There Is No Planet B | Carolyn Porco | TEDxBerkeley

for anyone who was alive at the time and even his according to historians the 1960s were a period of tremendous turmoil but for those of us who were paying attention to our first forays into space and the effects that those initial steps had on our culture they were a fascinating time to be alive despite all the chaos around us we and my generation were excited about the possibilities the optimism of that era was probably best captured by the 1968 film that no one who saw back then ever forgets and I'm talking of course about 2001 a Space Odyssey it's hard to describe what it was like to see this film for the first time as a 15 year old it left such a vivid impression about what awaited us in the future like video conferencing from space and getting in a space shuttle and cruising across the moon to be waited on by waitresses and stylish uniforms and knowing that eventually we would get in a spaceship that could take us all the way to Jupiter and only a year later Apollo 11 lands on the moon ample demonstration to my teenage self that we were going we're on our way it was all very seductive so my head has been filled these days with thoughts of space cadets a half century ago mainlining on optimism and believing that the future would be sublime and I am grateful to the point of Tears to remember and I'm going to lose it that once upon a time when I was young we went to the moon but my head is also filled these days with the realization that the vision of the future that was created by 2001 was an illusion and over a very long distance now I recognize that underlying the mesmerizing imagery of technologies that were vastly superior to what we had on the eve of Apollo 11 and part of the seduction was my tacit assumption that if we had our act together so well that we could live in space and undertaken to planetary travel then life on Earth must be perfect and of course that was not the case yes life improved vastly for our species in that time people and a great many more than ever before a living longer healthier happier lives and we now eat grapes in the middle of the winter from Chile but all of that has come at a cost to our natural support systems and as you undoubtedly know our environment and our biosphere are being steadily and rapidly eroded how did we get to this point well by many roads I'm just going to talk about two of them the first in adopting new technologies we do not pause to evaluate the long-term consequences we rush into development and we don't do what is called systems engineering which is a comprehensive in-depth and two end design an analysis of a complex system of many interacting components over its entire lifecycle we do this all the time in the space program but it's never done when considering how new technologies are going to affect our planet our civic life our physical and psychological health and so on and the second road was basically our economic model our economic model doesn't even allow for that our economic model is based on relentless endless growth and turns a blind eye towards the exploitation of resources and the inevitable creation of waste so now it was a model that enabled great advances when we had unlimited resources but limits now have been reached and we are faced with what was called back in 1968 the tragedy of the Commons all over our planet our common resources are being overused and their polluted and their even being destroyed our oceans our forests the air we breathe our freshwater systems our arable lands our soils our wildlife and so on despite all this we are being told that there's cause for optimism we are being reminded that there is another dimension that we have not yet fully exploited it's the third dimension it's called space and in fact we are now in the era of new space when commercial interests long chomping at the bit for access to space and the profits that our wait there have now been given the green light and they are making headway now I have for a very long time been a enthusiastic promoter of human exploration of the solar system and I have always imagined it to be undertaken by a consortium of nations and so I am frankly dismayed to witness the exhilaration that many of us have felt about extending our reach across the solar system now being hijacked by profit ears and [Applause] and I see in this the very same forces that have been ruinous to our planet down here are about to be enacted all over again above our heads now to be fair we are seeing some spectacular things from the people of new space like not one but two rocket boosters landing back on earth at the same time and of course who could forget star man in his red Tesla Roadster with the earth in the background clearly this is not your mother space program anymore okay but we are also hearing some outrageous absurd claims like mining asteroids is going to save the earth and Elon Musk wants to terraform Mars he wants to turn the surface environment of them of Mars habitable so that we could move there permanently and avoid disaster down here on earth and Jeff Bezos wants to build space colonies in orbit around the earth because he says in a we're gonna run out of energy and there's going to be too many of us and we have to get off the earth and even Stephen Hawking famously said that we need to get in a in a spaceship and and find another habitable planet around another star or else we'll face extinction due to things like asteroid strikes and epidemics and overpopulation okay the message from these guys is clear we can only save ourselves if we leave the earth and I say not so fast okay okay let's take these things one by one what about terraforming Mars recent results from Mars orbiting spacecraft have shown an inventory of co2 on Mars that is inadequate to warm and pressurize the atmosphere and turn the planet habitable and that is even if we could afford the colossal planet-wide engineering task of mobilizing all that co2 getting it out of the ground getting it out of the ice and putting it into the atmosphere and even then if we could do all that there still would be no oxygen to breathe so that would have to be manufactured on Mars oh and by the way the surface gravity on Mars is only 38 percent that of the earth which brings me to reality okay real life space track real life space travel is not Star Trek and believe me it hurts me to say that but it's true we have come to learn that the human body does not like reduced gravity for long periods of time nor does it like being irradiated by cosmic radiation and that's not even to mention the psychological ill effects of being in confined spaces for exceedingly long periods of time staying healthy physically and mentally on Mars would be a big challenge a big obstacle to human colonists trying to live there permanently in raising successive generations okay we are just simply not evolved for such conditions maybe someday we will have a human presence on Mars in the same way that we have a presence at the South Pole today that is a research station continuously inhabited but not by the same people these would not be multi-generational colonies these would be scientific outposts so that's the kind of thing I'm hoping for in the future now what about space colonies these would have to be miles wide to make the environment on the inside comfortable in the gravitational sense they'd also have to be terraformed they also would be massive expensive projects the justification for this is being given that we will run out of energy in about two or three hundred years and by then there will be trillions of us so we have to move off the earth negative our global population is not on track to reach a trillion thank God for small things and the requirement for energy assumes an economy on steroids that it's going to double every 25 years and we need more energy to power it well that growth assumption is not a foregone conclusion and there's almost limitless sources of energy down here if only we would avail ourselves of them so so in short there is absolutely no justification for preparing to move human civilization off the earth and to Mars and into space colonies and in my opinion it is irresponsible to put this Specter before us and present it as a reasonable realistic response to the mess we have created here on earth okay what about the other wild and crazy' idea getting in an interstellar spaceship and traveling to another star and colonizing another earth-like planet what are these guys thinking okay the Voyager spacecraft the farthest and fastest human-made vehicles on their way now making their way to the Stars will take 80,000 years to get to the nearest one and that one's only four light-years away and these things were only the size of a small car so imagine launching I don't know thousands of colonists and all their support the resources that would require even to bring down that 80,000 years a little bit okay and who the hell wants to spend 80 thousand years in a spaceship okay so the only way that we will ever entertain the notion of humans traveling across space and interstellar is if scientists ever figure out a way or if they ever find that the universe admits the possibility from matter to travel faster than the speed of light something that is presently disallowed by the laws of physics as we presently understand them if there is any interstellar travel in our future it will likely be undertaken by artificial intelligence so think how the computer without David Bowman and Frank Poole I present to you the interstellar astronaut of the future I will end by saying that after 40 plus years of planetary exploration and with my last major professional assignment behind me I feel now very much like an astronaut who's come home from the frontier and while I was away this is what I learned there is no place else in the solar system as suitable or as tailor-made for us as is the earth that its surface water oceans are unique and you won't find anything like them for at least several light-years around and that life on Earth and in its oceans is also unique in the solar system certainly in the extent to which it has flourished here on our planet just a few days February 14th will be the 30th anniversary of the much-beloved Voyager pale blue dot an image of the earth taken from beyond the orbit of Neptune that has over the years become synonymous with an inspirational call to planetary brotherhood and protection of the earth I was involved as you heard and the taking of this image and so it was only natural that when a few months after this picture was taken I learned that I would be the leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission to Saturn I put it at the top of my bucket list to do this picture over again I'll only make it better and I got to do that we did it in July of 2013 [Applause] I called it I called it the day the earth smiled it has a long story behind it but as you can see it is if I may say so myself a beautiful image of Saturn and its rings in the foreground with our beautiful blue ocean planet a billion miles in the distance adrift in a sea of stars the significance of this image lies not in its beauty but in the uncorrupted on politicised view that it gives us of ourselves that view of all of us together all of Earth's creatures together on one tiny little dot of a planet alone in the blackness of space our scientific explorations and images like this have shown us with stark clarity that there is no planet B that there is literally no place else for us to go to survive and flourish without extraordinary and I would submit unrealizable effort science fiction aside the unpalatable truth might really be that humanity's last stand is right here right where it all began and the lesson going forward now is we had better make the best of it so I say directly to Geoff and Elon and Mark and Warren and all the high net-worth individuals all around the globe you have won the race you've earned the gold you are admired the world over for what you have been able to achieve how about now showing our fragile precious life-giving planet some love and I mean an unconditional love a love that does not seek profit or gain a mother's love you gentlemen have the power and the means to do this you dream big you want to build colonies in space you want to jumpstart the habitability of an entire alien planet well here's a crazy notion for you why not read terraform the earth everybody in this room who has a PhD at one point in time had to take a qualifying exam this could be your qualifying exam instead of abandoning our planet why don't you join forces and challenge the obviously brilliant people who work in your organization's to figure out the solutions to some of our problems down here for example figure out how to safely utilize nuclear energy because it's nearly limitless how to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere how to remove plastics from the oceans and how to get the peoples of the world to rise above nationalism and tribalism and work together on this because all of this is got is what it's going to take and if you succeed that would be a moonshot with your names written all over it you you would forevermore be remembered as the visionary individuals who led the way in pulling us back from disaster you would be forevermore remembered as the engineers of what just could be humanity's finest hour I say to you make it so and please remember love the earth thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 10,433

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Astronomy, Humanity, Space

Id: dR9uhc_yQjQ

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020