Can Tech Help Sustain Our Planet? - BBC Click

[Music] 999 this is a climate emergency and this week we have greener cleaner buildings robot boat exhaust sniffers and artificial trees [Music] I want to share with you a fact that I hadn't fully understood until I met climate scientist Edie Hawkins last year now I'd known that our weather was getting worse and our sea levels were rising and I'd known that global warming was happening because we were emitting carbon dioxide and methane into the air at a runaway rate but what I hadn't fully understood is this simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not bring global warming under control for every ton of co2 that we put into the atmosphere the temperature goes up a little bit more in order to stop global warming we need to do something very drastic indeed if we end up in a world where our emissions are net zero and we're not increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere anymore then that will stabilize global temperatures at the point at which we do that to reduce global temperatures we would need to somehow remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now there are already ways of capturing co2 at source on its way out of power stations for example but this doesn't get it all by any means what you need is something to pull co2 back out of the air what you need is something like this it's called the artificial tree the air passes through these filters which are made of a very special material because the co2 actually clings to this material as the air passes over it now once these filters are saturated with carbon dioxide this whole thing moves down into a container of water where this particular material releases the co2 into the sealed container and then congratulations you've captured yourself some co2 from the air this is the brainchild of Klaus Lackner here at the aptly named negative emissions Center at Arizona State University they realized very early on this is a waste management problem we are dumping co2 into the atmosphere and it just stays there so it was very clear to me in the early 90s that sometime in the 21st century we will have to stop a minute Klaus was the first scientist back in 1999 to publish a scientific paper suggesting carbon capture from the air was a feasible way of combating climate change the problem was no one seemed to be listening look at the climate change problem in the 90s we had models which told us it's happening but you couldn't really see it out in the real world except for the microscope in the 2000s you could measure it it was happening in the teens now you can see it happen even as as a non expert climate has changed in the next decade as it grows out of the noise it becomes loud and clear and it starts to hurt and once it hurts people will say now what do we do about it klaus argues that since we're failing to meet our targets for lowering co2 emissions carbon capture from the air is now unavoidable and now people are listening his technology has recently received commercial investment we have put so much co2 in the that we actually have to come back so we call ourselves they send them for negative carbon emissions because we are actually thinking about having a period in this century in which we will have to take a hundred parts per million back now that's more co2 than the world emitted in the 20th century how many of these do you think you would need a lot now these are very small but go to the size of recipient container if you wanted to actually match current emissions you would need 100 million or now right these are bigger than that right but 100 million sounds like a horribly large number until you start deconstructing it we build 80 million cars and trucks in Shanghai Harbor is sending out about 30 million for shipping containers so I would argue as far as industrial industrial scale goes this is large but not outrageously large so here which you suggest pays for these in the future ultimately it's part of the energy consumption so you in some form or another and as people around the world start to reach the conclusion that carbon capture is needed a startup scene is beginning to grow with differing approaches because co2 is everywhere it doesn't really matter where you put your devices and in Iceland carb fix has something very useful green geothermal power using this they claim to be able to capture up way more carbon than classes artificial trees and once you've captured the carbon the next problem is what you're gonna do with it so that it's not just rubbish but we can actually make something valuable from it we can use the co2 to create drinks with beers or soda or whatever we can also use co2 for fuel production there are also currently studies ongoing to see if if we can somehow use this year to do as a building material yeah in the future we may be able to knock co2 into concrete although the amount of rock that we'd create has been estimated to cover a landmass the size of Egypt and in fact to do this any other way also requires a scale that is pretty unimaginable you could say we can do it with trees and real forests and you can calculate if you wanted to do the same hundred million of these units in forests or any agriculture any photosynthetic systems you suddenly realize that the landing or the area you need is larger than current agriculture okay pasture land fields everything at it we would need more than that [Applause] [Music] welcome to the week in tech it was the week where a city in Florida paid almost 400 thousand pounds in Bitcoin to get its data back from ransomware hackers who'd locked up their computers with malware engineers at Toyota built a world record breaking free throwing basketball droid q3 managed 2020 consecutive successful shots former UK Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg says there's absolutely no evidence Russia influenced the brexit result using Facebook Clegg is now a vice president at Facebook and up to 20 million manufacturing jobs could be at risk by 2030 as a result of robots replacing human workers so says the analysis outfit Oxford analytics the study reveals that on average each new industrial robot eliminates 1.6 human manufacturing jobs a new electric car has been announced that boosts its range to 450 miles with the help of solar panels on its bonnet roof and boot called the Lightyear one its price is expected to be a whopping 135 thousand pounds no word yet on when a production model is expected and finally Rasputin may have played a part in the fall of the house of Romanov but who knew he could belt out a tune like Beyonce this new form of deep faking is the work of Samsung's AI Center at Imperial College London deep fakes will now be generated using just one image of a subject before the AI algorithm goes to work this is quite a scene the dancers here are being choreographed by artificial intelligence which has learned from moves created by a leading choreographer and it's quite something [Music] Wayne McGregor has been running his dance company for 25 years so has an archive perfect for the job wale is actually here today but he seems to be focusing on perfecting the moves rather than designing a whole dance [Music] a computer algorithm is analyzing hundreds of hours of his dance creations sparking new personalized routines ready for a show in LA next month so how does he feel seeing what the technology musters up you see it on the screen and it's surprising it's it's something you've not seen before you can't quite work out how your body can do that and then the dancers in the room have to translate it they have to find they have to look at it and find a way of themselves embodying that physicality the imagery used could improve over time but there is also a reason for the imperfections this has been the creation of the man behind Google cardboard who greatly values technology as a tool to enhance not reduce creativity of course the dancer the choreographer is the artist and the AI is there to stimulate creativity and not to replace it we display some sticky figures just to display the whole output of the algorithm but we are also making a rendering which is something in between abstraction and the skeleton and if it was too perfect then it would look like a video and it will be less stimulating for the dancer to be inspired and as well as the idea of immortalizing talent and teaching there seems to be some other added value what it's doing is supplementing enhancing dealing with data in a way that we couldn't deal with it offering as opportunities that we would never be able to see and so in a way it becomes more like an 11th dancer in the studio with you it's a kind of a creative partner rather one that's replacing your kind of creative gifts if you like the other thing it and it's really important is it is about the dialogue between machine and body yeah between the thinking body and the thinking machine so it's not ever that we just set the system going and just learn the choreography that's not interesting to us these dancers make every move look so graceful so it's hard to imagine a bad outcome being created here but how did they feel about being taught by a I usually you have you know Wayne come in and either gives us creative tasks himself which could be based on anything it could be a poem it could be and you know or audible inspiration from a track and but to have these really intelligent quick systems that kind of generate movement that then we have to learn from an AI system it's very different the Google it men are demonstrating just takes something from me you know we don't lately fine detail it's just whatever you see take something from it at the moment it doesn't understand momentum and physics in gravity so it makes us move our bodies in an incredibly different way you know we we have a typical vocabulary each and every one of us that we kind of go into that we try to strive away from and I think this helps us do that so whilst it's early days for this technology and it doesn't seem to be making the real-life choreographer redundant maybe just maybe artificial intelligence could push creativity to a whole new level that was Lara now one often unseen cause of air pollution is shipping the enormous cargo vessels which crisscross the world produce enormous amounts of sulfur and nitrous oxides as well as particulate matter by some calculations one large container ship can produce the equivalent of tens of millions of cars worth of these pollutants but it's a field where much more measurement is needed to truly understand the scale of the problem and what can be done Paul Carter has been to Denmark to investigate how authorities there are using tech to better understand shipping and the pollution it causes this sleepy remote part of Denmark may not look like it's at the cutting edge of emissions detection and enforcement but looks can be deceiving the Danish maritime Authority in partnership with the European Maritime Safety Agency are using drones like this one as the latest weapon to detect and identify ships that are breaching EU regulations on emissions this aircraft is equipped with a range of detectors and sensors as well as 360 and infrared cameras to identify ships and effectively sniff their emissions by flying through the plume of smoke they leave behind I'm stood in the takeoff and landing zone for the drone that they use here or our pass to actually give it its correct term it's out behind me somewhere finding a ship to a sniff for want of a better term and I'm not sure if our camera can actually pick it up but along the horizon there's a yellow band which is actually the pollution that you can see that these ships are emitting and if you can imagine what it was like before these regulations came in and that's exactly what this aircraft is trying to detect so this is a very innovative project to protect the environment how does it work what we try to do is to take as many measurements as possible of the sulphur content of the plume of the vessels and this type of drone is adding a proof of their infringement because up to now what happened sometimes is that they were changing fuel just when entering the port so this type of drone allows us to also take measurements while they their sail now it's going to be coming back into land soon and it's be honest I don't really want to be stood here when it does so I'm gonna make a sharp exit [Music] it's piloted by two people from a ground-based control center one flying and one monitoring the payload as well as a team of ground-based engineers and observers to fly one of these it's kind of fun it's different I used to fly helicopters and so it's very different from in that perspective but is in many ways as well there's many similarity the drone react the same way as a helicopter would do so then I can use my experience as a helicopter pilot in this type of industry and it's a nice to be able to do something from the environment as well and we can see the one is polluting a lot then you can see the black smoke but most the time you don't see it also because of the wind pushing it down or pushing in sideways you may not be able to see it but we have also an extra tool like a IR camera to be able to see it in my helpers sometimes as well so we have a sensor which montreux the co2 in the annual tip and we also have the payload camera which you used to be able to see where you're going the are pass or remotely piloted aircraft system is detecting for a range of pollutants all the data recorded during each flight is shared directly with the host member state and also with em so basically now we can extend our reach by a huge margin by by flying these drones over the ship's collecting samples of the emissions and then calculate back to how much surface in the fuel are they breaking the rules are they not then we can follow that up with with actual inspections on board when they when the ship comes to into port and here it comes now it's just coming into land you can see it's sweeping round slightly just to accommodate for the wind it's quite bizarre to think that you know even just a couple of minutes ago that was a speck out there on the horizon it's been out there for the last hour hour and a half inspecting any ships that it's come across and now it's coming back into land well and rest we are sort of the first movements with the this type of technology used in this way but as it gets easier as the regulation behind it matures then I think that that day we will see this all over the place and it's not just for cell phone missions so you could their money so many things and see because that's really what we're trying to do we're trying to to extend our reach where can we go and and enforce the rules that we are trying to enforce Denmark are the first EU Member State to use this technology but as regulations and legislation continue to emerge soon no ship will be safe from similar sulphur sniffers okay we're off to Switzerland now for an innovative way of building homes more cleverly and more sustainably dan Simon's has been to see some unusual buildings and the robots and very old wisdom used to build them in Zurich the experimental odd-shaped D fab house has recently opened its doors it's been partially built by robots and the lack of any tea breaks isn't the only cost-saving this flexible mesh mold allows for fast creative design the bots build the wall from digital models these one-offs would typically mean more materials are wasted than when creating standard straight walls but doing things this way results in hardly any material waste elsewhere these dynamic casting machines create both load-bearing functional supports and lighter facades while 3d sand printers produce ultra light ceiling slabs again all with minimal waste and that's important because you may be surprised to learn that we're just a decade or two away from running out of materials to build with we are rapidly running out of resources as funny as it may sound we are even running out of sand to make concrete this particular floor actually is printed out of sand but other materials could be compressed dirt so basically just dirt locally found on-site or clay or nation of certain materials like that these lighter and more varied choices of material will help us save the planet's resources and to test what will and won't work they need a huge sandpit in which to play the university is home to one of the biggest robots if you like in the world this is a large wealth house building plant it has four or five of these huge arms to create different things this is a floor that's in progress here the only problem they've got is once they built it they've got to get it out of these doors but look again at those ceilings and floors they're more important than you might think using different materials is all very well as long as they're as strong as concrete right well no in fact a change of design inspired from Europe's stunning architectural past is solving that problem just like the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals arched slabs can support a lot of weight without requiring steel reinforcement by studying traditional vaulted construction methods researchers then used 3d printing to make super thin floor slabs that can withstand heavy weights what all these designs have in common is that they have strength through their geometry through their design they spread the weight to various areas and therefore can take more weight once people who on them and support them often with less material now in this example the form that's needed to create the bridge is just a piece of material like this rather than building up a huge support structure and pouring the concrete over the top it uses less material as do the slabs that the University have created now through a different geometry they can save up to 70% the concrete needed the upshot could be buildings that are just as strong as today's but that end up weighing half as much because the floors alone usually make up about 80 percent ever building's total weight researchers say they comply with all Swiss and EU building regulations although the new designs are yet to be signed off that was Dan and that's it for click episode 999 I know we've been on air every week for over 19 years and next week is our 1000th program to celebrate we're doing something very special and you're all invited for the first time rather than us deciding what you watch you will be in the driving seat because for our 1000th episode the BBC is letting us pioneer a completely new way of making TV we've created an interactive world of stories for you to explore however you wish more than a year in the making from the self-driving capital of the world Phoenix Arizona to magical Malawi to meet the inventors using AI and ancient technology to solve everyday problems combining the production techniques of video games with that click storytelling that you know and love you will be able to shape our show and there'll be wizards we've all worked really hard on this and we are incredibly proud of the result we hope you enjoy it - that's next week thanks for watching and we'll see you for clique 1000 [Music] [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 61,138

Keywords: click;, bbc, sustainability, environment, tech, technology, trees, nature, carbon, air, emissions

Id: WmcnjdgAt9Q

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019