Mosquito-borne diseases kill more than 1,000,000 people in the world every year! Oxitec biologists have produced mosquitoes with a reduced lifespan. The fog-basking beetles in Namibia condense water on their shells to cool themselves. The Sahara Forest Project has been started in the hot country of Qatar.
Freeman calls solar geoengineering "a kind of sunscreen for the planet." The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo spewed 20,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere.
A rectenna can receive the concentrated energy of sunlight sent to the Earth.
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Freeman calls solar geoengineering "a kind of sunscreen for the planet." The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo spewed 20,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere.
A rectenna can receive the concentrated energy of sunlight sent to the Earth.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more vidoes.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season8
#episode3
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#planets
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00humanity is under threat from storms that seem to get fiercer earthquakes that are ever more
00:11deadly and killer viruses that engulf the globe are we powerless against these forces of nature
00:21or is it time for us to fight back against planet earth
00:30change the elements harness limitless power eliminate entire species and bring others back to
00:40life do we dare to play god with our world can we should we hack the planet
00:54space time life itself
01:05the secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole
01:09we all know about hackers they hijack a system meant to do one thing and make it do something
01:28different usually that means a computer but what if it was a planet astronomers always say earth is the
01:38goldilocks planet ideal for life but we know earth isn't perfect living here means dealing with deadly
01:47natural forces from plagues to drought to natural disasters and with global warming things are
01:54getting worse could we use technology to manipulate an entire world become hackers of planet earth
02:09no place on the globe is safe from nature's onslaught
02:14our coastlines are pounded by tsunamis hurricanes and cyclones
02:19the land we inhabit is riddled with geological fault lines tormented by extremes of temperature
02:28but one natural enemy causes more human suffering than all others combined
02:32and that enemy disguises itself as a tiny flying insect
02:44every year mosquito-borne diseases kill more than a million people
02:49there's malaria yellow fever encephalitis and dingue fever
02:54Brazilian entomologist guilherme trivelato knows this enemy personally he's a survivor of dengue
03:03it's the worst disease i ever had put me in bed all my bones were in pain my eyeballs were hurting a lot
03:11i don't want to have that again never again
03:14but planet earth has worse in store for us
03:22in his research outpost in the brazilian city of parisicaba guilherme is fighting mosquitoes that are
03:29armed with a new weapon the zika virus zika is coming and zika is a big madness for the whole city and the whole
03:37country and even the whole world even though a zika infection is usually mild
03:44this virus poses an enormous threat to humanity
03:48if it infects a pregnant woman the virus stunts the growth of her unborn child's brain
03:54causing a devastating condition called microcephaly
04:00since zika can jump directly from human to human the virus has spread rapidly around the world
04:08a global threat to an entire generation more than 40 percent of the population of the world is in
04:14contact with this mosquito and that's a huge problem to fight the massive threat posed by mosquitoes
04:20guilherme and his team are doing something radical
04:26they're giving up on man-made weapons like insecticide instead they are hacking into nature itself
04:34designing and releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild
04:39letting nature fight nature it's quite weird the idea of releasing mosquito to have less
04:45mosquito but in this project that we are doing i've released something around 44 million mosquitoes
04:51already the way that we develop this method is to use one mosquito against himself
04:57instead of trying to kill mosquitoes with poisons guilherme and his colleagues at the biotech firm
05:07oxitech are attacking them with mosquitoes which are genetically modified to die young and to pass on
05:14that fatal trait to the entire wild population sex is our secret weapon in this case we change the genome of
05:21this mosquito in the lab we release the male mosquito to seek for the female to copulate and when they do
05:27it all the offspring will die before reach adult face to a female mosquito guilherme's males look normal
05:36and very suitable to breed with but they are stealth weapons carrying a genetic time bomb when the males
05:44are in the wild they mate with the females and all the offspring of this couple will carry his father
05:50genes the larvae die before he can bite someone before he can transmit the disease creating a brand new
05:58living organism is not guilherme's only godlike task if his mutant male mosquitoes are to spread their
06:05premature death genes he has to keep them alive long enough to mate
06:13imagine the bike guilherme is riding is a mosquito carrying the death gene
06:18and a flat tire is its fatal flaw
06:26because it can't get far with a flat tire guilherme uses a tire patch kit to keep it going
06:34that tire patch is an antibiotic called tetracycline which attaches to the death gene and temporarily turns
06:41it off when we give tetracycline it's like we're filling up the tire of the bike and the mosquito can go
06:47long and reach the adult face this antidote is good for just 14 days but that's long enough for the mosquito to mate
07:01its offspring are not so lucky they have the death gene but no antidote in the wild the offspring
07:08carrying the same gene won't have the equipment to repair the tire and that's why they end up dying
07:15in the larval stage get enough mutant mosquitoes out there and most of the next generation of disease
07:24bearers will be doomed to die after releasing mutant mosquitoes for a year guilherme saw cases of
07:33dengue fever in his neighborhood plummet from 133 to just 12. once we start the release in four to six
07:41month we can see like a huge knockout on the population we don't heard about dengue fever
07:46anymore in the area that we're treating it was once one of the most hot spots for dengue fever in the
07:52city before we start the project since the trial began before zika hit brazil he can't compare its
07:58before and after numbers but the death gene method is blind to which disease mosquitoes carry with the
08:05results that we have for dengue fever we will certainly have the same results for zika virus because
08:10we're killing the mosquito if you don't have the mosquito you don't have any of those disease
08:16hacking the genes of the mosquitoes could save millions of human lives but hacking into the ecosystem
08:23even if to read the world of devastating disease is not welcome by all the residents of piracy carbon
08:31releasing into the wild genes that trigger death is for some a shocking escalation of gmo technology we
08:39work with media and tv radio newspaper we deliver leaflets we also pass house by house carrying a cage
08:48with the male mosquito so people can see that it's true that the male does not bite the male doesn't
08:54transmit any disease the males cannot harm anyone as zika has spread to the united states so have the fears
09:02that scientists are messing with mother nature with as yet unknown consequences
09:07but hiyame and his colleagues at oxytek argued their technique is a smarter and safer way to fight
09:13mosquito-borne disease the beauty of this thing is that it's the most environmental friendly way to
09:19fight the mosquito that without releasing one gram of pesticide in the environment we're not going to harm
09:24bumblebees we're not going to harm honeybees we're not going to harm any other insects in the environment
09:29hacking into the basic biology of life is merely science's first step in combating the deadly forces of nature
09:41every year millions of people suffer the wrath of natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes
09:48we can't hope to build defenses against these colossal forces but perhaps we can use our ingenuity to tame them
10:01sometimes it feels like the earth is out to get us
10:05when katrina hit new orleans it took more than a thousand lives and flooded 80 percent of the city
10:12hurricanes are so powerful they can take water and turn it into a swirling vortex of destruction
10:20today we are building better defenses but they're never guaranteed to hold off nature's power
10:27maybe we're going about this the wrong way could we use our ingenuity to hack into nature directly
10:33and turn a storm into a tempest in a teacup
10:53every year hurricanes and tropical storms kill around 10 000 people they cause billions of dollars in damage
11:00with rising sea levels and rising temperatures the toll is only going to get worse
11:10dr stephen salter one of britain's leading marine inventors believes we can turn back this rising
11:16tide of destruction but the only way is to suck the life out of the storms before they grow too big
11:24it's very difficult to stop hurricanes once they've really got going the amounts of energy are really
11:28enormous and you end up with a cubic meter of water having about the same energy as 12 grams of tnt
11:37so a cubic kilometer is about the same as hiroshima and this is very difficult to control
11:45a category five hurricane is among the deadliest weapons in nature's arsenal
11:50it can be larger than the state of texas
11:52and release more energy than our largest nuclear bombs
11:59after katrina we were kicking around ways of trying to prevent another katrina and the focus is
12:05to try and reduce the sea surface temperatures warm surface water near the equator is the seed of every
12:13hurricane when the warm water evaporates and rises it forms thunder clouds that are whipped into a spiral
12:22shape by the earth's rotation when these winds hit 74 miles per hour
12:29a hurricane is born
12:32we cannot compete with a full-grown hurricane
12:35but steven thinks we can drain them of their power if we get them while they're young
12:41we all know about oil and vinegar because one is lighter than the other it floats to the surface
12:56the same is true for the warm and cold layers in the ocean brown vinegar is the cold water and the
13:02yellow oil is the warm water and it's the warm water that's doing the damage to hurricane growth
13:09and what we want to do is to bury that warm water somewhere down deep
13:15but it's one thing to mix up the contents of a water glass
13:20it's another to mix up the entire ocean
13:22and that's the hurricane hack steven is working on
13:29this is a test tank where we can test models of any devices with any sea state at about 100th scale
13:37and we can make highly repeatable and accurate representations of very realistic seas
13:44today steven is testing his newest hurricane taming device it's called the salter sink what i'm trying
13:53to do here is to move a layer of warm water down to bury it deep in rather cold water using only the
14:02energy from the existing sea waves
14:05like any sink saunter's device collects and drains water warm water from the ocean surface enters the
14:14device through one-way bounds as water gets trapped in the center the sea level there rises slightly
14:21this creates a downward pressure as the water levels try to equalize driving the warmer water
14:27through a tube into the colder layer deeper in the ocean in full scale this should be made as a
14:33network of used towers lashed together the idea of this is that we can't afford to make anything strong
14:40enough to resist the forces of big seas so what we want is something that can bend enough to move with a punch
14:49the saunter sink is made of recycled materials and requires no power other than the waves themselves
14:55but to stop a hurricane we'd need to build them very big with diameters more than twice the length
15:06of a football field and plastic tubes dropping down nearly as deep steven imagines nearly 500 sinks
15:13dotting the ocean's surface draining away the warm water fuel that powers hurricanes
15:19he knows that his invention might be a long shot but with destructive storms becoming more common
15:31steven believes we must dream big i think we have to try to do it but at least i can go to my grave saying
15:40i've tried to do my bit if we contain the ocean's fury coastal cities would become safer places to live
15:53and with our ever-growing population we need every patch of land we can get
15:59but will planet earth fit 11 billion human beings and even if it can what are we going to eat
16:06can we hack deserts into oases we think of earth as a fertile planet it provides vast quantities of food
16:20with its abundant green fields but by the end of this century there will be 11 billion of us
16:29and take a look at the land that's left desert will we all bite the dust or is there a way to hack it
16:49most architects design homes and office buildings but michael paulin is thinking bigger
16:56he wants to redesign the driest places on earth by mimicking the designs of nature
17:03biomimicry is about looking to nature as a source of inspiration for design solutions
17:09in biology there's an amazing source book of ready-made solutions for many of the big challenges that we
17:15face over the next few decades
17:20eating everybody in the world is a challenge today and it's only going to get more difficult
17:26and right now we're not creating new farmland in fact we're doing just the opposite a lot of the
17:32world's deserts have only been that way for a fairly short amount of time and they're that way because
17:37humans made them that way a lot of north africa when julius caesar arrived was this wooded landscape
17:43caesar's armies set about clearing those forests and within about 200 years they had substantially
17:49trashed that landscape and once you've made that flip it's very difficult to get it back
17:54today one-third of all land on earth is desert case in point the arab state of cutter
18:05it's bordered on three sides by water but that water is too salty for farming
18:13michael began thinking about how to get rid of the salt
18:16he researched traditional desalination plants but found they were too expensive
18:22then he came across a tiny creature that seemed to have the problem figured out the namibian fog
18:28basking beetle is an amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource constrained environment
18:35what the beetle does is it comes out of its hiding place at night it crawls to the top of a sand dune
18:40and then because it's got this matte black shell it's able to radiate heat out to the night sky and
18:45become slightly cooler than its surroundings and as the moist breeze blows in off the sea you get droplets
18:52of water forming on the cool shell just before the sun comes up it tips the shell up the water runs down
18:59to its mouth has good drink goes off and hides the rest of the day
19:02michael began sketching designs for an equivalent of the beetle shell that farmers could use to give
19:10plants a drink usually we use greenhouses to trap the sun's heat but michael turned that idea upside down
19:20in the desert at night the outer surface of a greenhouse becomes very cool and could condense
19:26water from the air around it i put a mirror in the ice box to cool down if we hold this over a bit of
19:35hot water we should find that we get condensation forming that leaves the salt behind in the solution
19:41and it just evaporates pure water into the air michael has designed a greenhouse which uses solar energy
19:50to pump in warm seawater that water flows into a space between two roof layers where
19:56it soaks into cardboard pads at night that roof loses heat to the night sky and becomes cooler than
20:02its surroundings so that you can get this condensation forming the roof is at an angle and once that
20:08starts to form droplets then we can use that to water the plants michael put his greenhouse to the test
20:19then cutter it was the opening salvo of what he calls the sahara forest project
20:28and soon it was producing fruits and vegetables just like the european farmland by bringing
20:34concentrated solar power and the salt water cooled greenhouse together we're using what we have a lot
20:40of sunlight seawater and carbon dioxide to produce more of what we need
20:44with the success in cutting michael's ready to scale up his designs and transform deserts into
20:54great baskets all around the globe the project in katar was two and a half acres there's the potential
21:01to go really big five years down the road we hope that we will have significantly scaled up and we'll be
21:07producing really massive quantities of food in some of the most water stressed parts of the world
21:13humanity has been decimating ecosystems for millennia but now we have the chance to use technology
21:20and ingenuity to restore them transforming the face of our planet if a beetle can do it then we ought to
21:28be able to do it humans are ingenious by turning deserts into fertile places we could dramatically boost
21:38the world's food supply but why do deserts become deserts in the first place because the ecosystems that made
21:47them fertile have collapsed there may be a hack for this too bringing long extinct species back
22:00scientists have identified upwards of eight million species now living on
22:05our planet but they're disappearing for every thousand species that has ever lived
22:15there's only one that is still around
22:17and our life depends on other life when just a handful of species dies it can bring down an entire
22:28ecosystem rich forests can turn into desert just like they did in the sahara the first step to prevent the
22:36the demise of the demise of our species might be to bring another one back from the dead
22:49on her day off molecular paleontologist beth shapiro
22:53likes to drink in the abundance of nature
23:00you would too if your day job
23:04took you to the siberian tundra
23:06few places on earth are as barren and desolate
23:10but the tundra only became that way because its animal populations died
23:15extinction is a natural process but the rate of extinction today is not natural we're in a crisis
23:23but beth is working on a fix one that sounds like science fiction
23:28she's bringing dead species back to life it's clear that the siberian tundra would benefit
23:35greatly from having a large herbivore up there roaming around and distributing nutrients and
23:40regenerating that rich grassland that used to be there a large herbivore say an elephant could start
23:50to turn things around in siberia except that no elephant can survive in siberia but beth knows an
23:59elephant-like creature that could the long extinct woolly mammoth asian elephants can't live in the frozen
24:08tundra but a mammoth could so if we want to take an asian elephant and turn it into an animal that can
24:13live in the tundra we're going to have to find those characteristics of a mammoth and somehow get
24:19those characteristics into an asian elephant
24:24beth's plan is to hack together the dna of two species separated by tens of thousands of years of
24:31evolution but first she needs to get her hands on mammoth dna one of the best places in the world to
24:39find dna in bones is in the arctic and that's because those bones get buried in the permafrost
24:44like sticking them in a freezer this is really cool what we've just found you can see is one two three
24:52four pieces of mammoth bone here this is part of the vertebra so you can see how big this is
25:02recovering mammoth bones is surprisingly easy but it's a different story with the dna inside them
25:11my job once i've gotten the dna out of this bone is to take all those tiny little fragments of mammoth dna
25:18and figure out how they line up against the elephant genome that's how we really start to piece together
25:24what a mammoth genome looks like because mammoth dna comes in bits and pieces beth has to put them
25:30together in the right order using closely related modern elephant dna as a template
25:41building a mammoth is a bit like building mail order furniture
25:44suppose someone sent you a chair but it came in many pieces and they forgot to include the instructions
25:54you have to figure out which piece does what if you tried to make a mammoth like this you'd wind up
26:00with a monstrosity but now suppose you started with a fully assembled elephant and all you had to do
26:10was modified to make it in siberia it will need some mammoth pieces long thick hair
26:23larger tusks
26:27and thicker layers of fat you'd end up with a hybrid that's neither elephant nor mammoth
26:33but a new custom species of your own design
26:40with 21st century gene editing beth thinks we're close to achieving this god-like feat
26:47de-extinction is still science fiction but there are many scientists out there who are trying to make
26:52it cross that divide to become science instead of science fiction as humanity demands ever more of our
26:58planet's resources beth believes custom designing species to revive dying ecosystems will become
27:05a vital technique as our population continues to grow and we need bigger cities and more agriculture
27:11we can use this technology to provide a little bit of an evolutionary booster shot if you will to
27:17protect species that are alive today to protect ecosystems that are still here while we can
27:22hacking into the animal kingdom could keep our planet in balance even as our population swells
27:33but if we can't slow down global warming aren't we all doomed or can technology kick climate change
27:43into reverse
27:43our civilization depends on things that spew carbon dioxide cars airplanes power plants
27:56we're always hearing about how if we want to save the world we'll need to get rid of all that
28:03but is there a radically different solution out there is all that carbon dioxide really the enemy
28:11or is it a potential ally
28:21canadian engineer jeffrey holmes understands that all living things make a mess
28:29but jeffrey believes if we're going to save the planet we need to reuse the mess we make
28:36carbon dioxide
28:44today we make most of our power by burning carbon-based fuel dug up from the earth
28:50carbon dioxide is the waste product we release that's trapping the sun's heat
28:55and causing all of our climate problems
28:57so co2 in the air it's a bit like this dirt we need some amount it's useful but too much we got
29:08ourselves a mess if we don't clean up the mess just continues to build
29:16in squamish british columbia jeffrey and his colleagues at carbon engineering
29:22are working on a hack for the entire atmosphere it begins the same way you clean up a pile of dirt
29:31except with a much bigger vacuum now the ability to take co2 back out of the air turn it into
29:39something useful it's like reusing dirt that's a game changer kind of idea
29:44jeffrey didn't invent the idea of capturing carbon dioxide for fuel
29:52trees do it all the time but jeffrey's prototype carbon plant takes this idea and turbo charges it
30:00it starts by sucking air into a big box called an air contactor inside the carbon dioxide in the air
30:08combines with a chemical solution and is converted into pellets of synthetic carbon-based fuel we can
30:16take the co2 that's produced by this plant we can form molecules of octane or diesel or any of the
30:22other fuels that we use in transportation when your car gives off co2 in its exhaust that gas usually
30:31builds up in the atmosphere but jeffrey's plant captures that gas and turns it back
30:38into fuel no more waste no more mess
30:47if he's going to do this on a global scale however jeffrey's going to need a lot more fans we could
30:54build large factory scale facilities so instead of one fan on the unit behind me we'd have hundreds
31:02or even a couple thousand fans because carbon dioxide is everywhere in earth's atmosphere
31:08we could build these plants wherever there's space for them and because they devour carbon dioxide much
31:15faster than trees we could not only stop global warming we might even reverse it
31:22but such a massive project would take decades and that's time we may not have
31:34that's the worry of jeffrey's boss david keith founder of carbon engineering
31:42even if we could bring emissions to zero tomorrow
31:44that doesn't eliminate the carbon risk we might already have put enough carbon in the atmosphere
31:49to make west antarctica melt and drown the bunch of cities so we need backup options
31:58david thinks we might be able to turn down the temperature dial on the whole planet
32:02we'll take a radical idea called solar geoengineering
32:10a kind of sunscreen for the planet
32:14in 1991 the eruption of mount pinotrubo in the philippines spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide
32:24into the earth's stratosphere it was one of the most devastating eruptions in a century
32:31but it had one positive effect it spewed a cloud of tiny sulfuric acid particles all across the
32:38stratosphere which reflected some of the sun's heat over the next two years the entire planet cooled by one
32:45degree fahrenheit sulfuric acid is the most common suggestion for stratospheric solar geoengineering
32:51simply because it's what nature does with big volcanoes a big volcano can put enough sulfuric acid
32:58in the stratosphere to cool the whole planet now that our climate appears to be changing rapidly
33:05david has a short-term solution
33:09pollute on purpose pretend i'm a giant 20 kilometers tall
33:14typical commercial aircraft flight about this altitude say 10 kilometers the stratosphere starts
33:19somewhere between about here and about here and the tropical stratosphere maybe at this altitude
33:23maybe the place where people would put aircraft they would release particles if we were going to do
33:28solar geoengineering david's radical proposal is to use a fleet of airplanes to dump millions of tons of
33:38sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere where high winds would keep them along
33:43when combined with water vapor they would do just what the volcano did bounce back heat from the sun
33:53david admits his stopgap measure has some ugly side effects like smog and acid rain
34:00but it will buy us the time to develop better solutions i got involved in solar geoengineering
34:13really because of the taboo i was curious of why people wouldn't talk about something that seemed
34:18like it might be important
34:22of course meddling with nature scares me that's precisely why i work on this topic
34:26we may one day turn the tables on our changing climate but one scientist thinks we have a better
34:35future beyond the atmosphere and outer space he's working on an extinction cord to the sun
34:45we're on the brink of making some serious upgrades to planet earth scientists are already envisioning the
34:58day when we can regulate the global temperature control storms bring our deserts back to life
35:06and when we can manipulate our fellow creatures both big and small to make the world safer
35:12we can't do it but there is more we can do to hack the earth out there beyond the sky is a source of energy
35:22that's unimaginably vast if we could tap into that we would truly become masters of the planet
35:32for spacecraft engineer paul jaffe thinking big is part of the job description living on the earth it's
35:48easy to forget there are tremendous resources out there the sun is unique among the sources of energy
35:54that we're exploring because it is effectively limitless if you look at fossil fuels which are
36:00limited and will run out there is no such fundamental limit with the sun solar panels are nothing new
36:08we've been building them for decades and they supply the majority of our satellites with free power
36:15today paul is working on a way to collect the sun's energy from all of us directly from out of space
36:22without any of the limitations of solar panels on the ground
36:25when we collect sunlight in space not only is it brighter than anywhere on earth we don't have to
36:30worry about night time we don't have to worry about clouds or rain we have essentially unlimited access
36:38to sunlight in space we just need to bring the energy to earth
36:44the first challenge would be building enormous solar arrays in outer space
36:49but that's not slowing paul down the good news is is it's easier to build large things in space than
36:56you might realize the spacecraft would be larger than anything we've built in space before
37:02but because we're building it in a zero gravity environment it's actually a lot easier to build in
37:08some ways than building a similar size structure would be on the ground but if we build a solar farm
37:15orbiting the earth as another challenge how on earth do we get that energy down
37:26imagine you trying to run an extension cord from a satellite in space
37:32that satellite is flipping around the planet at thousands of miles an hour
37:37you could fix this by putting it in an orbital sweet spot so it's always over the same place on earth
37:45but then you need an extension cord that's 22 000 miles long
37:55fortunately paul and his team at the u.s naval research laboratory think we don't need a cord at all
38:03this is a model of how the space solar concept works we have the sun through the satellite and the
38:09receiver on the ground the sunlight in space gets to the satellite in the satellite we have the solar
38:17panel on top which converts the electricity into direct current and then the electronics which convert
38:23that direct current into a radio signal that radio signal is sent to the ground where it is received and
38:29converted back to electricity that we would use at home or in our places of work
38:34transmitting energy across space sounds like magic but we do it all the time
38:42our radio cell phones and microwave ovens all move energy through invisible waves
38:46so does the wi-fi signal in your home we use wi-fi every day to send data but we can also use it to send
38:55power using just my phone and the wi-fi signal i'm going to power this led bolt just using the wi-fi signal from
39:04my phone imagine if we could take this and scale it up to power the entire world
39:24paul and his team have already built a tiny working prototype of the satellite they want to put into
39:29orbit it combines a thin layer of solar panels with special electronics that convert the energy to a
39:36radio signal to ensure it will work in outer space paul puts it through his paces in a series of test
39:45chambers one of them simulates the vacuum of space another simulates the extreme cold this is not science
39:56fiction we have it it works it can be made into a real system a full-sized solar system in space
40:05would be nine times longer than the international space station
40:10too massive to launch on a single rocket it would be assembled piece by piece by a team of robots
40:17meanwhile we'd be building a big receiver called a rectana on the ground the rectana would look like a big
40:24mesh so the sunlight would come through it you could throw crops under that you could raise livestock
40:31under that you could even collect regular solar energy so that you had that as an extra source of
40:37energy during the day paul wants to outfit his rectanas with the same wireless power system as his
40:44satellites that means we wouldn't have to plug them into anything but what will happen to life on earth
40:50when we start shooting beams of energy around people often ask well won't this fry birds and the answer
40:57is no because the power density is too low you were not going to walk under it and get melted it's not
41:04going to knock down planes and these invisible beams of energy from satellites would supply a huge amount of
41:12power a given satellite would probably be about a gigawatt enough for a small city with just a few
41:18thousand of these satellites we could cover all of the current and projected future demand for energy
41:24for our civilization a few thousand satellites would cost a fortune but as we learn to reuse rockets and
41:33mass-produced satellites the cost of putting things in space is rapidly going down and paul thinks we'll
41:40spend the money anyway the only question is how for tens of billions of dollars we can kick our
41:46addiction to fossil fuels this is going to be way less than the economic impact of global warming that
41:53doesn't come free that's going to be extraordinarily expensive if we didn't have to worry about energy
42:00anymore think about what our lives could become energy would be as effortless and easy and unconscious
42:06as we think now about breathing the human race has spent most of its history doing whatever it liked to
42:17this planet cutting down forests hunting species to extinction and polluting without a care in the world
42:25but in the past half century some of us began to realize that we have to limit our footprint
42:31the planet however unless the entire world agrees to tread lightly environmentalism isn't going to be
42:39enough we have to actively undo our past mistakes and when we gain confidence in our ability to hack the
42:48planet we can try to make this world better than it has ever been of course when you hack into anything
42:57you run the risk of crashing the system but it's a risk we may soon have to take
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