For thousands of years, well really probably millions of years,
our ancestors have looked up at the sky and wondered what's up there,
and they've also started to wonder,
hmm, could we be alone in this planet?
Now, I'm fortunate that I get to get paid to actually ask some of those questions,
and sort of bad news for you,
your tax dollars are paying me to try to answer some of those questions.
But then, about 10 years ago,
I was told, I mean asked,
if I would start to look at the technology to help get us off planet,
and so that's what I'm going to talk to you about today.
So playing to the local crowd, this is what it looks like
in your day-to-day life in Boston,
but as you start to go off planet, things look very, very different.
So there we are, hovering above the WGBH studios,
and here's a very famous picture of the Earthrise from the Moon,
and you can see the Earth starting to recede.
And then what I love is this picture
that was taken from the surface of Mars looking back at the Earth.
Can anyone find the Earth?
I'm going to help you out a little.
(Laughs)
Yeah.
The point of showing this is that when people start to go to Mars,
they're not going to be able to keep calling in
and be micromanaged the way people on a space station are.
They're going to have to be independent.
So even though they're up there,
there are going to be all sorts of things that they're going to need,
just like people on Earth need things like, oh, transportation,
life support, food, clothing and so on.
But unlike on Earth, they are also going to need oxygen.
They're going to have to deal with about a third of the gravity that we have here.
They're going to have to worry about habitats, power, heat, light,
and radiation protection,
something that we don't actually worry about nearly as much on the Earth,
because we have this beautiful atmosphere and magnetosphere.
The problem with that is that we also have a lot of constraints.
So the biggest one for us is upmass,
and the number that I've used for years
is it costs about 10,000 dollars to launch a can of Coke into low Earth orbit.
The problem is, there you are with 10,000 dollars later,
and you're still in low Earth orbit.
You're not even at the Moon or Mars or anything else.
So you're going to have to try to figure out how to keep the mass
as low as possible so you don't have to launch it.
But on top of that cost issue with the mass,
you also have problems of storage
and flexibility and reliability.
You can't just get there and say, "Oops, I forgot to bring,"
because Amazon.com just does not deliver to Mars.
So you better be prepared.
So what is the solution for this?
And I'm going to propose to you for the rest of this talk
that the solution actually is life,
and when you start to look at life as a technology,
you realize, ah, that's it,
that's exactly what we needed.
This plant here, like every person here
and every one of your dogs and cats
and plants and so on,
all started as a single cell.
So imagine, you're starting as a very low upmass object
and then growing into something a good deal bigger.
Now, my hero Charles Darwin,
of course, reminds us that there's no such thing as a designer in biology,
but what if we now have the technology
to design biology,
maybe even design, oh, who new lifeforms
that can do things for us that we couldn't have imagined otherwise.
So years ago, I was asked to start to sell this program,
and while I was doing that,
I was put in front of a panel at NASA,
as you might sort of imagine,
a bunch of people in suits and white shirts and pencil protectors,
and I did this sort of crazy wild,
"This is all the next great thing,"
and I thought they would be blown over,
and instead the chairman of the committee just looked at me straight in the eye,
and said, "So what's the big idea?"
So I was like, OK, you want Star Trek?
We'll do Star Trek.
And so let me tell you what the big idea is.
We've used organisms to make biomaterials for years.
So here's a great picture taken outside of Glasgow,
and you can see lots of great biomaterials there.
There are trees that you can use to build houses.
There are sheep where you can get your wool from.
You could get leather from the sheep.
Just quickly glancing around the room,
I'll bet there's no one in this room that doesn't have some kind of animal
or plant product on them,
some kind of biomaterial.
But you know what?
We're not going to take sheep and trees and stuff to Mars.
That's nuts, because of the upmass problem.
But we are going to take things like this.
This is ??
Those white dots that you see are spores.
This happens to be a bacterium that can form incredibly resistant spores,
and when I say incredibly resistant, they've proven themselves.
?? spores have been flown on what was called LDEF,
long duration exposure facility, for almost six years
and some of them survived that in space.
Unbelievable, a lot better than any of us can do.
So why not just take the capabilities, like to make wood or to make wool
or spidersilk or whatever,
and put them in ?? spores
and take those with you off planet?
So what are you going to do when you're off planet?
Here's an iconic picture of Buzz Aldrin looking back at the Eagle
when he landed, oh, it was almost 50 years ago on the surface of the Moon.
Now, if you're going to go to the Moon for three days,
and you're the first person to set foot,
yeah, you can live in a tin can,
but you wouldn't want to do that for, say, a year and a half.
So I did actually a calculation, being in California.
I looked at what the average size of a cell at Alcatraz is,
and I have news for you,
the volume in the Eagle there, in the Lunar Module,
was about the size of a cell at Alcatraz
if it were only five feet high.
So incredibly cramped living quarters.
You just can't ask a human to stay in there for long periods of time.
So why not take these biomaterials and make something?
So here's an image that a colleague of mine
who is an architect, Chris Maurer, has done of what we've been proposing,
and we'll get to the point of why I've been standing up here holding something
that looks like a dried sandwich this whole lecture.
So we've proposed that the solution to the habitat problem on Mars
could just simply lie in a fungus.
So I'm now probably going to turn off everyone
from ever eating a mushroom again.
So let's talk about fungi for a second.