Translator: Bob Prottas
Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo Thanks. My name is Ed Lu, and I'm building a space telescope, together with the B612 Foundation. (Applause) It's called Sentinel, and simply put,
its mission is to protect the Earth. In 2018 we're going to launch this thing, and it's big, by the way, it's about the size
of a FedEx delivery van. We're going to launch
into an orbit around the Sun. So it's going to be
about 500,000 times further from the Earth than
the Hubble space telescope. And we are going to find and track threatening asteroids before they find us. How'd we end up on this crazy quest, other than the fact that
everybody needs a space telescope? Right? Our organization started out
about 10 years ago. We started it with a different goal, we were working
with a different project, related. And then something happened
about a year and a half ago. Interesting, a guy came up
and asked me a question, and it crystallized our thinking. What we realized is that
we had to change our course, and that we had no choice
but to actually do this, instead. And I want to tell you the story about how we ended up there
and what we're doing. Why should you care about asteroids? Well, if you're a scientist,
they're very, very interesting, they're parts,
left over parts of the solar system from the formation of it. But if you're a citizen of planet Earth, and you all are, I hope, (Laughter) asteroids are important
because they hit the Earth. So if you roll this video, anybody here has ever seen
an asteroid impact site? They're all over the Earth. These are some of
the known ones on planet Earth. An awful lot,
it's kind of a surprising lot? But there's way more than this. They hit the Earth all the time. Just look up at the Moon. The Moon is covered in craters, and actually the Earth is hit
more often than the Moon. So the reason you don't actually
see them on the Earth is because they get covered up
by the ocean, or wind and weather,
and things like that get rid of them. They sometimes actually hit the Earth, even in modern times. 1908 Tunguska, this is the aftermath. It looks like a bunch of telephone poles
laying on its side. This is an impact site called Tunguska. It's thankfully in Siberia, where an asteroid,
fairly small, about 40 meters across -- so I would say
that's about the size of this room -- it hit in Siberia moving at a velocity of about 20 kilometers per second. Anybody here whoever took
High School physics knows that the energy is one half M V squared. When you have a big number
and you square it, you get a huge number, and that
was an enormous amount of energy. It was about a thousand times larger than the energy in the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima. So, it wiped out a huge area. It's about 2,500 square kilometers
of total destruction. So, for example,
just to put that in perspective, if you drew a circle between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose, it took about that size. That's the area that was wiped out. Again, a thousand times larger
than the Hiroshima bomb. That was only 100 years ago. These hit the Earth
about every 100 to 200 years. So, flip a coin, that's the odds
that somewhere on Earth, during your lifetime,
it's going to happen again. Random spot,
most of the world's unpopulated, but wouldn't it be a shame
if it was a populated area? (Laughter) About 10 years ago,
we decided that we'd work on the problem of deflecting asteroids. There was a bunch of really bad
Hollywood movies out. Armageddon, Deep Impact, we thought we'd be the heroes, we're going to figure out
how to deflect an asteroid. And if you roll this little movie, over the last 10 years, we together
with a lot of other scientists, have worked on this problem,
and now we understand that it's actually not that difficult
to deflect an asteroid. What you have to do is either
run into it with a spacecraft, like this, and boom! You actually
change the velocity slightly. It's like playing billiards. It turns out that with sufficient notice you only need to change
the velocity of an asteroid by about a millimeter per second to turn a hit into a miss, if you do it early enough. A millimeter per second.
That's about this fast. Okay? So you don't need to change
the velocity a lot, you don't need oil miners,
and Bruce Willis, and stuff. (Laughter) It turns out that there are actually
even controllable ways of doing this. If we take the next video here. This is something that
me and another astronaut, named Stan Love,
yes he is Doctor Love, invented. It's called a gravity tractor. It's very, very simple.
You just hover a spacecraft nearby, and the mutual attraction
of gravity between them, very, very tiny, adds up
and if you can hover for months, so if you run this, you'll see
that you can actually tow asteroids and give them the required
fraction of a millimeter per second needed to precisely put this
where you want. What we realized after about
10 years of working on this, and the community has realized, is that deflecting asteroids
is actually not that hard. We actually have the technology
to do things like this. So what's the problem? The problem is,
if you don't know where asteroids are, there's nothing
you can do about it, right? As my friend Don Yeomans likes to say, "The 3 rules of deflecting asteroids are: Find them early, find them early,
and find them early." So let's look at the big picture. What does the Solar System look like? If you could run this... The green circle there
is the orbit of the Earth, and then you can see
the orbits of the other planets. And these are all the known asteroids, and these are actual real positions.
(audience murmuring) The wizards
at the California Academy of Sciences put this together, these are real orbits. All of this is real data, those are the locations
of all the known asteroids. So the Earth again, look at the green line. You see all the stuff flying around. It's a very crowded place
in our Solar System. It's a little deceptive,
because you have to make them bigger so you can see it,
but very, very crowded. That's the good --
So here's the bad news, though. We know what tiny area
of the Solar System we've actually surveyed thus far, we know that it's not very much. There's a hundred times more
than you see here. And those are undiscovered right now, and we really have no way
to discover them from the ground. So what does
the real Solar System look like? Multiply this by 100 and you get
what the real Solar System looks like, it looks like this. This is actually the situation -- follow the green line of the Earth, and follow all the things
that go whizzing past the Earth. Every time you hear in the news that an asteroid
has whizzed past the Earth you should think, "So what,
it's happening all the time, 99 out of 100 we don't know about." So that's what the situation
looks like in the Solar System, and that's what we want to change. Because if you know
where every single one of these is, we can tell you where it's going. Because we understand
something called "Orbital Mechanics". It turns out
that if you tell me the velocity and the location
of each one of these things, I'll tell you where it is
any point out in the future. Okay, that's how we send
probes to Mars, for instance. We ended up in a situation where we know how to deflect asteroids, but we're not looking for them. We're driving around the Solar System
with our eyes closed, essentially. And that seems kind of crazy, right? Because these things do hit the Earth, as evidenced by this guy here. As you all know, an asteroid impact
is what wiped out the dinosaurs and we don't want to be like him. I saw a T-shirt the other day that said, "Asteroids are nature's way of saying, 'How's that space program coming?'" (Laughter) So -- (Applause) I was giving
a talk about this very subject, down in Mountain View at a large company that rhymes with "Oogle". (Laughter) I was basically telling
this whole sad story saying we know how to deflect asteroids, but basically nobody's funding, the government has no plans,
the government's broke anyhow, and we're not looking for asteroids. So the next large asteroid
that hits the Earth is in all likelihood just going to hit us
and that will be what happens, we'll take what we get, but isn't it kind of crazy that we actually know how to do this, know how to deflect it,
but we're not doing it? And something interesting happened. After the talk, a guy came up to me
and he said -- I described that we actually knew how to actually find all these asteroids too, so you actually can't find them
from the Earth. You need to put a space telescope out, orbiting around the Sun and so on. And he said to me, "How much does a space telescope
like that cost?" I said, "Well, they're expensive, the government's not doing this, it's $300 million, blah, blah, blah." The guy looked at me and he said, "So why don't you do it yourself?" And I was taken aback. "What do you mean, how can we do this?" He goes, "Well, I just donated money to a museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art. We're building a new wing,
we're supporting that. We're raising more money than that. We're going to build
the wing of an art museum. The people of San Francisco
have come together. In about 5 or 6 years, we're going to do it,
nobody has any doubt. So if we can do that, if we can build the wing
of an art museum, for less money, could you raise it and do it yourself?" And I think the answer's yes. So, we --
(Applause) have gone out,
we've been raising the money and we've hired people
and we're doing just that. (Audience member)
Thanks! (Laughter) You're welcome! (Applause) We just had our first major design review, things are moving along. And if you could run this video... This is the spacecraft,
it's called Sentinel. Again, it's large, it weighs 2,630 pounds, and it is going to orbit the Sun, and it is going to view
the Solar System in infrared. Infrared is basically heat,
where asteroids are bright, and it is going to find
these moving objects. This is the view from Sentinel, and it will see these moving objects
and it will track them. And it is going to discover
each and every month, over 10,000 asteroids. Now all other telescopes
combined throughout history have sum total discovered
about 10,000 asteroids. So we're going to surpass that
in month 1. So what are we going to find? We're going to find about a half a million
asteroids when we're done, and we're going to know
where they all are, where they're going,
which ones are coming near Earth, and which ones may actually
threaten the Earth. And that's plenty of time to go out there and deflect them. This is our plan. So let me show you a little bit about
why it has to be orbiting the Sun. If you think about it, you don't want to be on the Earth
because you can't look -- half the time
those things flying past the Earth were between the Earth and the Sun, and telescopes don't work very well
pointing at the Sun. So if you look at that white pie slice, that is the view from the area
that can be seen by Sentinel. And you see
that as it goes around the Sun, it sweeps out an area and it's sometimes on the opposite side
of the Sun as the Earth, and that is the trick
to finding all these asteroids. So again, 2018 is our launch date. We've put together a team of folks, and we're going to buy
a rocket from SpaceX. And we're going to put
this thing out there, and we're going to find
all these asteroids. So -- (Applause) What's the big picture here? I mean, to me
the really cool part about this is, that we're living
in a really special time. I mean civilization's about,
what 10,000 years old, right? 10,000 years ago,
people learned how to grow things, agriculture and so on. And here we are, 10,000 years later, we have figured out
the laws of orbital mechanics, we've figured out rocketry,
astronomy, mathematics, and so on, and what's all that for,
if it's not to protect the Earth, right, if it's not to protect ourselves? We actually know how -- we believe we know how to go out there and measure our environment, find out what's out there, amongst all the stuff orbiting the Sun, and protect our own planet, and when something
is on its way to hitting the Earth to actually change
the evolution of the Solar System. So think about that, that's actually
fairly, fairly amazing, right. I mean -- hairless monkeys from the 3rd planet
have figured out a way to keep their planet
from being struck again. Okay, and we've only
just reached this point, and even more amazing to me is that we've reached the point where -- because of advances in rocketry,
and computing power, and infrared detectors, and so on -- that we're actually at the point where a private organization can just go do it. Like that guy asked me,
"Why don't you just go do it?" The answer is, there's no reason
why we shouldn't just go do it. So here we are. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Cheering)
a bit misleading in that we're not changing the course of the sun through the milky way... but cool project.