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What do you guys think?

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For those who watched
Shere Khan's memorable TED talk,

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I am a typical example 
of what he describes

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as "a body carrying a head,"

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a university professor, right?

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You might think it was not fair

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that I was lined up to speak
after these first two talks,

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to talk about science.

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I can't move my body to the beat,

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and after a scientist
who became a philosopher,

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I have to talk about hard science.

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It could be a very dry subject.

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Yet, I feel honored.

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Never in my career,

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and it's been a long career,

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have I had the opportunity to start a talk

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feeling so inspired.

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Usually, talking about science

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is like exercising in a dry place.

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However, I had the pleasure of being invited

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to come here and talk about water.

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The words water and dry don't match.

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Even better!

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Talk about water in the Amazon,

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which is the splendid cradle of fresh life,

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is what inspired me.

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That's why I'm here,

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although I'm carrying my head over here, like this,

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I am trying, or will try, to pass on this inspiration.

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I hope that this story will inspire you and that you will spread it.

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We know that there is controversy.

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The Amazon is the lungs of the world, right?

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Because of its massive power to exchange vital gases,

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between the forest and the atmosphere.

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We also hear about the storehouse of biodiversity,

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although many believe it, few know of it.

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If go through this riverbank outside

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you will marvel at the...

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you can barely see the animals.

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The Indians say that the forest has more eyes than leaves.

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This is true and I will try to show you something.

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But today I'm going to use a different approach,

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an approach that, inspired by these two initiatives here,

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a harmonic and a philosophical one,

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I will try to use an approach

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that is slightly materialistic,

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but it attempts to convey that there is also, in nature,

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an extraordinary philosophy and harmony.

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There will be no music in my presentation,

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but I hope that all of you will notice the music of the reality I'm going to show you.

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I'm going to discuss physiology, not of the lung,

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but other analogies with human physiology,

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especially the heart.

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We start by thinking that water is like blood.

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The circulation in our body distributes fresh blood,

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which feeds, nurtures, and supports us,

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and brings the used blood back to be renewed.

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In the Amazon, things happen similarly.

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We'll start talking about the power of all these processes.

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This is an image of rain in motion.

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What you can see there are the years passing at every second.

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The rains all over the world. What do you see?

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The equatorial region, in general,

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and the Amazon specifically,

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is extremely important for the world climate.

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It's a powerful engine.

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There is an intense evaporation taking place here.

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If we take a look at this other image

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that shows the water vapor flux...

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in black you have dry air, in grey, moist air,

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the clouds are white.

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What you see there is an extraordinary resurgence in the Amazon.

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What phenomenon, if it's not a desert,

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what phenomenon makes the water gush from the ground into the atmosphere

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with such power that we can see from space?

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What phenomenon is this?

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It could be a geyser.

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A geyser is underground water heated by the magma

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that explodes in the atmosphere,

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and transfers this water to the atmosphere.

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We don't have geysers in the Amazon,

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unless I am wrong, I don't know of any.

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However, we have something that has the same role,

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with much more elegance,

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our good old friends, the trees

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that, like geysers,

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transfer an enormous amount of water from the ground to the atmosphere.

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There are 600 billion trees in the Amazon forest, 600 billion geysers.

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This is done with an extraordinary sophistication,

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they don't need the heat of the magma.

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They use the sunlight to do this process.

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So, in a day, a typical sunny day in the Amazon,

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a big tree manages to transfer 1000 L of water

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by its transpiration.

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1000 L!

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If you take all the water from the Amazon,

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which is a very large area,

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and add up all this water that is released by transpiration,

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which is the sweat of the forest,

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you arrive at an incredible number,

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20 billion metric tons of water.

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You know, this is in a day.

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Do you know how much that is?

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The Amazon River, the largest river on Earth,

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one fifth of all the fresh water

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that leaves the continents of the whole world ends up in the oceans,

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it dumps 17 billion tons of water a day in the Atlantic Ocean.

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This river of vapor

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that comes from the forest and goes to the atmosphere,

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is greater than the Amazon River.

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Just to give you an idea,

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if we could take a gigantic kettle,

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one that you plugged into a power socket, an electric one,

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and put the 20 billion metric tons of water in it,

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how much power would you need

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to evaporate this water?

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Any idea? A really big kettle,

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a gigantic kettle.

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50 thousand Itaipus.

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For those who don't know it, Itaipu is still the largest hydroelectric plant in the world.

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It's something Brazil is very proud of

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because it provides more than 30% of the power

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consumed in Brazil.

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And the Amazon is here, doing it for free.

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It's alive and an extremely powerful plant, providing environmental services.

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Related to this subject,

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we are going to talk about what I call the “Paradox of Chance”,

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which is curious.

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If you look at the world map,

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it's easy to see this.

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You will see that in the equatorial zone, you have the forests,

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and the deserts are organized

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on 30º north latitude, on 30º south latitude, aligned.

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Look over there, in the southern hemisphere, the Atacama,

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Namibia Kalahari in Africa, the Australian desert,

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in the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonoma, etc.

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There is an exception, and it's curious,

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It's the quadrangle that ranges from Cuiabá to Buenos Aires,

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from São Paulo to the Andes.

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This quadrangle was supposed to be a desert.

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It's on the line of deserts.

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Why isn't it?

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That's why I call it the “Paradox of Chance”.

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What do we have in South America that is different?

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If we can use the analogy

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of the blood circulating in our bodies,

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with the water circulating in the landscape,

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we see that the rivers are veins.

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They drain the landscape, they drain the tissue of nature.

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Where are the arteries?

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Any guess?

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What takes...

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how does the water irrigate nature's tissues

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and bring everything back through the rivers?

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There is a new type of river,

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which originates in the blue sea,

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which flows through the green ocean,

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it not only flows, but it is also pumped by the green ocean,

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and falls on our land.

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All our economy, that quadrangle,

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70% of the GDP in South America comes from that area,

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and depends on this river.

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This river flows invisible above us...

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we are floating here on this floating hotel,

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on one of the largest rivers on Earth,

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which is the Black River. It's a bit dry and rough,

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but we are floating here,

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and above us there is this invisible river passing.

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This river has a pulse.

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Here it is.

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That's why we also talk about the heart.

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You can see the season of the year there... There is the rainy season.

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In the Amazon, we used to have two seasons,

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the humid season and an even more humid one.

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Now we have a dry season.

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You can see it covering that region

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which, otherwise, would be a desert.

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It's not.

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We, scientists...

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you see that I have a problem here

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to take my head from one side to the other.

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Scientists study how it works, why, etc.

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and these studies are generating a series of discoveries

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which are absolutely fabulous

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to raise our awareness of the wealth,

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the complexity, and the wonder that we have,

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of the symphony we have in this process.

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One of them is how the rain is formed.

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Above the Amazon, there is clean air,

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as there is above the ocean.

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The blue sea has clean air and forms few clouds,

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it almost doesn't rain.

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The green ocean has the same clean air, but forms a lot of rain.

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What is happening here that is different?

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The forest emits smells,

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and these smells are condensation nuclei

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that form drops in the atmosphere.

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Then clouds are formed and there is torrential rain.

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The watering can of the Garden of Eden.

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This relation between a living thing, which is the forest,

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and a non-living thing, which is the atmosphere,

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is ingenious in the Amazon,

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because the forest provides water and seeds,

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and the atmosphere forms the rain and gives them back,

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guaranteeing the forest's survival.

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There are other factors as well.

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We've talked a little about the heart,

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let's now talk about another function, that is the liver!

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When humid air, with high humidity and radiation are combined

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with this organic material,

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which I call “exogenous vitamin C”, generous vitamin C is in the form of gas,

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plants release antioxidants

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that react with pollutants.

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You can rest assured

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that you are breathing the purest air on Earth, here in the Amazon

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because the plants take care of this characteristic as well.

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This benefits the way plants work,

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another ingenious cycle.

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Speaking of fractals,

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and their relation with the way we work,

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we can establish other comparisons.

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As in the upper airways of the lung,

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the air in the Amazon is free of excess dust.

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The dust in the air that we breathe is cleaned by the airways.

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This keeps the excess dust from harming the rainfall.

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When there are fires in the Amazon,

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the smoke stops the rain, it stops raining,

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the forest dries up and catches fire.

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There is another fractal analogy.

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Like the veins and arteries,

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the rain water is a feedback.

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It returns to the atmosphere.

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Like endocrinal glands and hormones,

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there are those gases which I told you about before

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that are formed and released into the atmosphere, like hormones,

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that help in the formation of rain.

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Like the liver and kidneys, as I've said, the cleaning of the air.

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And, at last, like the heart,

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pumping water from outside, from the sea,

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into the forest.

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We call it the "biotic moisture pump,"

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a new theory that is explained in a very simple way.

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If there is a desert in the continent

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and a nearby sea,

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evaporation is greater in the sea,

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and it sucks the air above the desert.

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The desert is trapped in this condition, it will always be dry.

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If you have the opposite situation, a forest,

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the evaporation, as we showed, is much greater, because of the trees,

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it inverts the relationship.

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The air above the sea is sucked in

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and humidity is imported.

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This is a satellite photo taken one month ago.

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That's Manaus down there, we're down there,

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it shows this process.

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It is not a little river, one of those that flow into a canal.

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It is a mighty river that irrigates South America,

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among other things.

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This image shows those paths, all the hurricanes

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that have been recorded.

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You can see that in the red square, there hardly are any hurricanes.

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This is not by chance.

263
00:13:21,053 --> 00:13:25,645
This pump that sucks the moisture into the continent,

264
00:13:25,645 --> 00:13:28,265
also speeds up the air above the sea

265
00:13:28,265 --> 00:13:30,225
and this prevents hurricane formation.

266
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To close this part and summing up,

267
00:13:32,710 --> 00:13:36,341
I'd like to talk about something different.

268
00:13:36,341 --> 00:13:38,939
I have several colleagues

269
00:13:38,939 --> 00:13:41,684
who worked in the development of these theories.

270
00:13:41,684 --> 00:13:43,809
They think, and so do I,

271
00:13:43,809 --> 00:13:47,845
that we can save planet Earth.

272
00:13:47,845 --> 00:13:50,251
I'm not talking only about the Amazon.

273
00:13:50,251 --> 00:13:53,086
The Amazon teaches us a lesson

274
00:13:53,086 --> 00:13:54,993
of how pristine nature works.

275
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We didn't understand these processes before

276
00:13:58,370 --> 00:14:00,077
because the rest of the world is messed up.

277
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Here, we can understand it.

278
00:14:02,172 --> 00:14:05,597
These colleagues propose

279
00:14:05,597 --> 00:14:07,709
that we can, yes, we can, save other areas,

280
00:14:07,709 --> 00:14:10,324
even deserts.

281
00:14:10,324 --> 00:14:12,540
If we can establish forests

282
00:14:12,540 --> 00:14:15,614
in these other areas, we can revert climate change,

283
00:14:15,614 --> 00:14:20,508
including global warming

284
00:14:20,508 --> 00:14:22,286
I have a dear colleague in India

285
00:14:22,286 --> 00:14:25,284
named Suprabha Seshan,

286
00:14:25,284 --> 00:14:27,851
who has a motto,

287
00:14:27,851 --> 00:14:32,036
"Gardening back the biosphere",

288
00:14:32,036 --> 00:14:35,622
"Reajardinando a biosfera", in Portuguese.

289
00:14:35,622 --> 00:14:38,632
She does wonderful work rebuilding ecosystems,

290
00:14:38,632 --> 00:14:40,515
we need to do this.

291
00:14:40,515 --> 00:14:43,499
Having closed this quick introduction,

292
00:14:44,649 --> 00:14:48,282
we see the reality that we have out here

293
00:14:48,282 --> 00:14:52,169
of drought, this climate change,

294
00:14:52,169 --> 00:14:55,267
things that we already knew.

295
00:14:55,267 --> 00:14:57,462
I'd like to tell you a short story.

296
00:14:57,462 --> 00:15:00,087
Once, about four years ago,

297
00:15:00,087 --> 00:15:03,648
I attended the presentation of a text by Davi Copenaua,

298
00:15:03,648 --> 00:15:06,471
a wise representative of the Ianomami people

299
00:15:06,471 --> 00:15:08,464
that went more or less this:

300
00:15:08,464 --> 00:15:11,145
Doesn't the white man know

301
00:15:11,145 --> 00:15:12,588
that if he destroys the forest the rain will end?

302
00:15:12,588 --> 00:15:16,194
And that if the rain ends, there will be no drinking water

303
00:15:16,904 --> 00:15:19,034
or food?

304
00:15:19,034 --> 00:15:22,712
I heard that and my eyes welled up

305
00:15:22,712 --> 00:15:27,746
because, oh, my...

306
00:15:27,746 --> 00:15:30,385
I've been studying this for 20 years, with a super computer,

307
00:15:30,385 --> 00:15:34,327
tens, thousands of scientist,

308
00:15:34,327 --> 00:15:35,773
and we are starting to reach this conclusion that he already knows!

309
00:15:35,773 --> 00:15:39,536
A critical point is that the Ianomami have never deforested.

310
00:15:39,536 --> 00:15:45,342
How could they know the rain would end?

311
00:15:45,342 --> 00:15:50,157
That bugged me

312
00:15:50,157 --> 00:15:54,744
and I was befuddled.

313
00:15:54,744 --> 00:15:56,447
How could he know that?

314
00:15:56,447 --> 00:15:57,866
Some months later, I met him at another event and said:

315
00:15:57,866 --> 00:16:02,105
"Davi, how did you know that destroying the forest the rain ends?

316
00:16:02,105 --> 00:16:05,167
He replied: "The forest spirit told us."

317
00:16:05,167 --> 00:16:11,174
For me, this was a "game changer,"

318
00:16:11,174 --> 00:16:13,127
a radical change.

319
00:16:15,697 --> 00:16:19,072
I said:

320
00:16:19,932 --> 00:16:23,140
"Gosh, why am I doing all this science,

321
00:16:23,140 --> 00:16:27,928
to reach a conclusion that he already knows?"

322
00:16:27,928 --> 00:16:30,712
Then something absolutely critical hit me.

323
00:16:30,712 --> 00:16:32,900
It is that...

324
00:16:32,900 --> 00:16:35,262
Seeing is believing.

325
00:16:35,262 --> 00:16:36,665
"Out of sight, out of heart."

326
00:16:36,665 --> 00:16:39,188
This is a need that who came before me pointed out

327
00:16:39,188 --> 00:16:40,932
that we need to see things...

328
00:16:40,932 --> 00:16:42,822
We, I mean, western society

329
00:16:42,822 --> 00:16:45,164
that is becoming global, civilized,

330
00:16:45,164 --> 00:16:48,130
we need to see, if we don't see, we don't register the information.

331
00:16:48,130 --> 00:16:50,837
We live in ignorance.

332
00:16:50,837 --> 00:16:52,797
Thus, I make this proposal:

333
00:16:52,797 --> 00:16:54,539
let's... of course, the astronomers would spend on this

334
00:16:54,539 --> 00:16:56,914
let's turn the Hubble upside down.

335
00:16:56,914 --> 00:17:00,734
And let's make the Hubble look down here,

336
00:17:00,734 --> 00:17:02,117
rather than to the end of the universe,

337
00:17:02,117 --> 00:17:05,787
the wonderful end of the universe.

338
00:17:05,787 --> 00:17:07,826
Now, we have a practical reality,

339
00:17:07,826 --> 00:17:09,492
we live in an unknown cosmos,

340
00:17:09,492 --> 00:17:12,778
we're ignorant,

341
00:17:12,778 --> 00:17:15,396
we're trampling on this wonderful cosmos

342
00:17:15,396 --> 00:17:16,969
that shelters and houses us.

343
00:17:16,969 --> 00:17:19,939
Talk to any astrophysicist,

344
00:17:19,939 --> 00:17:22,673
the Earth is a statistical improbability.

345
00:17:22,673 --> 00:17:24,922
The stability and comfort that we enjoy

346
00:17:24,922 --> 00:17:28,951
with the droughts of the Black River,

347
00:17:29,431 --> 00:17:31,541
all the heat and cold and all,

348
00:17:31,541 --> 00:17:32,920
there is nothing like it in the universe, that we know of.

349
00:17:32,920 --> 00:17:37,466
Then, let's turn the Hubble down here and look at the Earth.

350
00:17:37,466 --> 00:17:40,693
Let's start with the Amazon!

351
00:17:40,693 --> 00:17:42,744
Let's dive,

352
00:17:42,744 --> 00:17:44,773
let's reach out the reality we live in daily,

353
00:17:44,773 --> 00:17:46,678
and look at it, since that's what we need,

354
00:17:46,678 --> 00:17:48,589
Davi Copenaua doesn't need this.

355
00:17:48,589 --> 00:17:50,484
He already has something that I think I missed.

356
00:17:50,484 --> 00:17:54,864
I was educated by television.

357
00:17:54,864 --> 00:17:56,986
I think that I missed this,

358
00:17:56,986 --> 00:18:00,192
an ancestral record,

359
00:18:00,192 --> 00:18:03,563
a valuation of that which I don't know, which I haven't seen.

360
00:18:03,563 --> 00:18:06,337
He is no doubting Thomas.

361
00:18:06,337 --> 00:18:09,543
He believes with veneration and reverence,

362
00:18:09,543 --> 00:18:11,888
in that which the ancestors and the spirits taught them.

363
00:18:11,888 --> 00:18:13,758
As we can't, let's look into the forest.

364
00:18:13,758 --> 00:18:16,862
Even with the Hubble up there,

365
00:18:16,862 --> 00:18:19,148
looking into the sky...

366
00:18:19,148 --> 00:18:22,018
This is a bird's-eye view.

367
00:18:22,018 --> 00:18:24,256
Even when this happens,

368
00:18:24,256 --> 00:18:26,475
we also see something that we don't know.

369
00:18:26,475 --> 00:18:28,162
The Spanish called it the green inferno.

370
00:18:28,162 --> 00:18:31,309
If you leave here, go into the bushes, and get lost,

371
00:18:31,309 --> 00:18:34,563
and by any chance you head west,

372
00:18:34,563 --> 00:18:36,054
it's 550 miles to Colombia,

373
00:18:36,054 --> 00:18:38,350
and another 600 miles to somewhere else,

374
00:18:38,350 --> 00:18:40,135
then you can figure out why they called it the green inferno.

375
00:18:40,135 --> 00:18:44,691
But go and look at what is in there.

376
00:18:44,691 --> 00:18:48,749
It is a live carpet.

377
00:18:48,749 --> 00:18:50,401
Each color there is a tree species.

378
00:18:50,401 --> 00:18:53,645
Each tree, each tree top,

379
00:18:53,645 --> 00:18:56,554
has even 10,000 species of insects in it,

380
00:18:56,554 --> 00:18:59,983
let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, and all.

381
00:19:00,983 --> 00:19:02,853
All invisible.

382
00:19:02,853 --> 00:19:04,664
All an even stranger cosmos to us

383
00:19:04,664 --> 00:19:06,708
than the galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth

384
00:19:06,708 --> 00:19:09,596
that the Hubble brings to our newspapers everyday.

385
00:19:09,596 --> 00:19:12,971
I close my talk here.

386
00:19:12,971 --> 00:19:15,632
I have a few seconds left,

387
00:19:15,632 --> 00:19:18,017
showing this wonderful being.

388
00:19:18,017 --> 00:19:20,548
When we see the Morpho butterfly in the forest,

389
00:19:20,548 --> 00:19:23,758
we feel like someone left the door to paradise open

390
00:19:23,758 --> 00:19:27,049
and that this creature escaped from there,

391
00:19:27,049 --> 00:19:28,773
Because it's so beautiful.

392
00:19:28,773 --> 00:19:30,150
However, I cannot close

393
00:19:30,150 --> 00:19:31,913
without showing a tech side,

394
00:19:31,913 --> 00:19:34,015
we are tech arrogant.

395
00:19:34,015 --> 00:19:39,456
We deprive nature of its technology.

396
00:19:39,456 --> 00:19:44,083
A robotic hand is technological,

397
00:19:44,083 --> 00:19:46,348
mine is biological,

398
00:19:46,348 --> 00:19:48,262
and we don't think about it anymore.

399
00:19:48,262 --> 00:19:52,465
Let's then look at the Morpho butterfly,

400
00:19:52,465 --> 00:19:53,935
an example of an invisible technological competence of life.

401
00:19:53,935 --> 00:19:59,011
It is at the very heart of our possibility of surviving on the planet.

402
00:19:59,011 --> 00:20:02,043
Let's zoom in on it.

403
00:20:02,043 --> 00:20:04,440
Again, there is the Hubble.

404
00:20:04,440 --> 00:20:07,968
Let's get into the butterfly's wings,

405
00:20:07,968 --> 00:20:10,836
the scholars have tried to explain: "Why is it blue?"

406
00:20:10,836 --> 00:20:14,529
Let's zoom in on it.

407
00:20:14,529 --> 00:20:19,019
What you see is that the architecture of the invisible humiliates

408
00:20:19,019 --> 00:20:20,673
the best architects in the world.

409
00:20:20,673 --> 00:20:23,327
All this on a tiny scale.

410
00:20:23,327 --> 00:20:24,696
Besides the beauty and functioning, there is another side to it.

411
00:20:24,696 --> 00:20:26,748
All in nature

412
00:20:26,748 --> 00:20:30,427
that is organized in extraordinary structures has a function.

413
00:20:30,427 --> 00:20:33,208
This function, of the Morpho butterfly, it is not blue,

414
00:20:33,208 --> 00:20:34,563
it does not have blue pigments.

415
00:20:34,563 --> 00:20:36,940
It has photonic crystals on the surface,

416
00:20:36,940 --> 00:20:41,350
according to the person who studied it,

417
00:20:41,350 --> 00:20:42,702
extremely sophisticated crystals.

418
00:20:42,702 --> 00:20:48,012
Our technology had nothing like that at the time.

419
00:20:48,012 --> 00:20:50,584
Hitachi has now made a monitor

420
00:20:50,584 --> 00:20:53,006
that uses this technology,

421
00:20:53,006 --> 00:20:54,913
and it is used in optical fibers to transmit...

422
00:20:54,913 --> 00:20:58,427
Janine Banes, who's been here several times, talks about it, biomimetics.

423
00:20:58,427 --> 00:21:01,454
My time is up.

424
00:21:01,454 --> 00:21:04,628
Then, I'll wrap up with what is at the base of this capacity,

425
00:21:04,628 --> 00:21:08,319
of this competence of biodiversity,

426
00:21:08,319 --> 00:21:11,159
of producing all these wonderful services.

427
00:21:11,159 --> 00:21:13,916
The living cell.

428
00:21:13,916 --> 00:21:17,927
It is a structure with a few microns, which is an internal wonder,

429
00:21:17,927 --> 00:21:19,985
there are TED talks about it, I won't drag on,

430
00:21:19,985 --> 00:21:21,869
but each person in this room, including myself,

431
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
has 100 trillion of this micromachine in his body,

432
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
so that you can enjoy this well-being.

433
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Imagine what is out there in the Amazon forest.

434
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
100 trillion, this is greater than the number of stars in the sky.

435
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
We are not aware of it.

436
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Thank you so much.