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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.
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This pump that sucks the moisture into the continent,
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also speeds up the air above the sea
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and this prevents hurricane formation.
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To close this part and summing up,
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I'd like to talk about something different.
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I have several colleagues
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who worked in the development of these theories.
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They think, and so do I,
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that we can save planet Earth.
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I'm not talking only about the Amazon.
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The Amazon teaches us a lesson
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of how pristine nature works.
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We didn't understand these processes before
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because the rest of the world is messed up.
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Here, we can understand it.
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These colleagues propose
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that we can, yes, we can, save other areas,
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even deserts.
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If we can establish forests
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in these other areas, we can revert climate change,
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including global warming
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I have a dear colleague in India
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named Suprabha Seshan,
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who has a motto,
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"Gardening back the biosphere",
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"Reajardinando a biosfera", in Portuguese.
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She does wonderful work rebuilding ecosystems,
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we need to do this.
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Having closed this quick introduction,
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we see the reality that we have out here
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of drought, this climate change,
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things that we already knew.
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I'd like to tell you a short story.
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Once, about four years ago,
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I attended the presentation of a text by Davi Copenaua,
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a wise representative of the Ianomami people
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that went more or less this:
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Doesn't the white man know
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that if he destroys the forest the rain will end?
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And that if the rain ends, there will be no drinking water
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or food?
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I heard that and my eyes welled up
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because, oh, my...
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I've been studying this for 20 years, with a super computer,
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tens, thousands of scientist,
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and we are starting to reach this conclusion that he already knows!
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A critical point is that the Ianomami have never deforested.
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How could they know the rain would end?
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That bugged me
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and I was befuddled.
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How could he know that?
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Some months later, I met him at another event and said:
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"Davi, how did you know that destroying the forest the rain ends?
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He replied: "The forest spirit told us."
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For me, this was a "game changer,"
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a radical change.
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I said:
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"Gosh, why am I doing all this science,
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to reach a conclusion that he already knows?"
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Then something absolutely critical hit me.
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It is that...
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Seeing is believing.
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"Out of sight, out of heart."
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This is a need that who came before me pointed out
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that we need to see things...
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We, I mean, western society
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that is becoming global, civilized,
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we need to see, if we don't see, we don't register the information.
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We live in ignorance.
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Thus, I make this proposal:
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let's... of course, the astronomers would spend on this
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let's turn the Hubble upside down.
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And let's make the Hubble look down here,
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rather than to the end of the universe,
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the wonderful end of the universe.
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Now, we have a practical reality,
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we live in an unknown cosmos,
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we're ignorant,
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we're trampling on this wonderful cosmos
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that shelters and houses us.
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Talk to any astrophysicist,
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the Earth is a statistical improbability.
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The stability and comfort that we enjoy
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with the droughts of the Black River,
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all the heat and cold and all,
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there is nothing like it in the universe, that we know of.
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Then, let's turn the Hubble down here and look at the Earth.
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Let's start with the Amazon!
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Let's dive,
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let's reach out the reality we live in daily,
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and look at it, since that's what we need,
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Davi Copenaua doesn't need this.
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He already has something that I think I missed.
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I was educated by television.
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I think that I missed this,
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an ancestral record,
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a valuation of that which I don't know, which I haven't seen.
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He is no doubting Thomas.
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He believes with veneration and reverence,
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in that which the ancestors and the spirits taught them.
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As we can't, let's look into the forest.
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Even with the Hubble up there,
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looking into the sky...
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This is a bird's-eye view.
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Even when this happens,
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we also see something that we don't know.
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The Spanish called it the green inferno.
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If you leave here, go into the bushes, and get lost,
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and by any chance you head west,
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it's 550 miles to Colombia,
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and another 600 miles to somewhere else,
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then you can figure out why they called it the green inferno.
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But go and look at what is in there.
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It is a live carpet.
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Each color there is a tree species.
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Each tree, each tree top,
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has even 10,000 species of insects in it,
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let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, and all.
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All invisible.
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All an even stranger cosmos to us
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than the galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth
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that the Hubble brings to our newspapers everyday.
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I close my talk here.
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I have a few seconds left,
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showing this wonderful being.
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When we see the Morpho butterfly in the forest,
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we feel like someone left the door to paradise open
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and that this creature escaped from there,
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Because it's so beautiful.
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However, I cannot close
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without showing a tech side,
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we are tech arrogant.
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We deprive nature of its technology.
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A robotic hand is technological,
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mine is biological,
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and we don't think about it anymore.
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Let's then look at the Morpho butterfly,
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an example of an invisible technological competence of life.
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It is at the very heart of our possibility of surviving on the planet.
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Let's zoom in on it.
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Again, there is the Hubble.
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Let's get into the butterfly's wings,
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the scholars have tried to explain: "Why is it blue?"
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Let's zoom in on it.
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What you see is that the architecture of the invisible humiliates
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the best architects in the world.
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All this on a tiny scale.
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Besides the beauty and functioning, there is another side to it.
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All in nature
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that is organized in extraordinary structures has a function.
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This function, of the Morpho butterfly, it is not blue,
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it does not have blue pigments.
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It has photonic crystals on the surface,
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according to the person who studied it,
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extremely sophisticated crystals.
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Our technology had nothing like that at the time.
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Hitachi has now made a monitor
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that uses this technology,
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and it is used in optical fibers to transmit...
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Janine Banes, who's been here several times, talks about it, biomimetics.
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My time is up.
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Then, I'll wrap up with what is at the base of this capacity,
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of this competence of biodiversity,
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of producing all these wonderful services.
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The living cell.
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It is a structure with a few microns, which is an internal wonder,
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there are TED talks about it, I won't drag on,
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but each person in this room, including myself,
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Not Synced
has 100 trillion of this micromachine in his body,
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Not Synced
so that you can enjoy this well-being.
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Not Synced
Imagine what is out there in the Amazon forest.
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Not Synced
100 trillion, this is greater than the number of stars in the sky.
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Not Synced
We are not aware of it.
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Not Synced
Thank you so much.