Collaboration, innovation and why we are pretty much alone: Pascal Lee at TEDxStavanger

okay thank you for this I'd like to talk to you about collaboration and innovation but to also take a step back and maybe away from the earth and try to convey to you the notion that we might be living in a universe that is is maybe different from what you are hoping that it could be and certainly different from what I thought the universe was like when I was growing up but that's let's start with the first picture and do I have control of that okay yes all right this is the surface of Mars I was taking just a few days ago really and it I think is an amazing landscape that it looks you really like the earth but of course it's a different world the atmosphere is actually very thin you cannot breathe it it's made of carbon dioxide as well it's very cold average temperature is minus 60 degrees centigrade and to make things worse it's an extremely oxidizing surface environment and meanwhile we want to go there the reason why we want to go there is because Mars has had a long history involving liquid water near at surface and on earth everywhere where you've had liquid water you have life and and every form of life that we know of on the earth requires liquid water even in deserts liquid water doesn't have to be there all the time for that life but it has to be there sometimes at the very least and so we're fascinated by this place because we might find some answers to some fundamental questions including the notion of whether or not we are little but to get to Mars and to work there you need a spacesuit and the challenge that we face is that we have to reinvent the spacesuit to go to Mars and here's why this is the state-of-the-art in spacesuits it weighs 140 kilograms on the earth now of course when you are in low-earth orbit at the space station or on board a space shuttle for example it only in ways it's it's weightless essentially when you go to the moon with the thing you have it has a felt weight of about 25 kilos so it's quite manageable and this is why you could see the astronauts on Apollo hop around but if you take this spacesuit to Mars even though gravity at the surface of Mars is 38 percent of what it is on the earth only this space you would weigh would have a felt weight of about 50 kilos okay so it's way too heavy for you to be an effective Explorer so the challenge that we face before we're ready to go to Mars is to cut the mass of this spacesuit in half and that is going to require some reinvention of the spacesuit so here's what we did we have been working over the past few years with engineers who were thinking of how do you really reduce the mass of this spacesuit but who net who didn't necessarily have the background or the experience with doing geological field work and then we paired up this these engineers with people who actually do geological field work in deserts where they actually use vehicles to roam around and cover great distances if you do a logical field work in places where you have a lot of vegetation you would not use an ATV but if you're in a desert you realize that an ATV is a good solution to moving around and then of course we also go to a place where we can partner with people who do robotics because the idea of course is that if you're exploring Mars you're going to want to have some aspects of your vehicle or spacesuits that will involve robotics you put all this together in a pot you stir it and you come up with essentially a reinvented spacesuit and the solution is the most heavy part of your spacesuit is your oxygen tanks and what you want to do is actually offload your spacesuit off the oxygen tanks you want to put the bulk of your oxygen tanks on your ATV on your Rover and so the new exploration system that we anticipate we'll be using on Mars is a spaceship whose mass is reduced for by other clever ideas as well like different cereals but fundamentally by offloading the oxygen tanks onto a personal Rover an ATV so every time you're exploring Mars you would connect your backpack to the oxygen supply of your Rover and then when you need to step off and go chip away at rocks you will you will have just very small tanks in your spacesuit and what if you run out of oxygen well you won't risk that because your ATV will be your robotic ATV and it will follow you very closely so you will always be within close range of your vehicle but where we really want to go is not just the surface of Mars to find life to have a chance of finding extent life on Mars today life that is really still alive potentially we want to go into the subsurface there's no liquid water today at the surface of Mars that he's not in any durable or reliable way however at that the story could be completely different anywhere from a few hundred meters to one to two kilometers of depth on Mars we have to have liquid water because there's so much ice on the planet and the challenge of course is that and part of the reason why I've been coming to Stavanger is is to look at what the state of the art is in drilling and if you if you think conventionally and how you do drilling you are faced with this massive problem of having a lot of equipment to get to Mars to do a normal deep drill hole and and somehow reach the water and sample and explore it for life but we've been collaborating with a company that has had a very innovative idea called zap tech oops zap tech zap tech has come up with this very exciting and novel approach to drilling which is to use plasma physics and rather than having a long drill train you have essentially a drill head that is delivering high energy density of plasma into the rock it shatters the rock it's the result of a collaboration between plasma physicists with electrical engineers who also are working with folks who have extensive experience in drilling so this collaborative environment has come up with a practical solution for plasma drilling into rocks and all of a sudden you have cut back on the amount of mass if you need to take to Mars because the the real link to the surface between your your drilling head and the V in the spacecraft is a cable that's delivering the power and also you're using carbon dioxide compressed carbon dioxide as your drilling fluid you don't have to involve liquid water NASA is interested in this our Mars Institute is also collaborating on this and the hope here is that with zap tech we're going to come up with a practical solution to actually reach the subsurface of Mars down to the liquid water and I hope you share with me the excitement of this I had always thought that finding life on Mars would be something left to future generations but as it turns out it's something that we could see actually happening within the next couple decades maybe and not only that but some piece of hardware developed in Stavanger could be the first piece of hardware created by humankind to encounter alien life and I think there's there's something that goes beyond the the ambitions of any space agency in in that possibility so beyond this I am wondering about our position in the universe and this whole business of whether or not we are alone and you will see that this is also something that can be answered perhaps through collaboration this is the andromeda galaxy it's located two million light-years away it's about a hundred thousand light-years across it's in some sense a mirror image of our own galaxy the Milky Way and I grew up thinking that there might be many alien civilizations out there okay but the formula that really allows you to estimate the number of civilizations is this formula called the Drake Equation and you don't have to memorize it but you should know simply that the number n here represents the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and it's it's a simple formula it's the product of seven terms and the big challenge of course is that we don't know the exact value of each one of these seven terms so there are big question marks on them but if you knew the values of these seven terms you would have the answer you would know how many alien civilizations are out there but we've made a lot of progress in particular through collaboration each one of these terms is addressed by one of several fields of research that are familiar to us astrophysics and cosmology extras the search for extrasolar planets planetary science paleo microbiology on earth evolutionary biology on earth and for Paula G history and sociology all these all this expertise collaborates together to quantify these terms in hopes of giving you the answer n so let's look at the state of the art of this of this formula our sub star is the rate of star formation in our galaxy today okay and this is a star forming region seen from Hubble we didn't know the answer to or the value of our sub star over the past decades but we now know it it's about twenty to fifty stars per year throughout the galaxy on average okay that's a very important number because the uncertainty on it is very fairly small and it's something that really constrains the the beginning of this formula the second question that we have has to do with the fraction of these star systems that have planets and nowadays we are discovering more and more planets over a thousand planets that have been discovered by the Kepler mission we are where this is these are planets around other stars and so this this term F sub P which is again the the fraction of stars that have planets around them still theoretically has a wide range of possibilities between 5% and a hundred percent but the uncertainty has more to do with the fact that we've been limiting our search to certain types of stars and also certain sizes of planets but among the stars that we'd be looking at and among the planets that we've been able to detect the yield is approximately 50% so about half the stars out there the ones that we've looked at so far are yielding planetary systems around them so this is a a formidable increase in our chances of finding life out there within a planetary system how many environments are there that are suitable for life and by that we mean an environment that has liquid water energy and nutrients for life so one way to look at this is to examine what's called the habitable zone around a star this is the Sun and the habitable zone again is the zone where temperatures in particular are sufficient for are adequate for liquid water to be pleasant to be present and in our solar system the habitable zone would include about two planets planet Earth and planet Mars okay this is a sort of a temperature gradient issue too close to the Sun water would they provide too far out it would turn to ice but for stars that are smaller which are more common than the Sun the habitable zone is smaller and the most common types of stars the m-class stars which are about 1/10 of the solar mass you really have a very small habitable zone but n sub e for the solar system is - based on this basic habitable zone concept and it might shrink down to one planet or none in fact when it comes to smaller stars but there's a caveat the Sun itself for one thing is not constant in size right now it's much smaller than the orbit of the earth but in about four billion years it's going to turn into a red giant the orbits of Mercury and Venus will be completely engulfed in the Sun and the Sun surface will be right there next to the earth in case you have long-term investment plans you should consider them to to be adjustable the other caveat to this issue is the fact that the possibility of life of liquid water is not only dependent on how far you are from the star we have life that is thriving at depth inside the earth in environments that have liquid water but there are completely independent of our proximity to the Sun and in fact if you look at where in the solar system we have liquid water today you will find that there are actually eight or nine environments where it is present it's present inside the atmospheres of Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune it's on the surface of the earth and inside the earth it's liquid water is present at depth on Mars it's present at depth on Europa one of the moons of Jupiter and it's present at depth on Enceladus an icy moon of Saturn so in our solar system alone n sub E is anywhere between 8 & 9 so in principle it could be a very small number if there are many small stars like the m-class stars or up to 10 perhaps as a sort of a representation of how many there are in our own solar system so I'm going to submit to you that we should pick any N equals 1 as a reasonable but somewhat optimistic number and I'm not concerned about being optimistic because as you see this is something that will still result in a puzzling outcome the fraction of planetary systems where there are environments usable for life where life actually appears is a number between 0 & 1 on earth life appeared very early and this is one of the earliest light for life-forms we have a record of but we don't have the any trace anymore any fossil record of the very beginnings of life on Earth and this is why we're so interested in Mars Mars actually offers us an opportunity to to really examine several key possibilities life could have started on earth and of course blossomed on earth but also expand it to Mars because these planets are not closed systems we we know today that we have meteorites that have come naturally from Mars to the earth they Mars gets hit by asteroids and comets these impacts eject rocks from the planet they drift through the inner solar system they fall onto the earth and similarly there must be earth rocks today sitting at the surface of Mars that have been ejected from the earth and travel all the way out there so life could have started on the earth led to us but also generated a branch of cousins of ours on Mars today the converse is possible to life could have started on Mars and come to the earth we are also possibly facing the possibility of finding life on Mars that had an independent start of life on earth in which case we would really be dealing with an alien form of life on Mars so what's at stake in our search for life on Mars is really the possibility of answering some of these questions and determine and deciding between these options so f sub-l the fraction of stars where life actually appears or planetary systems and environments that are suitable for life where life actually appears is in principle a number that could be anywhere from being very small to one but we have a clue in our own solar system in spite of the fact it's the only example we have the key clue is that life appeared very early in the Earth's history it looks like it was an easy process okay the earth form about 4.6 billion years ago we have signs of life at about 3.9 for sure in earth rocks and so I will submit to you that f sub-l even if it's a bit optimistic it's okay is 0.5 a1 in half of environments that are suitable for life you actually see life begin but what about life that evolves to intelligence this is a vertical column representing the entire history of the earth it formed 4.6 billion years ago the present is way up there okay this is the earliest record of life at about 3.9 well all the dinosaurs was in that Mesozoic area okay in the in the green up there the bulk of Earth history has only known relatively simple and primitive forms of life complexification really happened at the time of the Cambrian explosion about 550 to 600 million years ago if you blow up that final section that the final 600 million years the latest 600 million years of life on earth you can see that this is when it was all happening the first fish the first land plants the first amphibians the dinosaur era homo okay us or at least the close relatives that that we came from essentially showed up only about two to three mmm years ago all right so we're very late event in the history of the earth to the extent that f sub-l might be a number that's closer to point zero zero two if you look at our presence on the earth in relation to the age of the earth okay we are down there at the at the two per two chances per 10,000 level if you were to visit the earth randomly at any point in history of its history there's only two chances in 10,000 you would run into something that looks like humanity okay the rest of the time we were out of the picture so what about this intelligent form of life turning into a civilization well that is defined as a society that all of a sudden is able to come up with and use Maxwell's equations which I've shown here it's the ability to use electromagnetic waves to communicate with other societies in space well that capacity happened relatively shortly after the emergence of intelligence within a couple of million years and so again the suggestion here is that this was something relatively easy although it should be an obligatory outcome of one mainly because there are caveats you can imagine intelligent societies being born on planets that have a permanent cloud cover or they are living in oceans where you really would not have much use of the electromagnetic waves so I would submit to you that F sub C optimistically still could be maybe at the 10% level Oh point point oh one finally the last term is the longevity of a civilization there many things that threaten our longevity this is our population curve in blue up to the present we're currently at 7 billion people on our planet these are three different outcomes that are considered by the UN as being possible in our future so there are cases of population explosion it could really be a threat to a long term survival as a society we are also subject to the threat of impacts which we can do something about we also of course subject to the vagaries of world wars and we are we're certainly concerned about that too historically cultures have lasted 500 to 5000 years or so and so in our case we've been capable of communicating with alien civilizations only for about a hundred years and I think optimistically we could give ourselves up to maybe ten thousand years but there's really no basis to believe that we could be surviving as a society well beyond that I mean we could we hope to but it's already a pretty large number so here's the final outcome if you're optimistic if you've used the numbers that were on the best end of things throughout the talk you might come up with a number n of 50,000 okay we could be one among 50,000 intelligent societies in our galaxy today this would mean that the nearest civilization might be a few light-years away if you use the most pessimistic numbers in these in this discussion you end up with something that makes ups exceptionally rare we are essentially completely alone and not only that we happen here because we are not the product of very simple processes that are reproducible elsewhere in my humble opinion and these are the numbers that I've been using you end up with an incredible outcome and we remember that my numbers were already quite optimistic okay they were within the brackets of reason but they were quite optimistic we're still only at N equals one and so this I think has a profound potential implication which is there could be one other civilization out there in our galaxy right now it's average distance might be 50 thousand light-years because our own galaxy is about a hundred thousand or we could be it we could be it and this incidentally would after the Fermi paradox and Rico Fermi who won the Nobel Prize came up with the discussion and his his concern was if there are so many Galactic Civilizations out there how come we don't see them okay and the answer is possibly because n is a very small number so this possibility I think has several quick consequences one is that we're profoundly alone it's it's sort of eerie how lonely we are in this galaxy number two it should give us a sense of responsibility this is a planet we should love and we should treasure the fact that we are humans and have achieved this kind of advanced stage of evolution and so if anything it should give us a sense of respect for human life it doesn't mean and that's the third consequence it doesn't mean that there's no life out there there's plenty of primitive life we might even find microbes in a solar system itself there might be fishes in oceans on planets within about a hundred light years there might be dinosaur type of animals on planets you know about a thousand light years out because dinosaurs have been around for so long there might be even primitive intelligent beings more or less like ourselves in terms of capability about 10,000 light years out but intelligent societies like ourselves very rare so with that thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

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Keywords: ted talks, tedx talks, TEDx, TEDxStavanger, ted, ted talk, Pascal Lee, English, tedx talk, Innovation, Collaboration Breeds Innovation, tedx, ted x

Id: f_7HN4qgWHk

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2013