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Strap yourselves in,
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we're going to Mars.
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Not just a few astronauts --
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thousands of people
are going to colonize Mars.
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And I am telling you
that they're going to do this soon.
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Some of you will end up
working on projects on Mars
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and I guarantee that some
of your children will end up living there.
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That probably sounds preposterous,
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so I'm going to share with you
how and when that will happen.
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But first I want to discuss
the obvious question:
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why the heck should we do this?
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12 years ago,
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I gave a TED talk on 10 ways
the world could end suddenly.
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We are incredibly vulnerable
to the whims of our own galaxy.
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A single, large asteroid
could take us out forever.
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To survive we have to reach
beyond the home planet.
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Think what a tragedy it would be
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if all that humans have accomplished
were suddenly obliterated.
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And there's another reason we should go:
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exploration is in our DNA.
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Two million years ago
humans evolved in Africa
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and then slowly but surely
spread out across the entire planet
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by reaching into the wilderness
that was beyond their horizons.
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This stuff is inside us.
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And they prospered doing that.
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Some of the greatest advances
in civilization and technology
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came because we explored.
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Yes, we could do a lot of good
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with the money it will take
to establish a thriving colony on Mars.
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And yes we should all be taking
far better care of our own home planet.
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And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars
the way we've screwed up Earth.
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But think for a moment,
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what we had when John F. Kennedy
told us we would put a human on the moon.
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He excited an entire generation to dream.
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Think how inspired we will be
to see a landing on Mars.
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Perhaps then we will look back at Earth
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and see that that is
one people instead of many
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and perhaps then
we will look back at Earth,
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as we struggle to survive on Mars,
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and realize how precious
the home planet is.
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So let me tell you about the extraordinary
adventure we're about to undertake.
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But first,
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a few fascinating facts
about where we're going.
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This picture actually represents
the true size of Mars compared to Earth.
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Mars is not our sister planet.
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It's far less than half
the size of the Earth,
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and yet despite the fact
that it's smaller,
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the surface area of Mars
that you can stand on
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is equivalent to the surface area
of the Earth that you can stand on,
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because the Earth
is mostly covered by water.
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The atmosphere on Mars is really thin --
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100 times thinner than on Earth --
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and it's not breathable,
it's 96 percent carbon dioxide.
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It's really cold there.
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The average temperature
is minus 81 degrees,
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although there is
quite a range of temperature.
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A day on Mars is about as long
as a day on Earth,
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plus about 39 minutes.
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Seasons and years on Mars
are twice as long as they are on Earth.
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And for anybody who wants to strap
on some wings and go flying one day,
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Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth,
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and it's the kind of place
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where you can jump over your car
instead of walk around it.
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Now, as you can see,
Mars isn't exactly Earth-like,
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but it's by far the most livable
other place in our entire solar system.
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Here's the problem.
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Mars is a long way away,
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a thousand times farther away
from us than our own moon.
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The Moon is 250,000 miles away
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and it took Apollo astronauts
three days to get there.
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Mars is 250 million miles away
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and it will take us
eight months to get there --
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240 days.
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And that's only if we launch
on a very specific day,
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at a very specific time,
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once every two years,
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when Mars and the Earth
are aligned just so,
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so the distance that the rocket
would have to travel will be the shortest.
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240 days is a long time to spend
trapped with your colleagues in a tin can.
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And meanwhile, our track record
of getting to Mars is lousy.
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We and the Russians,
the Europeans, the Japanese,
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the Chinese and the Indians,
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have actually sent 44 rockets there,
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and the vast majority of them
have either missed or crashed.
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Only about a third of the missions
to Mars have been successful.
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And we don't at the moment have
a rocket big enough to get there anyway.
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We once had that rocket, the Saturn V.
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A couple of Saturn Fives
would have gotten us there.
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It was the most magnificent
machine ever built by humans,
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and it was the rocket
that took us to the Moon.
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But the last Saturn V was used in 1973
to launch the Skylab space station,
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and we decided to do
something called the shuttle
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instead of continuing on to Mars
after we landed on the Moon.
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The biggest rocket we have now
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is only half big enough
to get us anything to Mars.
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So getting to Mars is not going to be easy
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and that brings up
a really interesting question ...
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how soon will the first humans
actually land here?
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Now, some pundits think
if we got there by 2050,
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that'd be a pretty good achievement.
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These days, NASA seems to be saying
that it can get humans to Mars by 2040.
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Maybe they can.
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I believe that they can get
human beings into Mars orbit by 2035,
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but frankly,
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I don't think they're going to bother
in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars,
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because we will already be there.
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We're going to land on Mars in 2027.
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And the reason is
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this man is determined
to make that happen.
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His name is Elon Musk,
he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
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Now, he actually told me
that we would land on Mars by 2025,
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but Elon Musk is more
optimistic than I am --
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and that's going aways --
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so I'm giving him
a couple of years of slack.
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Still ...
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you've got to ask yourself,
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can this guy really do this
by 2025 or 2027?
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Well, let's put a decade with Elon Musk
into a little perspective.
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Where was this 10 years ago?
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That's the Tesla electric automobile.
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In 2005, a lot of people
in the automobile industry were saying,
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we would not have
a decent electric car for 50 years.
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And where was that?
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That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket,
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lifting six tons of supplies
to the International Space Station.
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10 years ago,
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SpaceX had not launched anything,
or fired a rocket to anywhere.
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So I think it's a pretty good bet
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that the person who is revolutionizing
the automobile industry
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in less than 10 years,
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and the person who created an entire
rocket company in less than 10 years,
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will get us to Mars by 2027.
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Now, you need to know this:
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governments and robots
no longer control this game.
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Private companies are leaping into space
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and they will be happy
to take you to Mars.
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And that raises a really big question.
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Can we actually live there?
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Now, NASA may not be able
to get us there until 2040,
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or we may get there
a long time before NASA,
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but NASA has taken a huge responsibility
in figuring out how we can live on Mars.
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Let's look at the problem this way.
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Here's what you need to live on Earth:
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food, water, shelter and clothing.
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And here's what you need to live on Mars:
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all of the above, plus oxygen.
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So let's look at the most
important thing on this list first.
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Water is the basis
of all life as we know it,
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and it's far too heavy for us to carry
water from the Earth to Mars to live,
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so we have to find water
if our life is going to succeed on Mars.
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And if you look at Mars,
it looks really dry,
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it looks like the entire
planet is a desert.
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But it turns out that it's not.
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The soil alone on Mars
contains up to 60 percent water,
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and a number of orbiters that we still
have flying around Mars have shown us --
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and by the way,
that's a real photograph --
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that lots of craters on Mars
have a sheet of water ice in them.
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It's not a bad place to start a colony.
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Now, here's a view of a little dig
the Phoenix Lander did in 2008,
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showing that just below
the surface of the soil is ice --
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that white stuff is ice.
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In the second picture,
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which is four days later
than the first picture,
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you can see that
some of it is evaporating.
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Orbiters also tell us
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that there are huge amounts
of underground water on Mars
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as well as glaciers.
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In fact, if only the water ice
at the poles on Mars melted,
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most of the planet
would be under 30 feet of water.
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So there's plenty of water there,
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but most of it's ice,
most of it's underground,
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it takes a lot of energy to get it
and a lot of human labor.
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This is a device cooked up
at the University of Washington
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back in 1998.
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It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier.
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And it turns out the Mars atmosphere
is often 100 percent humid.
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So this device can extract
all the water that humans will need
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simply from the atmosphere on Mars.
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Next we have to worry
about what we will breathe.
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Frankly, I was really shocked
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to find out that NASA
has this problem worked out.
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This is a scientist at MIT
named Michael Hecht.
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And he's developed this machine, Moxie.
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I love this thing.
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It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially,
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that sucks in the Martian atmosphere
and pumps out oxygen.
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And you have to remember that CO2 --
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carbon dioxide, which is
96 percent of Mars' atmosphere --
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CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen.
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Now, the next big rover
that NASA sends to Mars in 2020
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is going to have one
of these devices aboard,
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and it will be able
to produce enough oxygen
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to keep one person alive indefinitely.
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But the secret to this --
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and that's just for testing --
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the secret to this is that this thing
was designed from the get-go
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to be scalable by a factor of 100.
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Next, what will we eat?
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Well, we'll use hydroponics to grow food,
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but we're not going to be able to grow
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more than 15 to 20 percent
of our food there,
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at least not until water is running
on the surface of Mars
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and we actually have the probability
and the capability of planting crops.
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In the meantime,
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most of our food will arrive from Earth
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and it will be dried.
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And then we need some shelter.
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At first we can use inflatable,
pressurized buildings
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as well as the landers themselves.
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But this really only works
during the daytime.
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There is too much solar radiation
and too much radiation from cosmic rays.
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So we really have to go underground.
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Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars,
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by and large,
is perfect for making bricks.
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And NASA has figured this one out, too.
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They're going to throw
some polymer plastic into the bricks,
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shove them in a microwave oven,
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and then you will be able to build
buildings with really thick walls.
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Or we may choose to live underground
in caves or in lava tubes,
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of which there are plenty.
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And finally there's clothing.
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On Earth we have miles
of atmosphere piled up on us,
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which creates 15 pounds of pressure
on our bodies at all times,
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and we're constantly
pushing out against that.
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On Mars there's hardly
any atmospheric pressure.
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So Dava Newman,
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a scientist at MIT,
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has created this sleek space suit.
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It will keep us together,
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block radiation and keep us warm.
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So let's think about this for a minute.
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Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen ...
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we can do this.
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We really can.
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But it's still a little complicated
and a little difficult.
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So that leads to the next big --
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really big step --
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in living the good life on Mars.
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And that's terraforming the planet:
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making it more like Earth,
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reengineering an entire planet.
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That sounds like a lot of hubris,
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but the truth is
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that the technology to do everything
I'm about to tell you already exists.
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First we've got to warm it up.
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Mars is incredibly cold
because it has a very thin atmosphere.
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The answer lies here, at the south pole
and at the north pole of Mars,
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both of which are covered
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with an incredible amount
of frozen carbon dioxide --
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dry ice.
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If we heat it up,
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it sublimes directly into the atmosphere
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and thickens the atmosphere
the same way it does on Earth.
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And as we know,
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CO2 is an incredibly
potent greenhouse gas.
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Now, my favorite way of doing this
is to erect a very, very large solar sail
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and focus it --
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it essentially serves as a mirror --
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and focus it on the south pole
of Mars at first.
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As the planet spins, it will heat up
all that dry ice, sublime it,
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and it will go into the atmosphere.
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It actually won't take long
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for the temperature
on Mars to start rising,
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probably less than 20 years.
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Right now,
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on a perfect day at the equator,
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in the middle of summer on Mars,
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temperatures can
actually reach 70 degrees,
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but then they go down
to minus 100 at night.
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(Laughter)
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What we're shooting for
is a runaway greenhouse effect:
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enough temperature rise
to see a lot of that ice on Mars --
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especially the ice in the ground -- melt.
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Then we get some real magic.
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As the atmosphere gets thicker,
everything gets better.
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We get more protection from radiation,
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more atmosphere makes us warmer,
makes the planet warmer,
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so we get running water
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and that makes crops possible.
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Then more water vapor goes into the air,
forming yet another potent greenhouse gas.
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It will rain and it will snow on Mars.
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And a thicker atmosphere
will create enough pressure
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so that we can
throw away those space suits.
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We only need about five pounds
of pressure to survive.
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Eventually, Mars will be made
to feel a lot like British Columbia.
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We'll still be left
with the complicated problem
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of making the atmosphere breathable,
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and frankly that could take
1,000 years to accomplish.
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But humans are amazingly smart
and incredibly adaptable.
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There is no telling what our future
technology will be able to accomplish
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and no telling what we can do
with our own bodies.
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We --
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in biology right now,
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we are on the very verge of being
able to control our own genetics,
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what the genes
in our own bodies are doing,
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and certainly,
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eventually, our own evolution.
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We could end up with a species
of human being on Earth
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that is slightly different
from the species of human beings on Mars.
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But what would you do there?
How would you live?
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It's going to be
the same as it is on Earth.
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Somebody's going to start a restaurant,
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somebody's going to build an iron foundry.
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Someone will make
documentary movies of Mars
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and sell them on Earth.
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Some idiot will start a reality TV show.
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(Laughter)
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There will be software companies,
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there will be hotels, there will be bars.
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This much is certain:
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it will be the most disruptive
event in our lifetimes,
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and I think it will be the most inspiring.
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Ask any 10-year-old girl
if she wants to go to Mars.
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Children who are now in elementary school
are going to choose to live there.
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Remember when we landed
humans on the Moon?
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When that happened,
people looked at each other and said,
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"If we can do this, we can do anything."
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What are they going to think
when we actually form a colony on Mars?
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Most importantly,
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it will make us a spacefaring species.
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And that means humans will survive
no matter what happens on Earth.
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We will never be the last of our kind.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)