form itself for example here's a leg the clear part is stiff the white part is compliant and you don't need any axles there or anything it just bends by itself beautifully so you can put those properties in it inspired them to show off this design by producing a little robot they named sprawl our work has also inspired another robot a biologically inspired bouncing robot from the university of michigan and mcgill named for robot and this one's autonomous let's go to the video and let me show you some of these animals moving and then some of the simple robots that have been inspired by our discoveries here's what some of you did this morning although you did it outside not on a treadmill here's what we do
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here's the first example of that this is the stanford shape deposition manufactured robot named sprawl it has six legs there are the tuned legs it moves in a gait that an insect uses and here it is going on the treadmill now what's important about this robot compared to other robots is that it can't see anything it can't feel anything it doesn't have a brain yet it can maneuver over these obstacles without any difficulty whatsoever it's this technique of building the properties into the form this is a graduate student this is what he's doing to his thesis project very robust if a graduate student does that to his thesis project
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this is from mcgill and university of michigan this is the making its first outing in a demo
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same principle it only has six moving parts six motors but it has tuned legs it moves in the gait of the insect it has the middle leg moving in with the front and the hind leg on the other side sort of an alternating tripod and they can negotiate obstacles just like the animal
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it's just working with a tuned mechanical system with very simple parts but inspired from the fundamental dynamics of the animal voice ah i love him bob here's it going down a pathway i presented this to the jet propulsion lab at nasa and they said that they had no ability to go down craters to look for ice and life ultimately on mars and he said especially with legged robots because they're way too complicated nothing can do that and i talk next i showed them this video with the simple design of here and just to convince them we should go to mars in i tinted the video orange just to give them the sense of being on mars
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you can't use regular cameras you have to take pictures per second to see this and here's some video at frames per second now i want you to look at the animal's back do you see how much it's bending like that we can't figure that out that's an unsolved mystery we don't know how it works if you have a son or a daughter that wants to come to berkeley come to my lab and we'll figure this out okay send them to berkeley because that's the next thing i want to do here's the gecko mill
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how about suction they stick on in a vacuum how about wet or capillary they don't have any glue and they even stick under water just fine if you put their foot under water they grab on how do they do it then believe it or not they grab on by intermolecular forces by van der forces you know you probably had this a long time ago in chemistry where you had these two atoms they're close together and the electrons are moving around that tiny force is sufficient to allow them to do that because it's added up so many times with these small structures what we're doing is we're taking that inspiration of the hairs and with another colleague at berkeley we're manufacturing them and just recently we've made a breakthrough where we now believe we're going to be able to create the first synthetic self cleaning dry adhesive many companies are interested in this
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if i could have the first slide please contrary to calculations made by some engineers bees can fly dolphins can swim and geckos can even climb up the smoothest surfaces now what i want to do in the short time i have is to try to allow each of you to experience the thrill of revealing nature's design i get to do this all the time and it's just incredible i want to try to share just a little bit of that with you in this presentation
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instead we believe you need to be inspired by biology you need to discover the general principles of nature and then use these analogies when they're advantageous
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and this is really important when you begin to look at animals instead we believe you need to be inspired by biology you need to discover the general principles of nature and then use these analogies when they're advantageous this is a real challenge to do this because animals when you start to really look inside them how they work appear hopelessly complex there's no detailed history of the design plans you can't go look it up anywhere they have way too many motions for their joints too many muscles even the simplest animal we think of something like an insect and they have more neurons and connections than you can imagine how can you make sense of this well we believed and we hypothesized that one way animals could work simply is if the control of their movements tended to be built into their bodies themselves what we discovered was that and eight legged animals all produce the same forces on the ground when they move
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you make sense of this well we believed and we hypothesized that one way animals could work simply is if the control of their movements tended to be built into their bodies themselves what we discovered was that and eight legged animals all produce the same forces on the ground when they move they all work like this kangaroo they bounce and they can be modeled by a spring mass system that we call the spring mass system because we're it's actually a pogo stick they all produce the pattern of a pogo stick how is that true well a human one of your legs works like two legs of a trotting dog or works like three legs together as one of a trotting insect or four legs as one of a trotting crab and then they alternate in their propulsion but the patterns are all the same
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the animals when you look at them running appear to be self stabilizing like this using basically legs that is the legs can do computations on their own the control algorithms in a sense are embedded in the form of the animal itself why haven't we been more inspired by nature and these kinds of discoveries well i would argue that human technologies are really different from natural technologies at least they have been so far think about the typical kind of robot that you see human technologies have tended to be large flat with right angles stiff made of metal
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think about the typical kind of robot that you see human technologies have tended to be large flat with right angles stiff made of metal they have rolling devices and axles there are very few motors very few sensors whereas nature tends to be small and curved and it bends and twists and has legs instead and appendages and has many muscles and many many sensors so it's a very different design however what's changing what's really exciting and i'll show you some of that next is that as human technology takes on more of the characteristics of nature then nature really can become a much more useful teacher and here's one example that's really exciting this is a collaboration we have with stanford
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and you can see that in this ghost crab from the beaches of panama and north carolina it goes up to four meters per second when it runs
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this is an eight legged scorpion six legged ant forty centipede now i said all these animals are sort of working like pogo sticks they're bouncing along as they move and you can see that in this ghost crab from the beaches of panama and north carolina it goes up to four meters per second when it runs it actually leaps into the air and has aerial phases when it does it like a horse and you'll see it's bouncing here what we discovered is whether you look at the leg of a human like richard or a cockroach or a crab or a kangaroo the relative leg stiffness of that spring is the same for everything we've seen so far now what good are legs then what can they do well we wanted to see if they allowed the animals to have greater stability and maneuverability so we built a terrain that had obstacles three times the hip height of the animals that we're looking at and we were certain they couldn't do this
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now i'm going to challenge you i'm going show you a video
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i'd like to apologize first of all to all of you because i have no form of presentation so what i'm going to do is every now and again i will make this gesture and in a moment of democracy you can imagine what you'd like to see i do a radio show the radio show is called the infinite monkey cage it's about science it's about so therefore we get a lot of complaints every single week complaints including one we get very often which is to say the very title infinite monkey cage celebrates the idea of we have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy
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we also had someone else who said infinite monkey idea is ridiculous an infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of shakespeare we know this because they did an experiment yes they gave monkeys a typewriter for a week and after a week they only used it as a bathroom
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the main element though the main complaint we get and one that i find most worrying is that people say oh why do you insist on ruining the magic you bring in science and it ruins the magic now i'm an arts graduate i love myth and magic and and self loathing that's what i do but i also don't understand how it does ruin the magic all of the magic i think that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful astrology for instance like many i'm a pisces
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but if we want to look at the sky and see predictions we still can we can see predictions of galaxies forming of galaxies colliding into each other of new solar systems this is a wonderful thing if the sun could one day and indeed the earth in fact if the earth could read its own astrological astronomical chart one day it would say not a good day for making plans you'll been engulfed by a red giant and that to me as well that if you think i'm worried about losing worlds well many worlds theory one of the most beautiful fascinating sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation is a wonderful thing that every person here every decision that you've made today every decision you've made in your life you've not really made that decision but in fact every single permutation of those decisions is made each one going off into a new universe that is a wonderful idea if you ever think that your life is rubbish always remember there's another you that's made much worse decisions than that
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we have been mountains and apples and and other people's knees who knows maybe one of your atoms was once napoleon's knee that is a good thing unlike the occupants of the universe the universe itself is not wasteful we are all totally recyclable and when we die we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs this is a wonderful thing understanding to me does not remove the wonder and the joy for instance my wife could turn to me and she may say why do you love me and i can with all honesty look her in the eye and say because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors
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and all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework for instance perhaps you've been at home for a week on your own you house is in a terrible state your partner is about to return you think what should i do do nothing all you have to do is when she walks in using a quantum interpretation say i'm so sorry i stopped observing the house for a moment and when i started observing again everything had happened
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remember that in the majority of universes you don't even exist in the first place this to me in its own strange way is very very comforting now reincarnation that's another thing gone the afterlife but it's not gone science actually says we will live forever well there is one proviso
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and that is all of these different things the love for my child i have a son his name is archie i'm very lucky because he's better than all the other children now i know you don't think that you may well have your own children and think oh no my child's best
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now i know you don't think that you may well have your own children and think oh no my child's best that's the wonderful thing about evolution the predilection to believe that our child is best now in many ways that's just a survival thing the fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes and therefore we love it but we don't notice that bit we just unconditionally love that is a wonderful thing though i should say that my son is best and is better than your children i've done some tests
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for me it's a very very important thing even on my journey up here the joy that i have on my journey up here every single time if you actually think you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful i'm sitting on a train every time i breathe in i'm breathing in a million atoms of oxygen i'm sitting on a chair
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every time i breathe in i'm breathing in a million atoms of oxygen i'm sitting on a chair even though i know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space i find it comfortable i look out the window and i realize that every single time we stop and i look out that window framed in that window wherever we are i am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet earth if you go to the safari parks on saturn or jupiter you will be disappointed and i realize i'm observing this with the brain the human brain the most complex thing in the known universe that to me is an incredible thing and do you know what that might be enough steven weinberg the nobel laureate once said the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless
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steven weinberg the nobel laureate once said the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless now for some people that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism but for me it doesn't that is a wonderful thing i'm glad the universe is pointless it means if i get to the end of my life the universe can't turn to me and go what have you been doing you idiot that's not the point i can make my own purpose
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and on my weekends i would go up just like all the other tourists to the top of the empire state building and i'd look down on this landscape on these ecosystems and i'd wonder how does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals how does it work to make habitat for animals like me i'd go to times square and i'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them i'd go to central park and see the rolling topography of central park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown manhattan i started reading about the history and the geography in new york city i read that new york city was the first mega city a city of million people or more in i started seeing paintings like this for those of you who are from new york this is street under the west side highway
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so i didn't grow up in new york i grew up out west in the sierra nevada mountains like you see here in the red rock canyon and from these early experiences as a child i learned to love landscapes and so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies i studied this emerging field of landscape ecology landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals
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so this process is something that i study and it's called atmospheric escape so atmospheric escape is not specific to planet earth it's part of what it means to be a planet if you ask me because planets not just here on earth but throughout the universe can undergo atmospheric escape and the way it happens actually tells us about planets themselves because when you think about the solar system you might think about this picture here and you would say well there are eight planets maybe nine so for those of you who are stressed by this picture i will add somebody for you
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so all of this sounds sort of general and we might think about the solar system but what does this have to do with us here on earth well in the far future the sun is going to get brighter and as that happens the heating that we find from the sun is going to become very intense in the same way that you see gas streaming off from a hot jupiter gas is going to stream off from the earth and so what we can look forward to or at least prepare for is the fact that in the far future the earth is going to look more like mars our hydrogen from water that is broken down is going to escape into space more rapidly and we're going to be left with this dry reddish planet so don't fear it's not for a few billion years so there's some time to prepare
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it's amazing what you can see it's beautiful but what's more amazing is what you can't see because what we know now is that around every star or almost every star there's a planet or probably a few so what this picture isn't showing you are all the planets that we know about out there in space but when we think about planets we tend to think of faraway things that are very different from our own but here we are on a planet and there are so many things that are amazing about earth that we're searching far and wide to find things that are like that
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but when we think about planets we tend to think of faraway things that are very different from our own but here we are on a planet and there are so many things that are amazing about earth that we're searching far and wide to find things that are like that and when we're searching we're finding amazing things but i want to tell you about an amazing thing here on earth and that is that every minute pounds of hydrogen and almost seven pounds of helium escape from earth into space and this is gas that is going off and never coming back so hydrogen helium and many other things make up what's known as the earth's atmosphere the atmosphere is just these gases that form a thin blue line that's seen here from the international space station a photograph that some astronauts took and this tenuous veneer around our planet is what allows life to flourish
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now with training we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious in fact we even told them to smoke what yeah we said go ahead and smoke just be really curious about what it's like when you do and what did they notice well here's an example from one of our smokers she said mindful smoking smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals yuck now she knew that smoking was bad for her that's why she joined our program what she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit
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the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath and when my mind wandered to bring it back sounded simple enough yet i'd sit on these silent retreats sweating through t shirts in the middle of winter i'd take naps every chance i got because it was really hard work actually it was exhausting the instruction was simple enough but i was missing something really important
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so it's kind of nice the sun and the moon getting together this way even if one is eating the other now this is typically how you see sunfish this is where they get their common name they like to sunbathe can't blame them they just lay out on the surface of the sea and most people think they're sick or lazy but that's a typical behavior they lie out and bask on the surface their other name mola mola is it sounds hawaiian but it's actually latin for millstone and that's attributable to their very bizarre cut off shape it's as if as they were growing they just forgot the tail part and that's actually what drew me to the mola in the first place was this terribly bizarre shape you know you look at sharks and they're streamlined and they're sleek and you look at tuna and they're like torpedoes they just give away their agenda they're about migration and strength and then you look at the sunfish
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they're in the guinness world book of records again for being the vertebrate growth champion of the world from their little hatching size of their egg into their little larval stage till they reach adulthood they put on million times an increase in weight million now imagine if you gave birth to a little baby and you had to feed this thing that would mean that your child you would expect it to gain the weight of six now i don't know how you'd feed a child like that but we don't know how fast the grow in the wild but captive growth studies at the monterey bay aquarium one of the first places to have them in captivity they had one that gained in months i said now that's a true american
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the california sea lion takes the as soon as they come into the bay rips off their fins fashions them into the ultimate frisbee mola style and then tosses them back and forth and i'm not exaggerating it is just and sometimes they don't eat them it's just spiteful and you know the locals think it's terrible behavior it's just horrible watching this happen day after day the poor little coming in getting ripped to shreds so we head down south to san diego not so many california sea lions down there and the there you can find them with a spotter plane very easily and they like to hang out under floating rafts of kelp and under those kelps this is why the come there because it's spa time for the there as soon as they get under those rafts of kelp the cleaner fish come and they come and give the you can see they strike this funny little position that says i'm not threatening but i need a massage
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i'd like to start tonight by something completely different asking you to join me by stepping off the land and jumping into the open ocean for a moment percent of the living space on the planet is in the open ocean and it's where life the title of our seminar tonight it's where life began and it's a lively and a lovely place but we're rapidly changing the oceans with our not only with our overfishing our irresponsible fishing our adding of pollutants like fertilizer from our cropland but also most recently with climate change and steve schneider i'm sure will be going into greater detail on this now as we continue to tinker with the oceans more and more reports are predicting that the kinds of seas that we're creating will be conducive to low energy type of animals like jellyfish and bacteria and this might be the kind of seas we're headed for now jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on friday but they sting like hell and jellyfish sushi and is just not going to fill you up
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jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on friday but they sting like hell and jellyfish sushi and is just not going to fill you up about grams of jellyfish equals four calories so it may be good for the waistline but it probably won't keep you for very long and a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans that is unless you eat jellyfish and this is this voracious predator launching a sneak attack on this poor little unsuspecting jellyfish there a by sailor and that predator is the giant ocean sunfish the mola mola whose primary prey are jellyfish this animal is in the guinness world book of records for being the world's heaviest bony fish it reaches up to almost pounds on a diet of jellyfish primarily
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and this is just so elegantly mysterious it's just it really kind of holds its cards a lot tighter than say a tuna so i was just intrigued with what you know what is this animal's story well as with anything in biology nothing really makes sense except in the light of evolution the no exception they appeared shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared million years ago at a time when whales still had legs and they come from a rebellious little puffer fish faction oblige me a little kipling esque storytelling here of course evolution is somewhat random and you know about million years ago there was this rebellious little puffer fish faction that said oh the heck with the coral reefs we're going to head to the high seas
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i am a very visual thinker i think in pictures not words to me words are more like instincts and language there are many people like me tesla for example who could visualize design test and everything all of his inventions in his mind accurately language is kind of exclusive to our species anyway i am a bit more primitive like a beta version of translate
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so in terms of having it can be viewed as a disadvantage and sometimes it is a real pain in the butt but it's also the opposite it's a gift and it allows me to think at i won a research competition for my research on coral reefs and i ended up speaking at the un convention of biological diversity presenting this research thank you
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i just heard the best joke about bond i was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago and a nigerian journalist comes and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a james bond movie and a nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes aha we meet again mr
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well it's just a joke anyway so there's tom dick and harry and they're working construction and tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it and he goes on this rant about twenty years my wife has been packing rice for lunch if she does it again tomorrow i'm going to throw myself off this building and kill myself and dick and harry repeat this the next day tom opens his there's rice so he throws himself off and kills himself and tom dick and harry follow and now the inquest you know tom's wife and dick's wife are distraught they wished they'd not packed rice but harry's wife is confused because she said you know harry had been packing his own lunch for years
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this seemingly innocent joke when i heard it as a child in nigeria was told about and hausa with the hausa being harry so what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred my father was educated in cork in the university of cork in the in fact every time i read in ireland people get me all mistaken and they say oh this is chris from cork but he was also in oxford in the and yet growing up as a child in nigeria my father used to say to me you must never eat or drink in a person's house because they will poison you it makes sense now when i think about it because if you'd known my father you would've wanted to poison him too
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