Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive | Stephen Petranek — Transcript

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1. 0:13Strap yourselves in,
2. 0:15we're going to Mars.
3. 0:17Not just a few astronauts --
4. 0:19thousands of people are going to colonize Mars.
5. 0:22And I am telling you that they're going to do this soon.
6. 0:26Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars,
7. 0:29and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there.
8. 0:33That probably sounds preposterous,
9. 0:36so I'm going to share with you how and when that will happen.
10. 0:39But first I want to discuss the obvious question:
11. 0:43Why the heck should we do this?
12. 0:4512 years ago,
13. 0:46I gave a TED talk on 10 ways the world could end suddenly.
14. 0:50We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy.
15. 0:55A single, large asteroid could take us out forever.
16. 0:59To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet.
17. 1:02Think what a tragedy it would be
18. 1:04if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated.
19. 1:08And there's another reason we should go:
20. 1:10exploration is in our DNA.
21. 1:13Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa
22. 1:17and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet
23. 1:22by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons.
24. 1:25This stuff is inside us.
25. 1:27And they prospered doing that.
26. 1:30Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology
27. 1:34came because we explored.
28. 1:37Yes, we could do a lot of good
29. 1:38with the money it will take to establish a thriving colony on Mars.
30. 1:42And yes we should all be taking far better care of our own home planet.
31. 1:48And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars the way we've screwed up Earth.
32. 1:54But think for a moment,
33. 1:55what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon.
34. 2:00He excited an entire generation to dream.
35. 2:05Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars.
36. 2:08Perhaps then we will look back at Earth
37. 2:11and see that that is one people instead of many
38. 2:14and perhaps then we will look back at Earth,
39. 2:17as we struggle to survive on Mars,
40. 2:19and realize how precious the home planet is.
41. 2:23So let me tell you about the extraordinary adventure we're about to undertake.
42. 2:29But first,
43. 2:30a few fascinating facts about where we're going.
44. 2:34This picture actually represents the true size of Mars compared to Earth.
45. 2:38Mars is not our sister planet.
46. 2:40It's far less than half the size of the Earth,
47. 2:43and yet despite the fact that it's smaller,
48. 2:45the surface area of Mars that you can stand on
49. 2:47is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on,
50. 2:51because the Earth is mostly covered by water.
51. 2:55The atmosphere on Mars is really thin --
52. 2:57100 times thinner than on Earth --
53. 2:59and it's not breathable, it's 96 percent carbon dioxide.
54. 3:04It's really cold there.
55. 3:06The average temperature is minus 81 degrees,
56. 3:09although there is quite a range of temperature.
57. 3:13A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth,
58. 3:15plus about 39 minutes.
59. 3:18Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth.
60. 3:24And for anybody who wants to strap on some wings and go flying one day,
61. 3:28Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth,
62. 3:31and it's the kind of place
63. 3:32where you can jump over your car instead of walk around it.
64. 3:36Now, as you can see, Mars isn't exactly Earth-like,
65. 3:39but it's by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system.
66. 3:45Here's the problem.
67. 3:46Mars is a long way away,
68. 3:49a thousand times farther away from us than our own moon.
69. 3:54The Moon is 250,000 miles away
70. 3:58and it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there.
71. 4:02Mars is 250 million miles away
72. 4:05and it will take us eight months to get there --
73. 4:08240 days.
74. 4:10And that's only if we launch on a very specific day,
75. 4:12at a very specific time,
76. 4:14once every two years,
77. 4:16when Mars and the Earth are aligned just so,
78. 4:19so the distance that the rocket would have to travel will be the shortest.
79. 4:24240 days is a long time to spend trapped with your colleagues in a tin can.
80. 4:30And meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy.
81. 4:34We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese,
82. 4:37the Chinese and the Indians,
83. 4:39have actually sent 44 rockets there,
84. 4:41and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed.
85. 4:45Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful.
86. 4:49And we don't at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway.
87. 4:55We once had that rocket, the Saturn V.
88. 4:57A couple of Saturn Vs would have gotten us there.
89. 4:59It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans,
90. 5:03and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon.
91. 5:06But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station,
92. 5:11and we decided to do something called the shuttle
93. 5:14instead of continuing on to Mars after we landed on the Moon.
94. 5:18The biggest rocket we have now
95. 5:20is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars.
96. 5:24So getting to Mars is not going to be easy
97. 5:27and that brings up a really interesting question ...
98. 5:31how soon will the first humans actually land here?
99. 5:37Now, some pundits think if we got there by 2050,
100. 5:41that'd be a pretty good achievement.
101. 5:43These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040.
102. 5:50Maybe they can.
103. 5:52I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035.
104. 5:57But frankly,
105. 5:59I don't think they're going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars,
106. 6:03because we will already be there.
107. 6:05We're going to land on Mars in 2027.
108. 6:10And the reason is
109. 6:11this man is determined to make that happen.
110. 6:13His name is Elon Musk, he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
111. 6:19Now, he actually told me that we would land on Mars by 2025,
112. 6:25but Elon Musk is more optimistic than I am --
113. 6:27and that's going a ways --
114. 6:29so I'm giving him a couple of years of slack.
115. 6:32Still ...
116. 6:34you've got to ask yourself,
117. 6:35can this guy really do this by 2025 or 2027?
118. 6:40Well, let's put a decade with Elon Musk into a little perspective.
119. 6:45Where was this 10 years ago?
120. 6:47That's the Tesla electric automobile.
121. 6:49In 2005, a lot of people in the automobile industry were saying,
122. 6:53we would not have a decent electric car for 50 years.
123. 7:00And where was that?
124. 7:02That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket,
125. 7:05lifting six tons of supplies to the International Space Station.
126. 7:0910 years ago,
127. 7:10SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere.
128. 7:16So I think it's a pretty good bet
129. 7:19that the person who is revolutionizing the automobile industry
130. 7:22in less than 10 years
131. 7:23and the person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years
132. 7:29will get us to Mars by 2027.
133. 7:32Now, you need to know this:
134. 7:35governments and robots no longer control this game.
135. 7:40Private companies are leaping into space
136. 7:42and they will be happy to take you to Mars.
137. 7:45And that raises a really big question.
138. 7:49Can we actually live there?
139. 7:52Now, NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040,
140. 7:56or we may get there a long time before NASA,
141. 7:59but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars.
142. 8:04Let's look at the problem this way.
143. 8:06Here's what you need to live on Earth:
144. 8:08food, water, shelter and clothing.
145. 8:12And here's what you need to live on Mars:
146. 8:14all of the above, plus oxygen.
147. 8:18So let's look at the most important thing on this list first.
148. 8:22Water is the basis of all life as we know it,
149. 8:25and it's far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live,
150. 8:29so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars.
151. 8:35And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry,
152. 8:38it looks like the entire planet is a desert.
153. 8:41But it turns out that it's not.
154. 8:43The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water.
155. 8:48And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us --
156. 8:53and by the way, that's a real photograph --
157. 8:56that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them.
158. 9:00It's not a bad place to start a colony.
159. 9:03Now, here's a view of a little dig the Phoenix Lander did in 2008,
160. 9:08showing that just below the surface of the soil is ice --
161. 9:11that white stuff is ice.
162. 9:13In the second picture,
163. 9:15which is four days later than the first picture,
164. 9:17you can see that some of it is evaporating.
165. 9:20Orbiters also tell us
166. 9:21that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars
167. 9:24as well as glaciers.
168. 9:26In fact, if only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted,
169. 9:31most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water.
170. 9:34So there's plenty of water there,
171. 9:37but most of it's ice, most of it's underground,
172. 9:39it takes a lot of energy to get it and a lot of human labor.
173. 9:44This is a device cooked up at the University of Washington
174. 9:46back in 1998.
175. 9:48It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier.
176. 9:51And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid.
177. 9:56So this device can extract all the water that humans will need
178. 10:00simply from the atmosphere on Mars.
179. 10:04Next we have to worry about what we will breathe.
180. 10:07Frankly, I was really shocked
181. 10:09to find out that NASA has this problem worked out.
182. 10:12This is a scientist at MIT named Michael Hecht.
183. 10:16And he's developed this machine, Moxie.
184. 10:18I love this thing.
185. 10:19It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially,
186. 10:22that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen.
187. 10:26And you have to remember that CO2 --
188. 10:28carbon dioxide, which is 96 percent of Mars' atmosphere --
189. 10:32CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen.
190. 10:35Now, the next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020
191. 10:40is going to have one of these devices aboard,
192. 10:42and it will be able to produce enough oxygen
193. 10:45to keep one person alive indefinitely.
194. 10:47But the secret to this --
195. 10:50and that's just for testing --
196. 10:51the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go
197. 10:55to be scalable by a factor of 100.
198. 10:58Next, what will we eat?
199. 11:01Well, we'll use hydroponics to grow food,
200. 11:04but we're not going to be able to grow
201. 11:05more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there,
202. 11:08at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars
203. 11:11and we actually have the probability and the capability of planting crops.
204. 11:16In the meantime,
205. 11:17most of our food will arrive from Earth,
206. 11:20and it will be dried.
207. 11:22And then we need some shelter.
208. 11:25At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings
209. 11:28as well as the landers themselves.
210. 11:31But this really only works during the daytime.
211. 11:34There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays.
212. 11:39So we really have to go underground.
213. 11:41Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars,
214. 11:44by and large, is perfect for making bricks.
215. 11:47And NASA has figured this one out, too.
216. 11:49They're going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks,
217. 11:52shove them in a microwave oven,
218. 11:54and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls.
219. 11:57Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes,
220. 12:03of which there are plenty.
221. 12:06And finally there's clothing.
222. 12:08On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us,
223. 12:11which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times,
224. 12:14and we're constantly pushing out against that.
225. 12:16On Mars there's hardly any atmospheric pressure.
226. 12:20So Dava Newman,
227. 12:22a scientist at MIT,
228. 12:24has created this sleek space suit.
229. 12:27It will keep us together,
230. 12:28block radiation and keep us warm.
231. 12:32So let's think about this for a minute.
232. 12:34Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen ...
233. 12:37we can do this.
234. 12:39We really can.
235. 12:41But it's still a little complicated and a little difficult.
236. 12:45So that leads to the next big --
237. 12:48really big step --
238. 12:50in living the good life on Mars.
239. 12:52And that's terraforming the planet:
240. 12:54making it more like Earth,
241. 12:56reengineering an entire planet.
242. 13:00That sounds like a lot of hubris,
243. 13:02but the truth is
244. 13:03that the technology to do everything I'm about to tell you already exists.
245. 13:08First we've got to warm it up.
246. 13:10Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere.
247. 13:15The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars,
248. 13:19both of which are covered
249. 13:20with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide --
250. 13:23dry ice.
251. 13:25If we heat it up,
252. 13:26it sublimes directly into the atmosphere
253. 13:29and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth.
254. 13:32And as we know,
255. 13:33CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas.
256. 13:37Now, my favorite way of doing this is to erect a very, very large solar sail
257. 13:43and focus it --
258. 13:45it essentially serves as a mirror --
259. 13:46and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first.
260. 13:49As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it,
261. 13:53and it will go into the atmosphere.
262. 13:55It actually won't take long
263. 13:57for the temperature on Mars to start rising,
264. 13:59probably less than 20 years.
265. 14:02Right now,
266. 14:03on a perfect day at the equator,
267. 14:05in the middle of summer on Mars,
268. 14:07temperatures can actually reach 70 degrees,
269. 14:10but then they go down to minus 100 at night.
270. 14:12(Laughter)
271. 14:14What we're shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect:
272. 14:18enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars --
273. 14:22especially the ice in the ground -- melt.
274. 14:26Then we get some real magic.
275. 14:28As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better.
276. 14:31We get more protection from radiation,
277. 14:33more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer,
278. 14:36so we get running water
279. 14:38and that makes crops possible.
280. 14:40Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas.
281. 14:45It will rain and it will snow on Mars.
282. 14:50And a thicker atmosphere will create enough pressure
283. 14:53so that we can throw away those space suits.
284. 14:56We only need about five pounds of pressure to survive.
285. 14:59Eventually, Mars will be made to feel a lot like British Columbia.
286. 15:06We'll still be left with the complicated problem
287. 15:08of making the atmosphere breathable,
288. 15:10and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish.
289. 15:13But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable.
290. 15:17There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish
291. 15:22and no telling what we can do with our own bodies.
292. 15:25In biology right now,
293. 15:28we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics,
294. 15:33what the genes in our own bodies are doing,
295. 15:36and certainly,
296. 15:38eventually, our own evolution.
297. 15:40We could end up with a species of human being on Earth
298. 15:44that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars.
299. 15:50But what would you do there? How would you live?
300. 15:52It's going to be the same as it is on Earth.
301. 15:55Somebody's going to start a restaurant,
302. 15:57somebody's going to build an iron foundry.
303. 16:00Someone will make documentary movies of Mars
304. 16:03and sell them on Earth.
305. 16:06Some idiot will start a reality TV show.
306. 16:09(Laughter)
307. 16:11There will be software companies,
308. 16:13there will be hotels, there will be bars.
309. 16:17This much is certain:
310. 16:19it will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes,
311. 16:23and I think it will be the most inspiring.
312. 16:26Ask any 10-year-old girl if she wants to go to Mars.
313. 16:30Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there.
314. 16:36Remember when we landed humans on the Moon?
315. 16:39When that happened, people looked at each other and said,
316. 16:42"If we can do this, we can do anything."
317. 16:45What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars?
318. 16:50Most importantly,
319. 16:52it will make us a spacefaring species.
320. 16:55And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth.
321. 17:01We will never be the last of our kind.
322. 17:04Thank you.
323. 17:05(Applause)