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For thousands of years,
well really probably millions of years,

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our ancestors have looked up at the sky
and wondered what's up there,

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and they've also started to wonder,

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hmm, could we be alone in this planet?

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Now, I'm fortunate that I get to get paid
to actually ask some of those questions,

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and sort of bad news for you,

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your tax dollars are paying me to try
to answer some of those questions.

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But then, about 10 years ago,

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I was told, I mean asked,

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if I would start to look at the technology
to help get us off planet,

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and so that's what I'm going
to talk to you about today.

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So playing to the local crowd,
this is what it looks like

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in your day-to-day life in Boston,

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but as you start to go off planet,
things look very, very different.

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So there we are, hovering above
the WGBH studios,

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and here's a very famous picture
of the Earthrise from the Moon,

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and you can see the Earth
starting to recede.

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And then what I love is this picture

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that was taken from the surface of Mars
looking back at the Earth.

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Can anyone find the Earth?

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I'm going to help you out a little.

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(Laughs)

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Yeah.

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The point of showing this is that
when people start to go to Mars,

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they're not going to be able
to keep calling in

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and be micromanaged
the way people on a space station are.

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They're going to have to be independent.

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So even though they're up there,

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there are going to be all sorts of things
that they're going to need,

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just like people on Earth
need things like, oh, transportation,

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life support, food, clothing and so on.

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But unlike on Earth, they are also
going to need oxygen.

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They're going to have to deal with about
a third of the gravity that we have here.

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They're going to have to worry
about habitats, power, heat, light,

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and radiation protection,

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something that we don't actually
worry about nearly as much on the Earth,

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because we have this beautiful
atmosphere and magnetosphere.

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The problem with that is that
we also have a lot of constraints.

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So the biggest one for us is upmass,

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and the number that I've used for years

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is it costs about 10,000 dollars to launch
a can of Coke into low Earth orbit.

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The problem is, there you are
with 10,000 dollars later,

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and you're still in low Earth orbit.

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You're not even at the Moon
or Mars or anything else.

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So you're going to have to try
to figure out how to keep the mass

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as low as possible
so you don't have to launch it.

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But on top of that
cost issue with the mass,

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you also have problems of storage

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and flexibility and reliability.

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You can't just get there and say,
"Oops, I forgot to bring,"

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because Amazon.com
just does not deliver to Mars.

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So you better be prepared.

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So what is the solution for this?

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And I'm going to propose to you
for the rest of this talk

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that the solution actually is life,

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and when you start to look
at life as a technology,

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you realize, ah, that's it,

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that's exactly what we needed.

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This plant here, like every person here

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and every one of your dogs and cats

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and plants and so on,

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all started as a single cell.

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So imagine, you're starting
as a very low upmass object

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and then growing into something
a good deal bigger.

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Now, my hero Charles Darwin,

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of course, reminds us that there's
no such thing as a designer in biology,

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but what if we now have the technology

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to design biology,

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maybe even design, oh, who new lifeforms

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that can do things for us
that we couldn't have imagined otherwise.

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So years ago, I was asked
to start to sell this program,

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and while I was doing that,

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I was put in front of a panel at NASA,

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as you might sort of imagine,

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a bunch of people in suits
and white shirts and pencil protectors,

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and I did this sort of crazy wild,

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"This is all the next great thing,"

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and I thought they would be blown over,

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and instead the chairman of the committee
just looked at me straight in the eye,

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and said, "So what's the big idea?"

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So I was like, OK, you want Star Trek?

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We'll do Star Trek.

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And so let me tell you
what the big idea is.

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We've used organisms
to make biomaterials for years.

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So here's a great picture taken
outside of Glasgow,

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and you can see lots
of great biomaterials there.

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There are trees that you can use
to build houses.

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There are sheep where you
can get your wool from.

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You could get leather from the sheep.

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Just quickly glancing around the room,

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I'll bet there's no one in this room
that doesn't have some kind of animal

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or plant product on them,

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some kind of biomaterial.

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But you know what?

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We're not going to take sheep
and trees and stuff to Mars.

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That's nuts, because
of the upmass problem.

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But we are going to take things like this.

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This is ??

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Those white dots that you see are spores.

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This happens to be a bacterium
that can form incredibly resistant spores,

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and when I say incredibly resistant,
they've proven themselves.

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?? spores have been flown
on what was called LDEF,

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long duration exposure facility,
for almost six years

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and some of them survived that in space.

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Unbelievable, a lot better
than any of us can do.

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So why not just take the capabilities,
like to make wood or to make wool

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or spidersilk or whatever,

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and put them in ?? spores

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and take those with you off planet?

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So what are you going to do
when you're off planet?

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Here's an iconic picture of Buzz Aldrin
looking back at the Eagle

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when he landed, oh, it was almost
50 years ago on the surface of the Moon.

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Now, if you're going to go
to the Moon for three days,

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and you're the first person to set foot,

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yeah, you can live in a tin can,

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but you wouldn't want to do that
for, say, a year and a half.

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So I did actually a calculation,
being in California.

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I looked at what the average size
of a cell at Alcatraz is,

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and I have news for you,

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the volume in the Eagle there,
in the Lunar Module,

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was about the size of a cell at Alcatraz

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if it were only five feet high.

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So incredibly cramped living quarters.

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You just can't ask a human
to stay in there for long periods of time.

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So why not take these biomaterials
and make something?

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So here's an image
that a colleague of mine

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who is an architect, Chris Maurer,
has done of what we've been proposing,

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and we'll get to the point of why I've
been standing up here holding something

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that looks like a dried sandwich
this whole lecture.

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So we've proposed that the solution
to the habitat problem on Mars

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could just simply lie in a fungus.

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So I'm now probably
going to turn off everyone

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from ever eating a mushroom again.

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So let's talk about fungi for a second.