Elon Musk - the Future of Energy & Transport

my name's Andrew Hamilton I'm the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University it is an enormous pleasure to welcome you all to this Oxford Martin School lecture to see the Sheldonian packed to the rafters for a very distinguished guest it's an enormous pleasure for us to welcome Elon Musk who will be talking about the future of energy and transport this is a lecture in the series of the Oxford Martin School the Oxford Martin School as all of you know is a very dynamic a very important interdisciplinary research school here in Oxford focused on many of the challenges of the 21st century and of course one of them is transport and so to hear from Elon Musk's today very much fits in with the priority of the Martin School it's my pleasure now to introduce the director of the Martin School Professor Ian golden ian has been director since September 2006 he is a South African you'll hear in a few moments there's a South African Lincoln connection tonight which which we're all very pleased and proud of Ian came to the Martin School as I said six years ago from the World Bank where he was vice president and prior to that he was director of the development policy of the World Bank so it's a pleasure Ian to introduce our speaker this evening thank you very much Vice Chancellor welcome Elon it's an enormous pleasure to bring great minds together and that's why my job is director of the Oxford Martin School is so fun and meaningful because we are dealing with the greatest challenges of the 21st century in Elon Musk we have someone who is focusing on two key areas transport and energy he's an extraordinary intellect but he combines his science with the business acumen and a commitment to society which is unusual it's the combination of not only business but also with science and knowing what to apply it for that makes him a really special visitor tonight an extraordinary talent with the right commitment to deal with the challenges of the 21st century he's the engineer and entrepreneur who build and operates companies to solve global environmental economic and social challenges is the CEO and chief designer of Tesla Motors you'll see the car outside and CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX at SpaceX Elon is the chief designer and as I've seen the development of the Rockets which have taken it now twice to the space station they've received the 1.6 billion NASA contract to provide commercial replacement for the cargo and as he will tell us no doubt they have now got a commitment as well to take astronauts its most extraordinary thing visiting the factory as I was privileged to do and to see not only the energy and commitment of Elon and his team but also the originality just how much of what they are doing is original how much they are taking away it has taken governments before for governments have achieved what Elon has achieved never before has a private individual done so much so quickly for space in addition to his work on SpaceX as if that wasn't enough his worker Tesla is developing a car which is now one this year the automobile and the boat o trends automobile of the year now for those of us that don't follow cars this is the equivalent of winning the EMA the grannies and the Oscars in the same year or for us academics two Nobel Prizes it is an achievement which is quite remarkable and having driven he was kind enough to trust his roadster to me having driven one of his cars I felt like I was in a space rocket it had this g-force which I've never before experienced this car I believe will revolutionize transport because it will enable people to see that you can do things without carbon which were unimaginable before in addition to this he started and run solar city which is developing and now the biggest producer of solar power systems in the US he began at PayPal which he co-founded and all of you will know about PayPal he became at CEO and then moved on to these other things the vice-chancellor mentioned that we have a South African connection we went to the same high school and we both escaped he went from there to do his degrees at Pennsylvania and at Wharton and in many ways has moved on from that but the work that he was doing including on super capacitors has continued to drive a lot of what he does today it is this incredible combination of vision bravery and ability which has had him likened by many to a 21st century version of what Brunel was in the 19th century and Henry Ford in the 20th century I have no doubt that he will benefit us in ways that we still do not imagine he exemplifies the ambition of the Oxford Martin school and its interest in solving the problems of the 21st century and it's a huge pleasure to invite him to address us [Applause] well I think thank you very much for the kind introduction it's honor to be here this is an incredibly beautiful theater and it's amazing to be in a place designed by Christopher Wren and speaking of Brunel actually I'm a big fan of Brunel and I have I have a five boys and I really wanted to name one of them for now or Isen baud I like to let them know like hopefully one in the future so III guess I I'll just tell you the because the the the story of kind of how I came to be here or you know the various things that I did and maybe why I did them and hopefully that's that's a bit helpful and and then we're gonna have quite along a question and answer session so I look forward to you know feel free to ask me any any question no matter how provocative or a challenge but what we're doing I'm actually always interested in a negative feedback actually so so the way I started out with some I just sought out in South Africa went winter Pretoria voice I and and and then left actually by myself initially to to go to to Canada and then and in the u.s. to college and graduating from from undergrad I had sort of make it make a decision and what one path would have sort of led led to Wall Street and and I guess have quite a big salary and then the other would have was was to do grad studies and try to figure out a technical problem and I didn't much like the first one so I went to I decide to go to go out to Silicon Valley and and and go to Stanford and try work on ultracapacitors for use and electric vehicles and I do actually think there's potential for a significant breakthrough in that area and actually to have energy storage mechanism that's that's better than that than batteries it's not necessary for transport to go electric but I think it is it's something that would accelerate that so so I was sort of about to get into it get into grad studies and then then the internet it was clear the internet was gonna be something that was would be very important to the future so I I thought well I could either sort of spend five years in a graduate program and discover that the answer is that there there is no no way to make a capacitor work and get that perhaps get some some nice papers published and that kind of thing and but that would be most unfortunate situation I thought you know because you can come to one of the possible things is to determine that success is not one of the possible outcomes III couldn't actually bracket the uncertainty on that so so I thought I can either do that or I can work on on building elements the internet and this was in 95 so nobody had actually made any money on these debts it was but I but I thought the internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity where we it was like humanity gaining a nervous system where all of a sudden any part of humanity would would know what the collective would have access to the collective knowledge and and that's that's true it's really quite a remarkable transformation in the past you'd have to and if you want to access to a lot of information had to be near a big library or something like the great Bodhi and ivory and you're right and but then that would be the only way to gain access to information and now with the internet with everything online you could be somewhere in the jungles of South America and if you've got access to an internet connection you have access to essentially all the world's information with a tremendous amount of analytical power behind that so I think it literally has gone from a situation where where people would communicate almost like via via osmosis if you can imagine sort of a creature simple melted multicellular creature that would communicate by I have quite slow chemical signals now we any part of humanity knows what every other party humanity because immediately it's pretty incredible so anyway I want to be part of building that so I decided to to do a couple of internet companies and that actually worked out reasonably well so the the first one helped bring the media companies online and then we sold that and then start another company which may be used called PayPal and that that that we sold for actually a larger sum of money to to eBay and and that left me in the fortunate position of having the capital to pursue that the two other things that I thought would most affect the future of humanity being sustainable energy both the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner which i think is arguably the most pressing problem of the 21st century and then the other one which is the extension of life beyond Earth and so I donated first was was the space company and the genesis of that is it's kind of interesting because at first I didn't think that it would be possible to to create a rocket company and I thought the the what what would really make a difference is to have a mission to to Mars a small sort of sent a small parented surface of Mars that that would get the public excitement about to reignite the passion for Space Exploration such that we could go beyond what we did with the Apollo program and I thought it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the the high-water mark of human space exploration and it was not something like that I was able to do witness in real time so I was - - when they landed so it's it's it just seemed as though that if I thought about the future one where we were true spacefaring civilization out there exploring the Stars and making the things real that we read in science fiction books and movies that that that seems like a really really exciting future that that that sort of made you feel good about the future and one way we were ever confined to earth made me feel a bit sad so yeah so that that's that's really what I was trying to figure is how do we how do we reverse that and then like I said at first I don't think we're possible to create a space company because it seemed like the province of governments but it so my first thought was bullets let's see if we can if we do a philanthropic mission to Mars and get the public excited about the idea of going there and then that would lead to an increased budget for NASA and then then we could go there that would hopefully work so I I figured out how to compress the cost of the spacecraft and the communication systems and that the paler and so forth and and then the it would have been a small greenhouse about a meter across with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel that would land you'd hydrate the jail for landing and you'd have this great shot of of green plants against against a red background in u.s. that's called the money shot and so and that the public has to respond to precedents and superlatives so this would be the first life on another planet the furthest that life's ever traveled and I thought okay well that would get people pretty excited and maybe they can imagine envision people being there I would certainly be able to figure out a lot of engineering and scientific data about what it took to maintain plantlife on the surface of Mars so I got through most of that and the thing I got hang up on was the rocket so getting there in the first place and they were the u.s. options from Boeing and Lockheed would simply too expensive I couldn't afford them and and so I went to Russia three times to negotiate approaching purchasing an ICBM of course desperate times call for desperate measures and I I went through so I did I did three visits there and at the end of it I was able to get to negotiate a price actually to buy three of these these things a lot three largest ICBMs in the Russian fleet but but they they were so pretty expensive and by the third trip I actually came conclusion that I would I was operating under the wrong premise that I was I was actually mistaken about the willingness to to send people to Mars to expand this the space frontier and I it actually in retrospect was quite silly of me just to think that that people were not interested in such a thing or it lost it lost the world to to do this in fact people had really thought that it's it's not possible or not or not possible for an amount of money that would materially affect their standard of living so so I came in conclusion that even if we succeed in doing this mission that wouldn't that wouldn't be enough that would they would have add a little bit more to the world to do it but it and wouldn't make it clear to people that there was away and and and and this is a case sort of almost the opposite I think if if you can show people that there is a way then there's there's plenty of will so so after that third trip I'd learned a lot more about rockets at that point and I held a series of meetings just just sort of brainstorming sessions with people from the space industry to try to understand if there was if I was missing something fundamental about the ability to improve rocketry and this is where I think it's helpful to use the approach yeah the the analytical approach in physics which is to try to boil things down to first principles and and reason from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy so and and the way this applied to to rocketry was to say okay well what are the what are the materials that are going to a rocket you know how much does each constituent away what's the cost of that raw material and and that and that's going to set some floor as as to the cost of the rocket and that actually turns out to be a relatively small number certainly well under five percent of the cost of a rocket and in some cases closer to one or two percent and so of course sort of maybe the the magic one lover so if you if you had a pile of of motive of the raw material how's the raw materials on the floor and you could wave a magic wand and rearrange them then then that would be the the best case scenario for for a rocket and so I was able to see okay well there's clearly a great deal of room for improvement even if you consider rockets to be expandable and and so I think that's that's sort of that's what I mean by sort of thinking about things from first principles Network if if I only had other hand I sort of an analyze it by analogy instead of we'll analogy would be well what are all other rocket companies what what do their Rockets cost what historically have other rockets cost and that would be sort of an analogy thing but it really doesn't illustrate what the true potential is and and so I think it's a first principle principles approach is is a good way to to understand what new things are possible that says this is a good framework um and it doesn't mean you'll be successful but you yeah at least you can determine if success is one of the possibilities that is important I think so started SpaceX and initially I had a decided to make a small rocket that called the Falcon one that was capable of putting about half a ton into orbit and that this did not go smoothly I swear and it was quite difficult to attract the key technical talent and and of course I was quite ignorant of many things and made lots of mistakes along the way and the first three flights of the felt horn failed or rather they they certainly can get to orbit the second and third flights arguably got to space but but they did not reach full orbital velocity and unfortunately that the fourth flight worked and if it hadn't SpaceX wouldn't be around because I had basically run out of money so that would that was a bit of a nail-biter and thank goodness it's a in fact that this all happened in 2008 yeah there was really no ability to raise outside money in a meaningful way in 2008 was the financial crisis so you can imagine trying to go to raise money saying well yes we just had four failures and the world isn't natural ruin but would you like to give us some money it would be definitely no force unfortunately thatthat succeeded and and we were able to go from Falcon 1 to begin designing the Falcon line which is an order of magnitude larger vehicle and in fact has more than 20 times the payload so it's got a payload to orbit of over over 10 tons and and and that actually is gone a lot a lot better because we had the experience with Falcon 1 to go by and and father he's not usually started with Falcon 1 was because I find I thought we would make a lot of mistakes and if if we're gonna make a lot of mistakes then it's best to make those mistakes at a small scale other than at a large scale and that seems to have worked that because going to Falcon 9 we've had four flights of Falcon 9 and they've all been all four of them have been successful so I think that that principle seems to work reasonably well you know touch moon or life fires coming up soon but and I think and then we also developed the Dragon spacecraft because somewhat opportunistically NASA announced they're going to retire the space the space shuttle and they needed they didn't have the budget to develop a cargo transport capability to the space station by the normal large government way and and so they put it out to bid to to commercial industry for the first time in NASA history is quite was quite a big step and we were lucky enough to to win one of those contracts and then the other company wasn't able to execute and so they got cut and and so we ended up being the primary means of transporting cargo to and from the space station so it we just did the first two missions [Music] for the first two space station resupply missions this year and thankfully both of those worked and then going from there NASA then said well what about astronaut transport and and so they they they put out a big competition and and awarded two contracts for for Asheville transport one of which went to Boeing they got a slightly larger contract and then won twice and so hopefully in about three years we will have Dragon version 2 and the the next-generation Falcon 9 rocket transporting national institute from the space station then we've got Falcon Heavy which is about three times the capability of Falcon 9 and that that will hopefully launch in about a year or two that will actually be the most powerful rocket in the world by a factor of two so we're making sort of steady progress the Falcon Falcon Heavy to put that into perspective has about 60% of the capability of of the Saturn 5 moon rocket so if you were to combine two flights of Falcon Heavy with orbital rendezvous and docking you could actually send people back to the surface of the Moon so I think now we're now we're really sort of talking about you know advancing the frontier which i think is quite important and then the the really major breakthrough that's needed in in rocketry that was the pivotal one which were aspiring to make is to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket this isn't this has not been achieved before the Space Shuttle was an attempt to achieve that but it was not a successful attempt unfortunately the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time which was also the primary ascent error frame and even the parts that were reusable was so difficult to reuse for the space shuttle that it ended up costing four times more than an expendable rocket of equivalent Paley carefully so service but it was the right goal but but it didn't hit the target and and I think this that was actually incredibly important I think it may not be completely intuitive but I think perhaps if one refers to other modes of transport it makes more sense because all other modes of transport are fully in rapidly reusable and that that applies to a bicycle a horse plane ships in fact in north and if sort of normal life would be quite silly to you discard your horse after every ride you know or dump the plane after you fluid the cost of a 747 is about 300 million dollars and you'd need two of those to do a round trip from Los Angeles to London but nobody's I don't think anyone has paid half a billion dollars to do that so Norwood one went to I mean there'd be a lot of travel by boat and train and that sort of thing if if that was the true Christ so it's extremely important in rocketry to achieve full and wrapped reusability this is not an easy thing to do because of Earth's gravity well um and just the basic physics of things so there have been many attempts to create a reusable rocket but they've generally well they've all they've all sort of been cancelled along the way once people realize that they would they would not succeed in fact usually they got cancelled quite so quite some time after it was obvious they wouldn't succeed so the problem is that if you design a an expendable rockets and do quite a good job of it you'll get two to three percent of your liftoff mass to orbit then if you [Music] they say well how much mass is needed to return that rocket and be able to fly it again quickly well about two to three percent so and so you can basically get nothing to orbit this is the way it's been in the past so in order to do something useful what what has to what you have to figure out is how do you get a much larger percentage to orbit let's say ideally on the order of four percent of your lift of mass to orbit in an expendable configuration and then compress the reusable elements down to about two percent so you have a net payload to orbit of two percent and then you could you could really have something that's that's quite useful and the the cost of the propellant is only about let's say 0.3% of the cost of the vehicle if you take Falcon nine for example which uses quite expensive fuel relatively speaking I think this their low low cost options the cost of of refueling or reloading propellant on one Falcon 9 is about $200,000 and the cost of the rocket is 60 million so that's just like a pain I mean it's just if you were to refuel a plane not for expense if you want to buy a new plane very expensive so okay at this point I'm really reasonably confident that it can be done and now it's a question of executing - to make that design work and seeing if there are any gotchas and they'll probably be a few craters along the way so I'm not expecting this to be a smooth journey as long as the rocket doesn't land on anyone will be fine so that that's really what SpaceX is focused on right now is kind of scaling up the size of the rockets and and trying to achieve this full and rapid reusability so if you're curious it means we're fairly public about things and you can just fold it on the SpaceX website so that's what we're doing it on our SpaceX I'd then in parallel we've got Tesla which is developing electric vehicles and sort of whole step for separate story line and tell me if I'm going on too long and stopping at any point feel free to leave it's getting boring so with with with Tesla the goal is to to try to create electric vehicles that are more compelling than gasoline vehicles as a product I mean the fundamental issue we have in in energy and transport is is it's the tragedy of the Commons you know we've got this co2 capacity of the oceans in atmosphere that is unpriced or mostly unpriced and so it's it's almost like we're sort of dumping garbage in the atmosphere and nobody's paying for garbage collection so it's a it's most unfortunate situation because the there are quite significant vested interests in in oil gas and coal with enormous amounts of money it's quite a difficult battle to fight and you can't expect them to simply roll over and put suicide or something there that they will fight but hardly and then they happen and so unfortunately research requires fighting hard back and and and creating products in the absence of there being a tax on co2 creating products that don't rely on the relative economics of using hydrocarbon fuels versus versus electric cars and instead that was our goal for from Tesla from the beginning and I'm really excited to to see that we've we achieved that goal actually with with the Model S which was as was mentioned model ass was recently awarded top honours by it was what who ordered some carve the year in automobile of the year and and that was against a very difficult field of gasoline cars and so I'm hopeful this will be seen as a pivotal moment in transport where where people where people you know finally appreciate it that an electric car could be better than a gasoline car and then they're going into the future our goal with Tesla is to keep refining the technology increasing the scale of production and and and make a mass-market electric car that that almost anywhere can afford and that's that's step three on the strategy so step one was with high price low volume step two mid price mid-volume step three low price high volume so sort of that step two and now we we want to progress districts that step three is as soon as possible and we didn't get quite a bit of criticism at Tesla for for creating the that the Roadster which we did in collaboration with Lotus and if people were complaining well why you making this expensive sports car and with the implication that we felt there was a shortage of sports cars for rich people and and we're racing to me that that that unmet need you know so the the real reason it is that any car that we make at low volume which is the first version of technology is going to be expensive it didn't matter what that car looked like so we could make something that looked like a very standard you know sort of Toyota Corolla or in a Ford Fusion or something like that and it would have cost say $70,000 but nobody will pay that for for what looks like a mid-sized economies sedan they're just they just want or very carefully forward but people are willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a fast sports car and so that that that's why we started off with that at that level and then with another big design iteration and an increase in volumes we had a car scale we're able to create the Model S and then with another order of magnitude increase in volume and another big design revision that's what allows to cut the price in half again and an M test also supplies powertrains to Mercedes in Toyota and half so that will do that father car companies in an effort to help them accelerate the transition to electric vehicles so that's a that's death peasants basics and I should read I should should mentioned certainly solar city is one must generate electricity and sustainable way as well as consume and in sustainable way and people will say well what electric cars correlate create pollution at the power plant power plant level and it should be noted that for any given source fuel it is always better to generate the power at the power plant level and then charge electric cars and run them for any given source view because power plants are much more efficient at extracting the energy than they need to rush the engines in a car there are at least twice as efficient and usually more like three times as efficient so so for any given suppose fuel it's all you know even if the whole world but we're always going to be powered by hydrocarbons it would still make sense to do electric cars but of course we must find the sustainable means of generating energy as well and and I I think that the work the most likely the main candidate for energy generation is actually solar I think the physics this was actually rather obvious because there are this is actually almost entirely solar powered today as it ages the would be a frozen ice ball at I don't know three or four Kelvin if it weren't for the Sun and and and our entire system of precipitation is powered by the Sun the ecosystem is almost entirely 99.99 percent powered by the Sun except for some chemo tropes at the bottom of the ocean so that's you know it's rather obvious that and I think once you try to take take a little portion of that energy it's essentially not much and convert that into electricity for use by by society so I I'm quite confident that solar power will be the single largest source of energy or of electrical energy for Humanity in the future and you know we combined with other things of course such as hydro hydro power and geothermal and and actually think nuclear is not a terrible option as long as you're not located in a place that's susceptible to natural disasters that's also I think a device common sense but so as long as that there aren't huge earthquakes or sort of weather systems that have names coming at you then then I think nuclear can be can be a sensible option and there are much safer and better ways to generate nuclear energy and poking fission here then then existed in in the past when you do reactors first first came out I think and then at some point in future every nice to make fusion work of course that would be quite quite good but in the meantime I think indirect fusion being solar power is the it is a good thing to do so that's what Solar City is doing is really trying to improve the economics of solar power and it's doing a great job I don't run the companies that the credit for small city really goes to the two key guys who Robert run a company but they're they're doing a great job of really accelerating the adoption of solar power in the United States so and hopefully they'll come to the UK as well so that's um that's about it so you're cute thank you so much Elan for that you make it sound so easy Bodi we a small fraction of us could achieve that in our lifetimes I think we should be actually delighted but thank you too for agreeing to take questions and answers I know that's what you really were looking forward to today so we have a roving mic we have some time and please keep your questions clear and concise to see you lot I'm afraid there's no microphones at the higher level it's gonna be difficult for the people carrying the roving mic to get up to the higher tiers so if you want to ask a question come down to this level of the Sheldonian who'd like to go first amazing talk can I be greedy and ask two questions one of the constraints on both your projects is the energy isn't concentrated enough batteries can't store energy as the densely as liquid fuel and even liquid fuel isn't dense enough to have an efficient launch into space so what if we could speculate on that and the second question I wanted to ask is about robotics in the future I guess even though you can have a driverless car people still want to drive the Tesla themselves I don't want to leave that to robot but do you think that the advance of robots is going to change people's perspective on manned spaceflight so energy concentration and right road of robot absolutely in fact the energy density basically the the the amount of energy you can store in a given amount of mass or volume has been a fundamental constraint on electric cars for a while and and then that's paired and correlated some degree with the cost per kilowatt hour the cost of storing that energy in a car now with with the with the advent of lithium-ion technology that that I think is really what enabled a compelling car and the thin my own batteries continue to improve it's sort of a roughly on average maybe eight eight eight or nine percent per year which when compounded over several years ends up being a meaningful improvement and as mentioned later in my talk I think even if there was no improvement in nope no fundamental improvement beyond lithium-ion batteries I think we could still take all terrestrial or all ground transportation could go electric we need we do need to further breakthrough for aircraft where the energy density requirements are at least two to three times more significant but but even with the current generation with in mind I think we could go to mass market with with with ground vehicles and in fact I'll focus is really more on reducing the cost of all the battery pack then improving the energy density so I think we're actually in a pretty good spot I'm quite and I actually now I'm reasonably optimistic that there will be a breakthrough in high-intensity capacitors and it's it's sort of in you if you do this sort of phase do the basic physics on the energy density potential of a capacitor it using naturally occurring materials it is quite hard to to beat lithium-ion batteries but if you can figure out a way to make sort of unnatural materials I suppose that are accurate to the molecular level then then I think I think you can actually have some fairly significant breakthroughs and that was actually developed the ability to do that it was developed in the photonics arena and applying that those sort of photonics breakthroughs to faster technology is what has the potential for a really big breakthrough there so III think we may see something on that on that level but it is it doesn't totally require for for cars for rockets well there's there's no way to make a rocket electric that's for sure unfortunately Newton's third law is cannot be escaped I think maybe I mean certainly there have to be a few nobel prize is awarded if that first one way to get around it that would be really really convenient but I do think it's possible with a really efficient combustion rocket to achieve the settlements of Mars I think I think you probably want to switch to methane it I think it's really methane or hydrogen or that kind of the two two best choices there and slightly leaning in the direction of of methane because it's easier to handle than than hydrogen methane is just ch4 versus H 2 and and both can be produced on the surface of Mars which is important so yeah I should say that I am quite confident at this point that it is it is possible to set up to create a self-sustaining civilization on Mars using only a methane or oxygen methane a hydrogen based Launch System and yeah just just it needs to be a fully reusable methane or hydrogen launch system will it can be done and I that they're keeping a certain figure out was it with volume is it possible to get the cost of moving to Mars down under half a million dollars which i think is and I could argue about the exact threshold but I think that's about the threshold which enough people would could save up money and move tomorrow yeah I mean that's that's how that's how American created basically and come back if they want they don't like that of course you get you get a free return trick it may be actually that I mean that this one has a debate about going to Mars one way and whether that makes things easier and I think for the initial flights perhaps but for the long term to get the cost down you need the spacecraft back whether the people come back is irrelevant but you must have the ship back because those things are expensive so so anyone who wants to return can just jump on so that that's it but until a few years ago I wasn't sure that success is one of the possible outcomes and now I think now quite sure that success is possible of course this long way between possible and making it real but I believe it's possible and then robotics right I think what can accomplish a lot with robotics I do slightly worry about if robotics get too good what's the point of us so it's it's um I think either either robotics get gets so good and there's not much point to us I guess I don't know or they're they're not as good as asked in which case we need to go and I I doubt it the second and hopefully the future does there's not some sort of AI apocalypse yeah I'm should come back that if you like it yep against Connecticut good evening thanks for taking questions and I just had two brief questions one on Tesla the second one on SpaceX as money if you're familiar with the Sabre engine the the hybrid engine which is there's a team of hard-working rolls-royce engine is working on it in the Oxfordshire cluster at the moment it's a hybrid engine the breeds air on the way up and it's you talked about earlier in your talk that you just specifically looking at reusable space delivery vehicles and rockets so that was the space space x1 and the test on was what happened to the original Tesla prototype then we've mule one oh yeah well we still have my original mule one of the Tesla Roadster and here I should give credit to a small company in Southern California called AC propulsion that had a called the t 0 so our very first meal was really taking a Lotus Elise kind of charming a AC propulsion power train into it and then sort of making it drive and then yeah we originally thought that well it would be it's another example of making some mistakes or dumb mistakes but the thought in the beginning of Tesla was to use AC propulsions power train and to Lotus Elise and get to market fast with an electric car as it turned out the AC propulsion power train didn't really work very well and was not scalable for production and had a lot of issues and so we had to completely redesigned the power train and then the the Elise because our car ended up being 50 percent heavier and had different weight distribution and lower points we invalidate all the crash structure and had to completely redesign the chassis and in the end I think about 7% of the parts for in common with movies so almost nothing yeah an input for good we actually inherited some of the limitations of him Elise so okay okay so and then and then but there's a longer night so I'll try to be less less longer in my answers but with respect to to everything hybrid stages I I have not I have not seen how the physics of that makes sense there may be some assumptions that I am that I don't have that are that are incorrect but really for orbital rocket you're trying to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible because that must fear is just thick as soup when you're trying to go fast and and it's not helped by the fact that the atmosphere is mostly not oxygen you know it's 80% nitrogen so so mostly what your everything is is chaff not wheat and and and having a big sort of intake is like having a giant break so the the braking effect tends to overwhelm the advantage of ingesting 20% oxidizer so so so you could just make to say that the the boost stage 5 to 10% larger and get rid of all the everything stuff I should say that this is being filmed so if any of you don't want to be filmed either don't ask your question or else tell the people who were filming up here afterwards that you'd like your questions extracted but the assumption is that you're happy to be on record good evening with the new technologies that has made the availability of shale gas really cheap and the boom of the US energy sector do you think the there will be a limitation in the development sustainable energy in the coming decade because of the new energy boom that you versus facing right now yeah but that's a good point and there's the new technology and innovation can have a downside one of the downsides is the ability to extract far more hydrocarbons than we thought were possible including you know once you start getting into deep methane or deep natural gas you're actually tapping into things that are not related to dinosaur fossils methane is a naturally occurring gas there are there places in the solar system where that that there with atmospheres primarily methane so it's not it does not require organic origin so if we if we dig too deep for methane we're actually going to a level that has never never been seen before not even in in the the you know the very earliest history of earth so that that's very dangerous I think and but but but that's why I think it's it's important for electric cars to be able to compete without economics being a factor and for that but I think this is it is very dangerous to to be extracting vast quantities of hydrocarbons from from deep within the earth and putting them in the atmosphere sooner or later something very bad will will happen and yeah it's just it made that there are a lot of people particularly us who who are vehemently against electric cars and social sustainable power it's quite difficult to reason with them actually you know they'll say well you know some scientists don't think it's a problem and I'm like well okay you know you can find some number of people that will disagree with anything and and you know this is the sector reminds me of the of the tobacco industry where the longest time they were actually the thing that you'd see ads where they claimed tobacco was healthy for you I don't know hard to believe these days but and and then there were there were these reports where there seemed to be some correlation between lung cancer and smoking and like like our scientists have conducted experiments and they show it's there's no relation at all so complete nonsense and and so go to the point where were almost any any any reasonable scientist would would say that yes of course smoking causes lung cancer and all sorts of other bad things but definitively but it's extremely likely and yet the tobacco industry would still I say our scientists disagree because one or two percent of the scientific community didn't feel that way and that's kind of and then and then the public just hears scientists disagree know what they don't hear ninety nine percent doesn't think it's stupid yeah so it's a it's definitely a tough thing and hopefully that I mean I hopefully that that transition occurs before it's before it's too late and that the mean is already quite a bit of momentum in the direction of climate change and accelerating the removal of hydrocarbons from the crust and placing in the atmosphere is I think just very unwise that's why I think it's the biggest problem with twenty-first century you're an incredibly successful and very modest man but my questions about failure but modest I think what we don't listen thank you what is my questions about failure so I was just wondering what are you trying at the moment or what do you think you'll attempt in the future that you're not expecting to succeed it well I think I think I would stay on on electric cars and rockets for a while and yeah it was actually never never my intent to to run Tesla III kind of I was running two companies is quite quite a burden actually I you know it's a lot of people who think if you're CEO of the company then they they may sort of imagine themselves if they were CEO of the company they would grant themselves lots of vacation and do lots of fun things and it's like that doesn't work quite work work that way what you actually get is a distillation of the the worst things going on in the company and anyway so III that the idea of taking on something more is it's very frightening but I mean possibly at some point in the future certainly not the near term there are I think this isn't an opportunity to create an electric chant essentially and I do think one could create an electric jet that that it's really exciting something that would be supersonic vertical takeoff and landing pure electric and just just a big leap forward I think I think that's that's a this thing I'm quite confident it's doable for provided that there's a rough doubling of the energy density in batteries or capacitors oh yeah basically around around the 500 watt hours per kilogram level is where it starts to make sense and then there's I do think there's the possibility of have a fifth mode of transport which I've talked about mentioned to change at 10:10 gently which is a like okay that the Hyperloop with and yeah III I'd like to sort of publish something about that maybe in the next month or two once Tesla's at steady state production and I want to flesh it out a little bit so that and it and pre address some of the rebuttals that people will come up with rather than just put it out there and then happy and the rebuttal it occur and I have an unaddressed rebuttal but I guess the way to think of it is it's like a cross between a Concord and a railgun hi thanks for a great talk at the risk of asking for trade secrets I was just wondering having built the Falcon rockets what was the final conclusion of your analysis to as to why your Rockets were so much less expensive than government project the full answer is is quite complicated and requires at least at least some understanding of how Rockets work and but but if you if you divide a rocket into the cost of the engines the airframe and the electronics and then the launch operation itself those are the marginal cost drivers and then there's the fixed cost of the company which is the you know we should divide it over the number of launches that take place but just looking at the marginal cost drivers it means you have to make a significant advancement in engines at airframe electronics and launch operation in fact they're easy to point out one of those areas but success in one of those areas would only have a small effect so let's say you had three engines well that would only reduce the cost of the rocket by probably thirty percent the cost of launch by 30 percent and and so that that's not much that's not a huge breakthrough or for free electronics or free airframe you actually have to compress all of them quite a bit and then like I said you have to make them reusable I can give a sort of an example an illustrative example in the airframe that that may be helpful the normal way that a rocket airframe is constructed is is machined isoquant I bet that's where you take high-strength aluminum alloy plate and your machine stiffeners into integral a machine stiffeners into the into the plate and I apologize this is gonna go a little slightly slightly technical but imagine you sort of have a plate of metal and you're just cutting triangles out of it and that that's normally how Rockets are made and most of a rocket is propellant tanks these things have to be sealed it's have to maintain pressure and I mean and and they have to be quite stiff so that definitely I thought that the approach that we took is it's rather to build it out and and to start with skin sections and friction-stir weld stiffness into the skins into the skin sections and that this is this is a big improvement because if you Machine away the material you're left with maybe 5% of the original materials you know 20 to 1 roughly wastage of material tests a lot of machining time are expensive if you can roll sheet and still well the stiffeners in then your material wastage can be 5% so since that without the other at the inverse essentially where we're you know instead of having 20 to 1 ratio you've got maybe a 1.1 ratio it's it's it's it's of having 95 percent wastage it's 5 percent waste which is huge huge improvement and then you can actually improve the mass fraction too because if you have [Music] still all the stiffness you can increase the profile and geometry and improve the geometry of the stiffness so you can have something which is say five centimeters tall whereas if you machined it from a plate who will be limited to six the plate which may be two or three centimeters tall so you actually end up with something which is both more advanced and and in that it is better mass fraction that it was also a fraction of the cost that's one example but there are many such things so one of the most amazing 3d printers when I was it accused oh yes good bet for another not from the color who runs our getting carbon arc transport group in the in the Oxford Martin school so you know the question I have for you is to say that we can see that our society is going to go through a major change because of the climate issue in the carbon problem that we have and looking back in our history so after going through a major change wasn't one of the key enablers to that was the scenario Warkworth claim something where they had the high road and the low road scenario and that enabled people didn't visit what would be a good outcome and what would get bad what is your good outcome for the climate change challenge well how would you digit what that right well what a good world would look like with this common climate change challenge well III think the thing we need to do is we the the best things you would do to achieve that would be a carbon tax and so I think if we were to just it that the market system will work extremely well if it has the right information to work so if we just apply tax to carbon and then dial that up according to whatever achieves that the target maximum carbon proportion in the atmosphere that that's that I think the right way to go and then countries really need to act unilaterally keep people can't have this thing will you know if such a such countries are doing it I'm not doing it well okay set a good example you know and and hopefully other over time other countries will fall in line or get ostracized so so I think that that's probably the smart move and then we can avoid all of there's no need for subsidies and special incentives which are really a backwards way of trying to deal with the lack of a carbon tax so I think in a good scenario the best possible scenario would be that something like that is instituted what what yeah and we're still going to have a significant increase in the in the carbon in the atmosphere temperatures are still going to rise sea levels will rise there will be but it should be I mean that the Dutch can manage you know with there probably a lot of dying companies will it's a lot of opportunity back business but I think I think if we take out action reasonably soon we can avoid a calamitous outcome if we only take take action say towards the end of the century then it's it's it's going to be extremely bad and I don't think people quite appreciate the fact that this the momentum of those other climate you know climate change it's like even if you stop now even if we immediately stop all carbon production that the momentum will still carry forward and increase the temperature raise water levels and make storms more powerful all those things that's fine yeah okay I'm perfect like what's the good I can get I can sweet we do we do carbon tax we minimize carbon reduction sustainable transportation energy production which likes is gonna be sort of solar wind geothermal hydro and some nuclear I think I think we have to actually let sort of accept that that nuclear a good option in certain places and and I actually think that that the most likely outcome is a is a good one an or a reasonably good one one one that where there's there's there's damage but but we could we recover I actually think that will occur so I don't I'm quite optimistic about the future and with not suggesting complacency in the least but I'm optimistic about the future I please excuse the pessimism of this question but could we expend so much energy running around on the surface of the planet that we don't have enough to eventually get off it to another planet if we wanted to and if so how long might we have to that point actually think as long as the sun is shining we'll be fine nothing that's gonna you know if we had to if humanity had to get all of its energy from from the Sun it could it could do so it's really this truly astounding amount of energy that comes at us from from the Sun I mean it's interesting that if you took the land area of used by by by nuclear plants including this to stay out zones and everything and said okay what generates more power the nuclear power plant or or just covering it with solar panels in most cases it's solar panels just the area used by the nuclear power plant in solar panels to generate more energy because you actually have to have a big stage you can't you can't just put a nuclear power plant and then out in the suburbs and and with watch people around it so you have done this big clearing clears and so they use a lot of area and but just to give you just a sense of how much power can come from the Sun this is literally true what would I just say hi thanks very much for your talk I think you're a visionary so you talked earlier about setting up a sort of colony on Mars and you've talked before about hopefully retiring on to Mars so I was my question is just why Mars right so people have talked about Venus so like why typically not Venus why so okay so you just by process of elimination the mercury is obviously way too close to the Sun you definitely get I mean this doesn't maybe some where you narrow a habitable zone on the backside of mercury but but I think one sort of asking for travel on that one and and then Venus is isn't really Venus should be a lesson for for what earth could become you know in a worst-case scenario which is a sort of a superheated high-pressure well in case of Units acid bath so it's literally a high-pressure high-temperature acid bath so definitely not a good place to to to make another I mean would I think the most that any probe is even lasted on Venus is measured in hours and then the moon is close but it's it's a really a small rock you know that's just circling earth with no atmosphere so very limited amounts of water ice that are sort of in the in a very permanently shadowed craters and and then it's got a 28-day rotational cycle which isn't great for plants so so it would be quite tough to make a self-sustaining civilization on the moon net lift something coming to Mars then Mars is definitely a fixer-upper of a planet not perfect but but but feasible I mean it's got a rotational period of twenty four and a half hours so remarkably similar to earth it's got just under her 1/2 its gravity so it's not close to gravitationally it's got a lot of water ice this is almost all of Mars has water bound up in ice forming in the soil this Walt has turned out to be non-toxic based on on probes that we've sent there so you can really add if you had a greenhouse and some fertilizer and you just sort of warm things up and pressurized it a little bit then you could you grow plants on Mars and most has a co2 atmosphere which plants like to consume so plants turned their consume co2 and on net exude oxygen so it I think it's very very doable to create a Mars base self-sustaining wash base and then ultimately terraform the planet to to make it like Earth so we could just walk around outdoors be able a longer-term project but but it's it is within the realm of possibility and then who's going to be on that you got to like Jupiter and gas giants and casually do something on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn but that's way harder than the ones alex Holliday who is the head of maths physics and life science in hospital surgery a physicist so I loved your talk before talking me more Nasser and Issa in Nasser in particular has done a huge amount of to transform my understanding of the solar system through wonderful planetary missions the Apollo program even though it had a political and military dimension to it was persuaded with the late stages to actually bring some rocks back which totally transformed our understanding of the inner solar system through the samples so the way things are going with you can you tell us how you envision private space exploration taking over from major space agencies and JPL and organizations like this in the future and with this move towards privatization how are we going to be able to address scientific priorities as opposed to commercial priorities and solar system exploration sure I I think I think space exploration is gonna be a mixture of private and government government activities and and in fact for SpaceX we there are many things we want to do to to enable these scientific missions and a bit and enable NASA and JPL to be able to any send others to to do much more for a given budget and in fact we've had a number of conversations with JPL which is located quite close to SpaceX about using our Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft it was at the version two of the Dragon spacecraft will have propulsion for propulsive landing hit buddies so version 2 of the Dragon spacecraft will be able to land on any liquid or solid surface on yeah in the solar system so there's the potential to turn that into a generalized science instrument delivery platform for for anywhere and in the solar system and then if you can see we what one could figure out how to do i stamp or tune you know if your tool and dragon and then and and have a smaller so those sampler to and rocket house within the Dragon spacecraft that could return some some Martian regolith that would be pretty cool and so we're exploring some ideas there and I think well I think we'll see at least at least some science missions being done in the future met maybe a lot of them so it's still thoroughly stage we do have one way of jason-3 which is a joint NASA ISA mission that's gonna be launched on one of our rockets in about two years and then of course we're spying the space station so I think it's gonna be a mixture of government commercial now I'm for whatever means will make it happen so I'm not you know hard over on commercial or government I'm just with what are whatever works for all practical purposes is it too early to think about establishing some nut rules but some attitude towards the comments let it be coming because you know that the entrepreneurs are gonna go and try to mine things there there are many valuable minerals and things on on Mars and to keep it from being exploited what kind of thinking do we have to do now well I don't think it's gonna be economical to to mine things on Mars and then transport them back to earth because the transport cost overwhelmed the value of whatever you or whatever you mind but I mean there will likely be a lot of mining on Mars that's useful for a Mars base but unlikely to be transferred back to to us like the the exchange of the economic exchange between it's a amaz a Mars base and an earth would be mostly in the form of intellectual property anything that can be transmitted by a photon but that's what I think that that's the most likely exchange of things that will occur yeah yeah I mean I I've decided I don't think we need to worry too much about some exploitation of Mars essentially it's yeah I mean that that would be a high-class problem to deal with hello I just want to ask two quick questions real quick we've been having a lot of argument about the food versus world debates I just want to take get your your take on the use of biofuels as a means of transportation and also the use of electric electric cars is most likely to put some sort of strain on the electrical grid of our cities I just want to act what kind of adaptations you'll like to see you done to the transmission grid sure I'm not the biggest fan of biofuels because I I think it's difficult you know again I've tried try to look at things like just to calculate the basic physics of it I mean really elementary stuff and and say okay well what what percentage of the incident sunlight is bound up in usable chemical energy and then once you have that chemical energy how how much of that is then translated into electricity and you have to compare of course that that total efficiency was just having solar panels and I mean unless I've made some really dumb mistake which possible but I you you're about a hundred times off fourth biofuels I mean at least two orders of magnitude so if you essentially what what well Santa is how many what's your what's per square meter of electrical energy generated with the best case biofuel I'm I'm talking about likely take take every every assumption and and maximize it so don't worry don't say oh well maybe there's somebody somebody can invent something better say what is the best offer just just envelope the hot the whole thing and say you had unbelievably efficient plants and maximum maximally efficient you can't violate any laws of thermodynamics but but like assuming you're at the limit of the laws of thermodynamics in all those cases and biofuels at least for terrestrial your land-based biofuels if there's no way this makes sense you end up being around maybe 0.2 percent you know efficient where as interment in turning sunlight into electrical energy whereas solar panels commercial solar panels of 20 percent efficient so why would you have a few five fuels and then and then it's not as though there are large swaths of arable land unused CF stay Walters if you go with biofuels is going to either result in wilderness being being cultivated or an increase in food prices and then you can also say is it possible if you stop all food production in the world to generate enough energy to meet the world's needs and like yeah you could profit probably that's about right actually if you stopped all food production just about me make the Volt energy needs so that's so now there is a possibility of ocean based and because of Earth's service is mostly ocean so if you could find a way to there may be maybe some sort of ocean algae based solution where you're unconstrained by service area although I still think you'd have to compare that to a bunch of floating solar panels and and you I think you still lose on collecting solar panels so I can't see how it would make sense that's where's the second question the quest electricity grid Lucas and so yeah if at some point there will be need to be improvements electricity grid but because that there's a huge disparity in the peak energy use during the day and the energy use of night and most charging electric cars occurs at night and we have quite a strong empirical basis for concluding this because we can look at all of our customers and and and and plot their energy usage and it's very predominantly at night it's just like basically just like your cell phone you you go home you plug it in and it charges overnight and and this there's you know the electricity grid is has to be sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year with some power plants not functioning that's well that's how electricity grid should be sized sometimes so it doesn't work out that way but and and so most the time you have huge amounts of excess capacity and then and so in the u.s. there was a study done Jozef like this that studies done all sorts of things some complete nonsense I love the word study say but but I think the study is actually for holding accurate that you could replace about 70 percent of the passenger miles in the United States at least not sure how to apply to Britain but in 70 percent of passenger miles with no changes to the grid assuming charging occur predominantly at night and then if you combine that with increased use of solar panels on houses and businesses so you have localized power generation and the nice thing about solar power is it tends to match energy usage because just generating power during the day when and that's when you tend to use the most power and and particularly on summer days where you have air conditioning running and a technician is a huge consumer of electricity and you generally only need it when it's warm and sunny so that's when you need it most so so I think we're okay on the on the grid front at least for the near future it's only gonna become a problem once let's say electric vehicles are at least approaching 10% or 20% of the vehicles on the road and then I think you'll be able to address the problem on a fairly localized basis I'm afraid that's that's what we have time for I know many of you have have your hands up we will be running a blog and we'll run encourage you on to engage when he has a second in his time as well and Kelly lots of different things happening in the Oxford Martin school around this that we'd like to engage you all in as well I'm gonna ask the vice-chancellor to make some concluding comments it's worth remembering that the great breakthroughs in exploration of the world in past centuries came from this combination that's been touched upon in the question time of government sponsorship but private genius and Drive and it was pioneers that discovered the Indies that crossed the Atlantic that explored the Western extremes of Canada and the United States and I think you'll agree with me today we have heard this evening a true pioneer and as we imagine the possibilities of space exploration we've heard tonight some of the possible solutions that might take us there like Ian golden I had the great pleasure to visit Ilan at SpaceX in Los Angeles it's hard to describe the scale of the ambition the scale of the enterprise as the Rockets are being built you see not only a real focus and dedication on solving practical problems in this vast many many football-field-sized Factory not only Rockets being built but also soaring ambition in the new designs the carrying of astronauts as we've heard trying to turn the Rockets into reusable vehicles and I think today we've really had an insight into into the way alongs mind works and I think it's given us all an object lesson in innovation and know don't limit your ambitions go back to first principles be ready to make lots of mistakes but not so many that you run out of money hoping and perhaps the last and most important of all don't buy ICBMs from right ladies and gentlemen it's been a fascinating lecture a fascinating question and answer session let me thank all of you for participating it in in it so wonderfully but most importantly would you join me in thanking Elon Musk for coming to Oxford for visiting us and for giving us such a wonderful exposition this evening you

Channel: Oxford Martin School

Views: 225,577

Rating: 4.8155909 out of 5

Keywords: oxfordmartin, elon musk, oxford, tesla, transport, Tesla Motors (Organization), energy, Power

Id: c1HZIQliuoA

Length: 86min 18sec (5178 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 22 2012