 Good evening, good evening, good evening, and welcome to Nerd Night East Bay. I'm Rick Karnesky, one of the co-bosses of Nerd Night East Bay. We are taking over the world, or at least the Bay Area. We will now have our fourth Bay Area events. This one promises to be more regular, which is awesome. And I'll have Scott, who's one of the co-bosses of Nerd Night North Bay, tell you about that in a bit. But first I wanted to welcome everyone to the show. Say hi to everyone in the streaming theater, over in theater too. We're glad that you could make it today. I don't know what's going to happen. First of all, you should go check out that table right there, where Mona is waving her hands. If you already have an Oakland Public Library card, you should get one of these nice lilac-colored flyers that tell you how you can learn more about each of the three talks tonight. If you don't have a library card, shame on you. And you can get one here. I'm really excited about the lineup tonight. We're going to have a talk on Bitcoin. We're going to have a talk on BISA2 and cosmic inflation. And we're going to have the talk from David Lange about open ROV. But before you hear any of that, I want to make sure that you're about free beer. So here's Scott. Free beer is like the best intro to get you guys to pay attention to me. So thank you Rick, that was great. So yeah, we're starting Nerd Night in the North Bay. We think it'll be great. Nerd Night is I think 75 cities, 100 cities, a lot. There's a lot of cities that are out there. So we're way up in the North Bay. We're up in Nevada, okay? So I know what you're thinking. Why the fuck are you in Nevada? Well, so Nevada actually offers a lot of great advantages. So Josh, hey, Nevada is close to other cities. That's Nevada's best-selling point. You can get from other places to Nevada pretty easily. So Petaluma's really close. Anyone here from Petaluma? You know why? Because it's really far to get down here, but it's close to get to Nevada. So you can get to Nevada. San Rafael also really close. You're just jumping your car. Anyone here from San Rafael? They improved me my point once again. So yeah, it's really easy to get down there. Also, we have a great venue, which we'll talk about in a few minutes, but it's at Hot Monk. We'll talk about the advantages of Hot Monk as well and why you should go there. We're actually gonna be, Rick, there's so much dollar in the name. So we're actually gonna be the first Tuesday of every month. So that means if you think about it, that you could go to a Nerd Night three times a week every single month and get some sort of nerd merit badge if you wanted. So you should totally come out and try that as well. So a couple things we need you to do to get on Nerd Night North Bay. So you should go to nerdnightnorth.bay.nerdnight.com. You should get in our mailing list. I'll talk about a gigantic advantage to our mailing list in just a moment. Also, eh, Facebook kinda sucks, but you should totally also go to our Facebook page as well and add it. Facebook loves to change the rules. We'll talk about that in a moment as well. But you can also find us on Twitter. So follow us on Twitter. I have three followers. I'm pretty excited about this. That was weird because five people cheered. So two cheered, but didn't follow me. Sure. All right. So yeah, you should totally go to these sites and for a couple of reasons. First join our Facebook group, even though Facebook sucks because we do put our event announcements on there. You should, oh, you should get on Nerd Night. You should join the Facebook group. Let's start. You should join the Facebook group. We will put our event announcements up there. It's also a great way to get links and stuff like that. We will not spam you on Facebook. We will not send more than one or two notifications a month. I swear to God. Even better, you should definitely get on the Nerd Night, North Bay mailing list. So Nerd Night, North Bay offers some great things for you. First, we have great speakers just like Rick has here. We also have a great venue. There are 15 beers on tap at all time, a hot month. There are actually lots of good beers. And also, finally, they're going to pair a special rare beer for every Nerd Night event. So if you're one of those guys that likes to check in on untapped or whatever, get that rare beer and brag to your friends, you should totally go to North Bay Nerd Night. They will have one of those beers. Finally, oh, here it comes. Here's the biggest surprise, the reveal. The reason you should get on the Facebook group and on the mailing list is because we're going to buy your beer. So if you're, you know, no one likes to get spam emails. I totally get it, we ignore it. I delete it, I don't even read it. So here's what we're going to do. If you get on our mailing list, we're actually in the event, going to announce from our mailing list someone that gets free beer at that event. And when I say free beer, I mean unlimited free beer up to four beers. This is amazing. Fuck you, that's a lot of beers, all right? Where the fuck out of Nevada? You have to drive back, remember? Also, that was a good thing right there. Also, if you're on the Facebook group, find, find, Facebook you win. We will also pick someone from our Facebook group for free beer as well. So if you're on the Facebook group, that's a chance to win. If you're on the mailing list, that's a chance to win. Theoretically, I guess you could win twice in the same event, we'll give you free beer for life. That is not true. We won't even tell you you won both, but we will give you free beer at that event. So please, absolutely, especially go to the mailing list. We will send you two event invites for an entire month, no more than that. I swear to God, please do it. And you just might win free beer. So we're gonna have a talk on Bitcoin tonight by Jeremy Rue. So that's the hip new, awesome alternative currency, okay? And alternative currency is something that comes up all the time in human history. So while Bitcoin is very popular, right now it's worth like $500 a Bitcoin share. I don't know, I haven't seen the talk yet. But there's actually a drive in human history to come up with other ways to make money and to have money. Do you think of money as dollar bills, y'all? And it's not just cash. It's actually lots of different things can become currency. What is currency? Dock point. Current, yeah, that too, thanks. Dock point. Currency is basically anything that has an accepted cultural value. In other words, this thing is worth this much in this culture and I can exchange it for other things. So what I thought I'd do is take you on a completely ridiculous but factual tour going back from this point in history, Bitcoin. Back through history for what has been alternative currencies and if we're lucky, try to figure out what those alternative currencies are worth now. So if you invested in things in 6000 BC, what would that be worth now? Okay. So first thing, first alternative currency. These are true stories. So 2011, Tide became a gigantic alternative currency. So please in Baltimore, like the liar, please in Baltimore, notice that they were getting a lot of calls for stolen Tide bottles from grocery stores and drug stores. And it turned out that some of these companies were actually losing $15,000 a month in stolen Tide bottles. That's crazy, right? So why was it? It turned out that Tide had become an alternative street currency. So what people were doing is they were actually stealing Tide bottles. They were drug addicts. They were stealing Tide bottles and they could actually trade a Tide bottle for $10 of crack or pop, okay? And again, remember that that crack or pop of $10 already has a huge markup, like a 95, you're a drug dealer, you're a businessman. So you're marking it way up. So you could trade a Tide bottle for $10 of crack or pop, okay? Ah, but then the drug dealers that got the Tide could sell it on the black market for $5. So what did they just do? They just totally laundered money. Pardon the pun, that was accidental. But worst part is that was accidental. I didn't even plan that till now. So you could actually trade drug money for Tide and then you could sell Tide on the black market for five real dollars, okay? Now, who would they sell to? Well, it turns out that Tide is really, you guys use Tide, it's expensive. It's $20 a bottle, the next one is like $10, it's crazy. So you could actually sell your $5 thing of Tide on the wholesale black market to less reputable stores and they could resell it for $20. So they made a bunch of money, the drug dealer made money and the drug addicts got drugs. It was an alternative currency that worked really well until the police shut it down. Sometimes if you don't have money, you can just decide that you have money and print it. So this is the Republic of Zealand. So after World War II, they actually built a bunch of offshore bases to look for Germans and then World War II ended and eventually we stopped looking for Germans and so we just left the bases out there and so an art colony actually went and lived, I shocked him with my German. So an art colony actually went out and lived on one of these bases way out off the coast of London and so that art colony actually got kicked out by something called the Bates family, which declared themselves emperor and ruler of the new country of Zealand, okay? So Zealand, that went fine for a couple years and then they realized that they needed things like goods and services and money so they didn't have any money, so they printed money. They basically decided, you know what? We now have Zealand dollars, keeping in mind, this is a thing out in the middle of the ocean, there's no trade with Zealand, but they printed Zealand dollars, ah, but what was their exchange rate? We just wanted the exchange rate on the black market was $5 for tide. They cleverly said a Zealand dollar being worth one US dollar, no matter what a US dollar was worth, well why? You have to actually question how committed they were to the idea of Zealand dollars because they would do all their business, they would ask for money in US dollars, but they would only pay in Zealand dollars, which kinda makes you think maybe they weren't convinced they were gonna be around. The weird part is they are still around, you can actually go to the webpage, you can become Zealand royalty if you want, right? You can actually sign a cost like 25 US dollars to become a duper duchess of Zealand dollars. Oh god, if you've lived in San Francisco for more than 20 minutes, you've heard the story of emperor Norton 55 times and his family's in the audience, that's awesome. I'm not gonna tell the whole story, I'll tell you the really quick version of the story, quick version of the story is he's a man who moved to San Francisco, he had lots of money, he lost all that money on a failed rice importation scheme, he went crazy, he left San Francisco, he came back to San Francisco, he claimed himself emperor of the United States of America. Luckily, he had a lot of friends and a lot of people that humored crazy people and so they basically accepted what became known as the emperor Norton dollar. He basically printed money and decided that that was what the currency of the United States was in 1959, this got tricky for me. I'm like, what in the hell is the exchange rate for Norton dollars? Cause unfortunately he's been dead for like 130 years so it's not clear what the exchange rate is. So I looked it up, you can go to eBay, you combine emperor Norton 50 cent piece for 999 US dollars. So if you do the math there, that means that one Norton dollar, oops, sorry, that means that one Norton dollar is worth about 20 US dollars. Okay, so we have another exchange rate. Finally, last one, we're skipping about once, 6,000 years of history. Last thing, so the biggest, the longest running currency in history is the cow. Cattle for a long time has been an accepted form of value. You had to basically have cattle to be rich, right? And there's lots of different reasons for that. But if you go back to the Bible, I mean there's lots of references to two things. If you're rich you have slaves and if you're rich you have cattle, right? As you can see from all these different Bible verses, just so no one gives me too much credit for being pious, I totally Googled Bible verses with cows in them and I had no idea what that stuff was. But so how much is a cow worth? That's actually a tricky question because cow is like you have to feed them, you have to water them, you have to, I don't know, you walk them, you walk the cattle. You walk the cattle. You graze them, thank you. Grazing I assume is expensive. So if you have a cow, what's the quickest value you can get out of that cow? So I wondered, well, how much meat is in a cow? And so first I'm like I looked at the price of ground beef but it's gross, you can't just grind up a whole cow and be like, ground beef. So luckily someone had actually done this experiment for me. They bought one cow and they figured out exactly how much of each type of meat they got out of this cow. So in other words, they got going way up there, three tenderloins, five short ribs, they got three, three pound lump roasts and then I went, this is what I do with my Sunday people, please appreciate this. I literally looked up the value of every single God in the cow, all right? They had each of these things, that's how much it cost per pound. So the value of the cow, multiplying it out, there's $2,421.14 of different kinds of meat in a cow. If you've got a cow as currency and immediately murdered it for meat, I'm not a vegetarian. Okay, so what does that mean in the end? In the end, if you think about it, that means one cow is equal to 2,421 ceiling bottles, is equal to $121 Norton dollars, is equal to 484 black market tied bottles. Let's talk about Bitcoin for all of a God. Thank you so much. Well, I'm getting set up. I did want to note that there's an email signup list on the librarian table along with a few posters if you like this month's design. Here's Jeremy. So my name is Jeremy Rue and I am a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I teach coding and classes for journalists, which is kind of a strange thing, but when I got into encryption, mostly because of this, I believe we threw a lot of investigative reporting and in this last year, we've been really getting into digital security and these topics and I did a talk here, one of these night talks, one of these five minute night talks and Rick saw it, and I know maybe a handful of people may have seen it I apologize, I reprised some of the slides for that. That talk was five minutes long, this was 20 minutes, so you get an extra 15 minutes of really heart-stopping and crypto content and so I hope it's not too much similar to what I did earlier. So this little guy right here, so there's a very vibrant Bitcoin community out there and this guy's kind of the meme of the community whenever the price of Bitcoin goes up real high, people get real excited, the guy's to the loom and people, and you'll understand why if you looked at kind of how much New York rise of Bitcoin over the last just couple of years, it's pretty interesting, but really, this talk is not so much about Bitcoin as it is about the underlying technology, which I find fascinating. Bitcoin, I don't know what's gonna happen with it, I'm not much of an evangelist myself. I'm just really fascinated by the technology behind it that makes it possible. I think it's just an extraordinary piece. And to really understand it, we kind of have to talk a little bit about encryption itself. So I'm just gonna have a couple of slides here, a few slides here to talk a little bit of the brief primer of what is encryption? What does that mean? How does it work? And then we're gonna go ahead and segue into a little bit of Bitcoin, I wanna talk about why I think this is so fascinating. So encryption started as early as like Julius Caesar as you call it, Caesar's Cypher, which is essentially kind of a substitution. You take, you have a message and you substitute an E for an A or B or F or C. I kind of want you these little any orphan decoder rings that we're all familiar with on the Christmas story. And so you take a message like hello world and you have some kind of key, which could be a decoder ring. And you end up with this kind of scrambled message that nobody knows except for people who have the key. And so the person you're sending the message to, they have the same key presumably and then they will be able to decode the message and take it back into hello world. And so the process of doing this is often a lot more fun than the actual message itself as Chris's story has told us. If you guys didn't remember that in the movie. But this basic type of encryption is called symmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption is basically the process of taking a message and coding it and scrambling it up. And then the other person decoding it at the other end, which is great. It's still used quite a bit, but there's some issues with it online. The problem is you have to have this key and you have to give this key to another person. And that's great if you can physically hand it to them in person, but online it's hard to kind of send a key out in the open via email or somehow getting it to the other party without it being encrypted itself. So they came up with this ingenious method. This is called public key encryption. And public key encryption is a really fascinating idea about taking a message and scrambling it up. So that you can essentially communicate with a complete stranger. And how it works is you have a couple of people that say Alice and Bob, and they each have two keys. So they have a public key and a private key. And the private key, somebody may keep secrets. It's almost like a password. There's a lot of advanced math that goes in behind this that I'm not gonna really get into. But essentially what happens is Bob and Alice, they have this public key and they say post it to their Twitter profile or they post it online. They're on the website, here's my key. And what happens is say if Alice wants to send Bob a message, she basically, all she needs is a piece of software and his public key and she can scramble and create a message that only he can decode. So basically it takes this message. So Alice takes this message like hello world, runs it through a software program. The software program says, who do you wanna encrypt this for? She goes, well here's Bob's private, or public key. And he ends up with this, this is a real encrypted message right here. And sends it to him. He's the only one that can actually decode this and reverse it. And after it's encrypted, she knows what the message says, but there's no way to cryptographically take this and to return it back to its original form without the private key. And I found this really fascinating. We use this as a type of software called PGP, which is being used a lot for email and all sorts of different purposes. This is a quick video. I wanted to show it, it's real short. It's less than a minute about this process of using public keys and private keys for something called a key exchanger, a key handshake. Two people who have never met agree on a secret shared key without letting Eve, who is always listening, also obtain a copy. In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman devised an amazing trick to do this. First, let's explore how this trick is done using colors. How could Alice and Bob agree on a secret color without Eve finding it out? The trick is based on two facts. One, it's easy to mix two colors together to make a third color. And two, given a mixed color, it's hard to reverse it in order to find the exact original colors. This is the basis for a lock. Easy in one direction, hard in the reverse direction. This is known as a one-way function. Now Alice keeps her private color and sends her mixture to Bob. And Bob keeps his private color and sends his mixture to Alice. Now the heart of the trick. Alice and Bob add their private colors to the other person's mixture and arrived at a shared secret color. Notice how Eve is unable to determine this exact color since she needs one of the private colors to do so. And that is the trick. And that is the trick. And so I just, I find that completely fascinating. There's all of these different tools and all of these different ways that a lot of computer scientists have found to devise ways to communicate. And essentially what it comes down to is a way to communicate and to know if people are who they are. You post a comment, you're in a chat room, whatever you might be doing, it's just this kind of this wild, wild west place. And one of the things that encryption does is it kind of creates a mechanism for trust. And the underlying technology for Bitcoin is very much about creating trust in a place where trust really doesn't exist very well because anybody can be anybody on the internet. And so how do you know if this person is really who they say they are? How do you know, how do you transfer information in a way that it can be validated and that can be tamper free? There's another aspect of encryption that's real important, it's called digital signing. And that's essentially using the same software. You can actually prove that a piece of content is free. So what you would do is you'd have, let's say Alice wrote a message saying, I wrote this sentence. And she wanted to add this little piece of code down here, just some cryptographic code. She could sign that and anybody can validate that because they would know her or her public key and they could say, okay, you know what? She's the only person that could have written this sentence and even one character of that sentence is modified, this wouldn't match up and it wouldn't validate. Developers have been doing this for years, they've been signing code and programs that they write so when they create a piece of software they wanna make sure that there's no viruses that are malware so people will have to have a digital signature sometimes. But people have found other uses for this, they found other ways that they could take this mechanism and apply it to other uses. One of the other things that a lot of people do is they sign other people's public keys. And this is a way because, so let's say I have a public key and Rick has, let's say I was a public key, but how do I know that's really his public key? I don't know if this really belongs to him so one of the things we could do is meet in person and I could sign it so that we other people would know hey, I vouch for this person. And this used to be real popular in a lot of these crypto, kind of, crypto nerd communities and people would have these parties, key signing parties, not to be confused with a key party. This is just weird, but I'd really like to see the person that showed up to the long party on that one and I wouldn't get there. The cryptographic key of how they did that. So anyways, so what this all leads to is this ingenious piece of software that was created in about 2008, 2009. And essentially what started this was a lot of really interesting, apocryphal sometimes, stories about how it was created. A person had written a white paper, essentially a research paper just proposing this idea and explaining how a system like Bitcoin would work. A bunch of developers got together, created this system and what's brilliant about it is it's sort of, it's decentralized, it runs itself. It's on millions of computers all around the world and there's no entity that runs it, it just kind of exists. And so it's really interesting at how it works and it uses two central technologies, it uses encryption and it uses something called peer-to-peer technology to really, to operate. And essentially if you think about anything that's online, how do you really know like music, digital music could be copied, anything could be copied and duplicated, piracy is a big issue. So how could money, how could something tangible ever exist online and how could you know that somebody who ever had some kind of e-cache, some kind of digital cache, could double spend it and could spend it again and again and copy it. How could you create something that exists and that you know it exists once and then once you spend it you don't have it anymore. You basically don't own it anymore because you've transferred it to someone else. Well, through those two technologies it was really born out of a way to sort of eliminate these guys because right now if you wanted to transfer money, let's say, cache is great, crash works, right? I want to buy something, I hand someone a $20 bill, they give me some kind of merchandise for that. If you want to do that online, you're always going to be relying on some kind of third party to facilitate that transaction. And basically what they do is like it's like IOUs, right? You use PayPal, you use some kind of Western Union and these entities, they charge fees for these things. They also demand a lot of private information, you know, Western Union, they want your social security number and things like that. And so this is sort of what the community around Bitcoin is really interested in. It's kind of a very libertarian community because they really want to sort of create a system of e-cache in a way to transfer currency and services to other people around the world. Well, how do I rely on a third party? You can just do it directly. And it was pretty much worth nothing, you know, pennies for most of the early life of Bitcoin. And then suddenly around 2011, a lot of more people started taking it more seriously. It was a day in 2011 where it hit $32 of Bitcoin and people were just astounded that it could ever be worth that much physical cash debt because the thing about Bitcoin is there's only a finite amount that could ever exist in the system. Right now there's about, I think 12 million Bitcoins in existence. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins ever minted. And the way the software is written and there'll never be more than that. And so it's a scarcity. And so there's people that want this. They want it for various reasons. Some people are investors and they think it's good that prices can go up. There's other people wanting it to spend. A lot of developing world wants it because it's a great way to get around a lot of money transfers, Western Union fees, things like that. They're growing in a lot of developing countries. And so throughout 2012, and all of a sudden there was this huge spike right in the beginning of 2013 where it hit $200. And then late last year it just shot up because of some different things going on all the way up to $1,300. It's around about $500. So if you wanted a Bitcoin right now, you would have to pay about $500 to obtain one. And this is what you're buying essentially is just digital code. You're buying a number essentially. That's all you would get this little secret number. And if anybody else figured out that number, they could theoretically steal it. They could take it from you. And so there's this crony little story that this guy, in the early days of Bitcoin, bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin back when it was with pennies. And that pizza today would be worth $7 million. So every on March or May 22nd, they celebrate this pizza. People in the Bitcoin community buy a pizza every March 22nd. They buy big pizzas with Bitcoin. Celebrate this interesting story of this person who he'd written about it because he thought, I want to buy something with Bitcoin. And back then it was just equivalent of pennies. Today, Overstop.com accepts a new link. You can ditch network now, accepts payments in Bitcoin. You can pay your cable or satellite bill. Expedit, you can buy travel. Cheap air, you can buy air flights. Cheap air will take it as flights. We're going to have flowers, which a lot of people thought was interesting because it's, you know, you don't want to have credit card transaction to tip off your, so you have another. Tesla, of course, came on a must. So you wanted to be the first where you could basically buy a car. You know, he wanted to basically have the bragging rights. There's going to be a NCAA football bowl. Later this fall, the St. Petersburg Bitcoin Bowl, it's one of the vendors of Bitcoin is sponsoring that, paid a lot of money. They make POS systems for like brick and mortar establishments, like a business owner, you can buy this little thing and accept Bitcoin, your establishment. So, and I left off, I'm showing this to a colleague of mine. He left out Dell, Dell computers also accepts it now. And here's a map of places around the world, brick and mortar places that accept it. Interestingly, it's not that big here in the Bay Area. There's a few places in here. It's just like a ramen place and there's a cupcake place in the mission that takes Bitcoin, but it's not, it's really, it's bigger in a lot of other countries and a lot of other places. Ohio, there's some business, a group of business owners created something called Bitcoin Alley, where like all of these businesses along the street accept it. I had a trip ahead of you in Baltimore and I went to this bar called Bad Decisions, and things like that. It was good. And so that's a lot of fun. So the end user doesn't really need to know that much about encryption. You just download, there's an iPhone app, there's an Android app that you can just download and you can just buy some Bitcoin with real money with dollars and you can start just spending it if there's a place that accepts it. This is sort of what the physical manifestation of a Bitcoin looks like. And notice there's two keys, there's a public key and there's a private key and the way it works is if you want to accept, if you want to receive money, your public key could be public, you could post it on. Some people post it on their websites saying, hey, send me money, send me a tip. If you like what I wrote and some people in my forums will write down their public address, you might see this long string of numbers you may have seen below someone's signature on the forum. And that's a way just to tip me. It's a really big tipping thing because it's a real quick way to send something 25 cents or 50 cents. US equivalent of Bitcoin. This address right here is worth $298 million. If you somehow could figure out the private key to this address right here, I mean, think about all the bank heists, all the incredible things people have done over the years to steal money. And essentially there's a number out there worth a lot of money. And there's a whole bunch of addresses, mostly from people in the early days of Bitcoin that amassed tens of thousands of Bitcoins that are now worth many, many, many millions of dollars and other entities as gambling rings, things like that. Bitcoin has gotten real big, especially in a lot of illicit ways. Think about it because of the sort of pseudo-anonymous way that you can transfer money really quickly around the world. So it's used in a lot of other ways as well. So let's say Bob wants to send Alice a Bitcoin. So basically what he's gonna do is he's gonna have a piece of Bitcoin software you usually call it a wallet. So Bitcoin's a wallet, you can download it from App, PC, smartphones, whatever. He's gonna use this private key and Alice's public key and he's gonna transfer some form of money like one Bitcoin, let's say, really. Those are some of the money. And it's gonna be recorded, it's gonna be broadcast to the Bitcoin network, which is a public network. This right here is not live live, but this was live when I recorded it. And essentially you can see all the Bitcoin transactions in real time. So you can see all the addresses of anybody who's sending anybody else Bitcoins around the world. So it's pseudo-anonymous is what they call it because we don't know who owns these addresses. But we can look them up, we can see how much they're worth, we can see every transaction. That's what keeps the system honest in a ways because it's all public, it's like a copy of the public ledger of Bitcoin is kept on computers all over the world, on millions of computers. And so why would anybody run this Bitcoin software on their computer, just let it sit there? Well, it turns out that's how new Bitcoins are minted. In fact, they call it a process called mining. So you set up your computer, you run a program, just let it sit there, it does nothing, just sits there. And essentially it earns money, it earns Bitcoins for you. And so they've incentivized the process of just keeping the network going. This is what a miner used to look like. I had a miner similar to this about a year ago. And it used to be just this little thing, you can sit there and it just like mine some Bitcoin and it get real hot, so you'd have to roll down on it. Nowadays, because it's been in this gold rush, basically these are just, it's not even worth the electricity to run something like this anymore. Because this is what Bitcoin mining looks like now. There's huge warehouses, big one, there's a news report, this gentleman had, they've done a news report on him in Washington, apparently in Washington, electricity is really cheap. He was boasting how he makes $7 million a month, basically just essentially processing these transactions. And really what it's doing is it's processing the transaction. It's an interesting, and the main innovation with Bitcoin is something called the blockchain. This is the underlying, and that's real. It's real complex, and unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to go into all of the very specifics but essentially what's happening is all of these miners are, it's kind of a game, it's like a lottery system and they're forming these transactions into these blocks, these segments of transactions. So about every 10 minutes or so a block is formed, which basically this block has 300 transactions that were made at this period of time. And they kind of fight over it and it just, this kind of, this tree that just starts to form, maybe some other miners create a block up there and this guy creates a block over here and then it turns out that the longest branch always wins out, so once you get to block five, it turns out it wins off and so this branch of the block gets pulled into the original. I wish there was some way to visualize, I couldn't find a great animation that really explained it, but it's a fascinating way of basically kind of like a tug-of-war of all of these different computers sort of agreeing. It's kind of a trust through consensus because there's so many computers, it's really hard to gain the system. You want to gain the system and create some Bitcoin out of thin air or double spend a Bitcoin, it's really hard to do because you'd have to hack millions of computers around the world and it just, it would be nearly impossible to do so it's this great, the system that created this sense of trust and it's certainly a leap in terms of computer science and the different problems that it solves. There's a lot of people talking about, wow, they did this with currency, what else could they do this with? I don't know what the future of Bitcoin itself is gonna be but I do believe that this technology has really gotten a lot of people's attention and so people are talking about all sorts of ways that you could sort of prove through encryption and through something like a blockchain, all sorts of different aspects of life on the digital world. So things, they work great in physical form. A lot of the stuff, what's wrong with birth and death certificates, it's fine, it works. Well, what if, when you digitize stuff, how do you know something that's digitized and really is what it is? Anybody can go in and just change it, hack the system, any of this stuff, once it's in none, ones and zeros, it's kind of susceptible, it sits. And so a technology like the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to essentially validate this and because it's through consensus, through it's because it's in millions of computers, it could be once a block in the blockchain is accepted and verified, it's impermanent and they call it permanent and it's impossible to change. And so this idea that you could use a lot of things on patents or copyrights or vote in my luck, there's people have written, a lot of grad students have written some papers on voting and how we can really change the voting system to create it so it's verifiable so that people can validate it, can check it, it can stay sort of private. So in that way, it could be in a digital form where it can't be changed, so it's like this digital equivalent of really on paper. So anyhow, I guess that's it. This is a t-shirt that somebody's selling. I thought it would be a good closer. So I was talking to Rick, Rick said you should do something fun. So I didn't know if anybody has questions, I actually, I printed out, so I just like some Bitcoin paper while it's each of these is worth 0.002 bitcoins which is about one US dollar today. Could be worth double that or half that, who knows. So it's interesting, there's the public address and then there's a little temper proof sticker here to hide the private addresses so you basically download this operating phone, feel like you can scan it in and there's instructions on the back. So I don't know, I should like hand it out to people who ask questions, I don't know. So, okay, any questions I can answer right now? So if you wanna buy Bitcoin, which actually, if you wanna be totally cash-free and anonymous, how do you, where do you go buy Bitcoin with cash? Yes, okay, so where do you buy Bitcoin? If you want to be completely anonymous, you wanna, and then you look on, search Bitcoin for graduates, that's interesting because a lot of people sell stuff now for Bitcoin, a lot of people like to buy because they don't like to give out your credit card number. The places, there's a website called LocalBitcoins which essentially, there's a lot of companies now that allow you to trade, the big one is Coinbase which is based in San Francisco and you can sign up a Coinbase account and you can connect your bank account but because of money laundering issues, everybody wants a lot of information from you and that scares a lot of people away initially because they wanna make sure that you're legit and that you're not laundering money. LocalBitcoins is just sort of like a meeting site that just hooks you up with somebody so that you can meet them in person and somebody's gonna just sell you something with cash and so you arrange a public place, a cafe and you'd go and you'd give them 20 bucks or $100 whatever you'd wanna buy and then they would send you Bitcoin and you'd check your phone and you'd wait until it's validated and then, okay, I got it, it's definitely, it's in the blockchain and there's no way they could ever take it back once they send it to you and it's been validated and you're all right, thank you and that's it and then now you have Bitcoin anonymously, nobody knows that you have this and you've got it from, I suppose and there's actually people who have done this, they've tried to see how much they can do completely anonymously and a lot of authorities, the FBI is really kind of into Bitcoin now because of all of the various reasons that they've done this and they've gotten very savvy because of the blockchain, you can trace back every Bitcoin transaction all the way back to the beginning so they're trying to create whole segments, whole divisions about Bitcoin and how they can learn about how to match people with specific addresses and trace back where the transactions have gone and so it's just kind of this race between the authorities and the people that are using these kinds of reasons. All right, you're all up, how much is this? All right, let's start over here and then we'll go ahead and look at that. So the taxes, how traditional companies tax evade with Bitcoin, taxes are interesting because the IRS realized very quickly people are becoming millionaires on this thing really overnight and so the IRS had to decide what they wanted to do with it. Everybody was hoping they'd treat it like a currency because if it's a currency, it's not that big a deal. IRS said no, they're treating it like property just like any else, just like if you bought a car and the car appreciated or some kind of device or like a token, a collectible. If you bought a collectible and it appreciated and you sold it and you made a ton of money on it then you'd have to pay taxes on it but the thing is when the IRS came down with this ruling saying we're gonna treat Bitcoin like a piece of property and you'd have to declare all your earnings when you transfer. So if you just have Bitcoin and you don't have to pay taxes but as soon as you convert it back to US dollars if you made money, you'd have to pay taxes on how much you made or lost but they don't really have a great system. They're just now getting a system in place of how they even, this is so new they have no idea how to audit it or authorize it or even how to note it, people are asking like how do I even write it down in my form? There's no form for this. And so they had to catch up on that. It's good it's about to be as well. Yeah, okay, there. So how does the time frame, are they looking for the point to be used for? Because I know that there is a lot of work done kind of on the right-hand of computing and math to create a separation of everything that's out there. And ultimately if one of the computing things like that get off the ground, then it's all in the system. Yeah, no, so one of the interesting things is, the question was this, cryptography will be broken eventually with quantum computers and won't all this be moved in a certain timeframe? Turns out in the white paper that the original, the gentleman who invented Bitcoin is the entity we don't really know, is Satoshi Nakamoto and addressed this issue and the cryptographic strength in Bitcoin is not quite quantum computer proof but basically made a system in place, put a proposal in place to upgrade it when that should happen. And so Bitcoins can be upgraded pretty quickly from its current bit size to one that is so long. So right now I said if you could somehow guess the private key of that one address you get $200 million, well it turns out that number of guesses you would have to make, there's so many guesses in it there's actually more guesses to figure out that private key of the Bitcoin than there are atoms in the universe and it's such a immense number. Every computer that could be working toward this problem would never solve it. But a quantum computer maybe, so when Yves figured out, he said, you know what, if we just doubled it, the cryptographic strength of this, it could be more, and there's a lot of debate around that but there's, people are thinking about this, that you know it's kind of a race, you know. People say well if the computers get stronger, so will the algorithms, and Edward Snowden, that was a big thing when he basically said that NSA, that's the one thing that protected you was cryptography, was encryption. That's the one thing that NSA really couldn't, NSA cracks everything else around encryption but the actual encryption itself is actually pretty sound. He says they'll just hack your computer and see if you're typing before you encrypt it or the person who's decrypting on the other end but he says the encryption itself, that's pretty sound and even the NSA is really afraid of encryption for that reason, so. Just make three more questions. Three more questions, why don't we do one over here. So most currency has some sort of innate value. Yes. That's how it's worth so much money but you can keep tied and watch your clothes. What is the innate value of it? What's the innate value of Bitcoin? This is a fascinating, in fact, Alan Greenspan, somebody asked him about that and he said that exact same thing, he said what is the, what does it give you? It's just that you're buying a number and that's true and I guess all currency is sort of what worth we associate with it and I think what they were able to accomplish with Bitcoin was to create something that was unique enough and trustworthy enough that people could associate something. A digital song that you could just share around and that's not really worth too much, that the Napster has proved that and other services since then is that it's just so easy to get, why would you pay money other than just being very honest and pay money for it? But Bitcoin was, they were able to accomplish a way to create something unique in a digital form that you could actually pay money and feel like I have this and other people cannot get to this without physically seeing the numbers, you know what I mean? But there is a, yeah, so it's just whatever we associate with it, just like a dollar, like a fiat currency, what makes a $20, it's not worth the paper it's printed on, I mean, it is, but it's not, it's just a piece of, intrinsic value is just a piece of paper, so, yeah. Right here? I'd like to say your public deed, and most of the value is the same public deed, I don't know what your intention is to do, is tracking everybody's public deed and tracking it. So, if everybody can see every transaction and you see your public key, what's to prevent someone like NSA just tracking everything, in fact, there's websites that already do that that track every transaction, the problem is there's so many millions of transactions and there are people, there's like already devices in play where people do these things called tumblers where they'll send them to intermediate addresses and other addresses and other addresses and they'll just try to mix coins, they'll take one bitcoin, because big coins can be split to trillions of a bitcoin, by six zeros and you can just split it and then recombine it and so there's ways to sort of fool the system and you would ultimately need a human to figure out, so there's some ways around that, but you're right, I mean, the whole system works because it's very transparent and so it's what they call pseudo-anonymous, it's not designed to be 100% anonymous. Last question. So I'm just curious, what's to prevent someone from shorting the system by overloading the network? That's, oh, overloading the network, interesting. If I set up two accounts and did like five million super complex transactions, you know, and then shorted the currency in the same time, what about that? So the question was, could you short the currency and overload the network and make, in fact, a lot of people suspect things like that have already gone on because you see these little flash crashes all the time, you can see, you know, there's exchanges, Bitcoin is actually on the Bloomberg terminal, you can actually see it, it's along with all the other, you know, New York Stock Exchange and everything, and you can see the buy orders, like if you go to these specific exchanges, like Coinbase and San Francisco or others, you can see the buy orders and sometimes there was one where somebody accidentally put in a really, you know, high buy order and it was just shot up and you can tell, like, people were trying to make a quick block on that by buying and selling Bitcoin and that probably happens a lot. The network overloading the network is hard to do. I'm sure people have tried it. Everybody, I mean, this system has been really, like, put to the test. So many hackers, really smart people have tried to hack it and they have succeeded several times in the early days of Bitcoin. They've hacked it and they've destroyed it and they've had to fix it and that's a big concern. And one of the things that I think Bitcoin is an issue with it is, I sound like I'm an evangelist but I'm very, I'm very, I don't think anybody here should really invest more than they can afford to lose because one of the things is it's grown a little quick, pretty quickly recently and so it's going more quickly than it probably should have and one of the lead developers of the software, he often says, you know, I get scared even touching the code now because so that there's like a market cap of $7 billion and huge corporations now that depend on this currency if they, like, screw it up through like a version update. You know, that means a lot of really major issues and so the things in the early days when somebody found an exploiter hacked it, you know, they were able to fix it and that wasn't that much damage. Nowadays, a lot of things can happen when they find issues with it and it's been very challenging for like the last year and a lot of people have tried, this is like a favorite tool like computer science grad students, they love to try to prove that you could double-spend it and you could try to hack the system and so, you know, as an experiment, people will try to hack it every way possible. So. Thank you. Thanks again to Jeremy. Jeremy will be in theater two answering questions for more of our Bitcoins, I assume. Bitcoins encryption. Yeah, so if you have additional questions, you can head over there. If you don't, you can head over to the librarians table right there, get a library card, get a reading list, sign up on our email list, whatever. We're gonna have like a 15 minute break. The next talk on cosmology requires a little bit of setup, so see you then. So there are very many ways I could introduce the next talk. First of all, we had to talk on Bitcoin, so there are a number of like inflation jokes I could make, but Roger and I went to school together and so that opens up a whole new realm of territory that we've been warned against getting too graphic and showing like injuries, so I could show like embarrassing pictures of Roger drinking, but there are just embarrassing pictures of me not drinking, so that's no good. Roger's not gonna talk to you about the detectors he actually makes, even though they're awesome, so I thought about talking to you about that, but I wanted to sort of climb it up a bit, internet style, and so I'm gonna talk to you about the South Pole. I didn't know which South Pole to talk to you about. I could talk to you about the South Pole that one of Roger's experiments is at, so that's by step two, and that's quite close to the true geographic South Pole, which actually shifts a lot, so they have to pay machinists to redesign this each year and replace it, and there is in fact like a nice actual pole, you'll notice a lack of like Santa hat. You'll also notice that he's actually wearing clothes. Thank God, apparently it's a tradition to go hot-tubbing women, go here, completely naked, and that's a bad idea. I could talk to you about the magnetic South Pole, but I'd have to show you pictures of penguins, like Marsha the penguins, because right now it's actually in the Antarctic ocean, well away from the geographic South Pole. So instead, I'll show you something that's kind of cool, which is like the point furthest away from any of the Antarctic sea. So it's out in the middle of nowhere, and out in the middle of the nowhere, they have a bust of the Stalin line, I don't know. And with that, here's Roger. Thanks to the intro, and for the invitation to speak. In case you missed it, I'm Roger O'Brien from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory down at Caltech, and I'll be speaking on behalf of the BICEP-2 team this evening. This is a photograph of BICEP-2 here. It should come to no surprise, given the name, that it's actually an upgrade to the original BICEP telescope. Both of them look in the same location, about a mile north of the geographic South Pole, which is around there in this photo. Our team has used these instruments and others to format the cosmic microwave background, and back in March, our team made a very bold announcement, which that within our maps, we had found evidence of gravitational waves likely produced during the Big Dang itself. So if you're a physicist, you'll agree that this is indeed a bold claim, whereas everyone else might be wondering what the hell are we talking about? In particular, you may want to know what's this cosmic microwave background I speak of? What's a gravitational wave and how did the Big Bang make them? Specifically, did we see in our maps, why Antarctica isn't it cold and hard to get to? And lastly, you might be wondering or thinking this all sounds outlandish, is it possible we just messed the whole thing up? So starting with the first of these, what's the microwave background? In brief, this is light that's left over from the Big Bang, but context is important here, and I'll remind you that one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science was the realization that our universe is expanding, the space between the galaxies is stretching, thus carrying them apart. And it's popular to analyze this, the surface of an inflating balloon, these purple spots here represent galaxies, and indeed they're carried apart by the stretching space between. It's, we know that something like this has got to be going on because we can compare the light from the distant galaxies to that in our own. And things look similar, except the light from the distant galaxies are longer in wavelength, even though likely they're emitted with similar properties. But that makes sense too, because after all, the light from the distant galaxies must traverse the stretching space and has this wavelength stretched out little by little becoming redder and redder over time. But if you take seriously this idea of an evolving dynamic universe, it begs the question, what did it look like early on? If you had a video of our universe and you wound it backwards, what would you see, or what would happen if you let the air out of this metaphorical balloon? And the answer, of course, is that the galaxies would converge back together, matter would get denser and denser, this light would get shorter and shorter in wavelength, bluer and bluer and thus hotter and hotter. This is the sort of extrapolation scientists once went through to begin speculating our universe would be gone in a hot, early, dense stator, or a hot, big bang. If you were looking at it right after the big bang, 14 billion years ago, the universe would have looked completely alien. And you wouldn't have even found atoms, it would have been so damn hot, it would have been nothing but ionized matter. Protons and electrons held ionized by this very hot light. But even back then, the universe was expanding, stretching out the wavelength and cooling that light little by little. And this 400,000 year point was a note because that's when things were finally cool enough for atoms to form for the very first time. And when they did, the light that had been ricocheting about and holding matter ionized, it was abruptly released and could finally move freely in a straight line that began sailing across the universe, we can still see in our telescopes 14 billion years later. And you might wonder, how do you see something 14 billion years after the fact? And the answer is that it's come from very far away, it takes time for it to get here. It's sort of like when you look at the sun, you're seeing it not as it is right now, but as it was eight minutes ago when the light was released. Or when you look at Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, that's four or eight years away, that's the image is four years old. So as you look through a telescope, further and further away, you're effectively looking further and further backwards in time. But there's a limit to how far you can see because after all the universe is finite in age, it's 14 billion years old. You can't even see all of that at the very beginning because the universe was built with this hot ionized matter that scatters light pretty effectively. You wanna switch over to the... So you can look across the room here and you can... Woo! You got a gun? You wanna cross the room here and you can see this tank of water that I brought. You can even see sort of through the tank of water here. It's basically transparent to light. It goes in a straight line. So it's a pretty good analogy to the modern universe, but the early universe would make more sense if we pour some milk in here and then we stir the thing up and it gets kinda cloudy, right? So you can't see through it so easily anymore. You can see just fine looking across the room up to it, but up to here, you can't see much anymore because most of the light you're seeing is actually scattering off of this front surface. And we call this the surface of last scattering, right? But the difference between this analogy and practice is that the actual surface of last scattering surrounds us on all sides. We stand at the center of a sphere. That's our observable universe and the light from the scattering surface has endured 14 billion years of expansion. It has this wavelength stretch all the way out into the microwave range, hence the name cosmic microwave background in the business. This color you want. Nope. We're going to miss. Okay. All right, so this light is very damn, it's about three degrees above absolute zero, but very uniform at temperature up to 10 parts per million. So if you had a map of the entire sky full of flat, it would look like this pretty featureless. So in fact, the classic question in cosmology is, why is this so uniform? Right, how is it that opposite sides of the observable universe know to be the same temperature when the light from them is just not reaching here at the midway point, right? They never should have been in contact. All right, so the answer to this riddle is actually related to where the gravitational waves come from. We think the universe went through a bit of a growth spurt at the beginning, a rapid period of expansion that we call inflation. It's the bang behind the big bang. And if you look up on Wikipedia, you'll find this really goofy cartoon. So this apparently is supposed to be raising red while it rises shown to double this dimensions over the course of a second, which I think would scare the living shit out of these shafts, but that happened. That's actually an understatement of what we think happened early on. We think in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, that distance scale should have increased by at least 27 orders of magnitude. And this means that adjacent regions of space would have been pulled apart at speeds far in excess of light. So in principle, you could have had a small volume before the event that came to the same temperature and then I got blown up to something bigger than we can currently see. That's our folklore for why the microwave background is so uniform. It also explains where the galaxies may have come from because a different way of spacing is stretches like this. This is a gravitational well. Matter can fall into these dimples to form things like stars and galaxies. On a very microscopic and fine scale, we think that you should be able to pop it into an out of existence. We call these quantum fluctuations. And conceptually, it might look like this. Bumps and wiggles very rapidly coming into out of existence but they're very faint. So faint you have no chance in hell of seeing in a laboratory setting. It's likely going on the room right now. You wouldn't know it. But that's why inflation is so cool because when it kicks in on the early universe, it stretches these out to cosmic scales and freezes them into place as we're showing here. After they're frozen, matter can fall in and form solid under dense regions. And in the early ionized universe, slightly hot and cold regions. Most importantly, this is going on across the surface of last scattering. So if you do what the Planck satellite did recently, it's a space-borne satellite that's doing measurements of a sort. If you subtract away the average temperature, but they've done it many before them, then you would see these tens of micro-calvin variations about that average. These spots will one day go on to form things like stars and galaxies. And in many ways, this is a baby photo of our universe. For the universe, an 80-year-old man or woman, this would have been taken in the first few hours of its life. Now, a different way that it's facing is stretches like this. This is a gravitational wave coming out of the screen towards you guys. It stretches on one direction and then a little later on the other, back and forth. You'd see this in practice if you had a ring of masses. As it comes through, these are really just traces long from the ride, but they get squeezed in one direction and then back in the other. So there's only some evidence that these things may exist, although our result is one piece of that evidence. These also get amplified from quantum to cosmic scales by inflation. So why do we think we've seen these things? And the answer is that we are less interested in the intensity of those spots in that map or our version and rather more in the polarization. That is, we wanted to know at each point in the sky whether the electric fields, when at light, were going, say, up and down or perhaps left and right. These are distinct states of light, but ones that the human eye has not evolved to see. But fortunately, we can build tools to see these things and put that race reflect and respond. Okay, so this is a polarizing grid. It has little microscopic wires. So if I put it in this orientation, it's letting through horizontally polarized light. And now if I take another one of these and I put in the vertical direction, it's gonna block everything but vertical and, of course, together, it looks dark because we're bucking out both states. And if I rotate this then this way, you can see light getting through because now they're both horizontal. You get some through. So you can see as I go back and forth here, this is a very real effect, albeit one that we can't see on our own. But this is a meaningful thing for us to study on the sky because those spots you saw on the map were actually sand waves rushing through the early ionized universe. One's triggered by those gravitational wells for inflation. Now it's complicated if you have many different waves rushing across the sky, but again, just one direction and wavelength is simple. So this is going from left to right. It has alternating high and low pressure planes here and in the early ionized universe, hot and cold. And if you consider an electron right at the surface, the last scattering is just about to get sucked into an atom. Before it does, it sees intense light coming in from above and below the dim from left and right. Therefore, it gets shaken more in one direction than the other. And so it's going to scatter light towards us that's polarized or partially borne as it is. We can simulate this in the tank here by turning on the satellites. Does that come up? Looks nice in person. Man, okay, well, anyway. So this bright spot in the center, that's going to be difficult to see from the back of the room, is meant to represent one of the intense planes in the sound wave. And if I didn't take the grid and put it in front, as I rotate this back and forth, you can see it goes from dim to bright. Isn't that even evident? Uh... Which is demonstrating, sir? Right to the left. Yeah, right to the left, right. We should just go back to the videos I talked about. So this is showing that it's partially polarized, but most importantly, it's going to be polarized parallel or perpendicular to the left-right direction, the wave would have been going. And if you were to look at that through a mirror, that would be unchanged. It doesn't change when you look at it through a mirror. We call this even symmetry. And the point is that the sound waves only know how to produce those sort of patterns on the sky. Oh, okay. And if you have anything rushing across the sky, they're going to reflect that underlying property. They're going to produce character at the circular and asterisk looking patterns here. And I stress this point because the gravitation waves also get in the act. They stress and impress space. But if it's filled with ionized matter, then it's going to heat and cool as I'm not showing on a power scale here. And if you put, or if you have an electron right in the middle, it's therefore going to see hot and cold in opposite directions. So it's just like the sound wave before. It gets shaken one way than the other. And so it's going to send always light towards you. The difference here between this and the sound wave is you could there all have these going along these diagonal directions. And so if you had a bunch of these living across the sky, you get a more complicated set of polarization patterns. So if we go back to the tank here, and I turn on this satellite system, just right here, turn off this, right? So now here, this is representing, this is representing essentially a compressed space on some diagonal axis. And so as the latest going from left to right, then you would see essentially dim along a diagonal and then bright along the other diagonal. So bright and then dim. Right, the point here is that if you look at this through a mirror now, right? This would have then flipped to the other diagonal. In other words, it looks dark here, but if you imagine flipping this thing, it will go dark in the other way. We call that odd symmetry when it goes back and forth between two different alternatives, when we flip back. Right, so what you might have seen if it's going from left to right is hot and cold on opposite axes. And so therefore the electron got shaken to some diagonal direction, right? But the point is when you look at through a mirror, it goes to the other diagonal. And when you have many of these ways rushing across the sky, then you wind up having characteristic patterns here that look like pinwheels, right? They reflect that odd symmetry. The one on the left when mirror becomes the one on the right, and vice versa. So this is the telltale sign of a gravitational wave here. And so we call these B modes, whereas these even symmetry E modes should trace the gravitational wells from inflation. These themselves look unchanged when you look at them through a mirror, right? So I want you to memorize these shapes. We're going to look from our maps in a second. They're going to, it's not going to be too hard. We're going to play a game of Where's Waldo. But one thing you need to know in addition here is how large these features are on the sky. And the answer is about two degrees, which is humongous, right? The full moon is like a half degree on the sky. So many idiot can see the full moon. You don't know how resolving power to see this, but you do need sensitivity because you're looking for something very dim. You're looking for an excess of one photon in one direction versus the other for every 50 million that enter the camera, right? So that's the strategy here, sensitivity of a resolution. This is the team. That's been a privilege working with this gang. I've never witnessed so many really smart people working with such intensity and focused towards one really awesome goal. It's been one of the greatest thrills in my life to play a role in this process. Now, BICIP2 mapped the sky for three years without a tire, whereas Peck Array here has five copies of BICIP2. It's plugging away as we speak. When people hear the name Peck, they often think of a telescope out in Hawaii. We chose a less hospitable location about a mile more of the geographic South Pole, right? So why an article? Isn't it cold and hard to get to? And I asked these rhetorical questions not to complain. This used to be more difficult. So in the battle days, you would sail down there on one of these wooden boats and perhaps it would get caught in the ice and crushed, leaving you stranded for years. This happened to Shackleton in this man. This is the Atmoset here. He was the first to get to the South Pole. He got there by sled and dog across the continent. He beat this long crew of Englishmen here by a couple of months. They infamously chose to use ponies instead of dogs. They all died on the way back out. So this used to be more difficult right now. Now we fly. We have it easy. It's a long flight to Australia, but it beats sailing. We connect there, typically, to a flight into New Zealand to Christchurch, where this coach waits to whisk us away. This is run by the US National Guard. It's pretty rough and ready. So you sit on these nets for hours as you fly south from Christchurch to McBurdo, which is on the coast of Antarctica. This is the largest base in the continent. It's really just a layover for us. You switch to another flight. You then fly across the trans-dark mountains here into the South Pole. So it looks like this when you're flying in flat. The feature looks pretty boring. Here's a different vantage point on the ground. This is the Keck Array Telescope. You're looking south. This is the base where one sleeps about a half mile off. That's immediately adjacent to the South Pole. If you turn around and look north, you would see this. This is the Dark Sector Laboratory. It's housed bicep two for three years, and will soon house bicep three. This is South Pole Telescope, and I don't think people from up at UC Berkeley work on this thing, but it's optimized for a different set of measurements. This is one of the best places in the world to do the science. There is superb infrastructural support from the NSS Office of Warburgings. There is, it's one of the driest places on the planet. Technically, this is a high desert. You're standing on two miles of ice here. That's how thick the ice cap is. That's what's melting into our oceans now. And it's so damn cold there that what a water persists just freezes out of the air. It's very dry, which is important because our water can absorb and breathe in microwaves. That's how your microwave absorbs. The last help went after the sun rises once a year and then sets once a year, six months apart. It's either very still and stable atmosphere to peer through. It's not being churned up by daily rising and setting in the sun. Now, the downside of that, of course, is once the sun sets, it becomes stupid cold there. Last week, it was negative 90 Fahrenheit. And I know this because some Yeh-Hoo did his ice bucket challenge down there. Oh. Oh. And so it's too cold to land planes. So there's a truck that's sold through a maroon there for eight months at a time, maintaining these sort of instruments. They do get to enjoy nice skies like this, though. So on an hourly basis, the sky does this. This is the moon, actually, a long exposure time during the winter. It's moving parallel to the horizon. Whereas up here, we go perpendicular, right? This is important because the field we map on about 1% of the sky, just goes in a circle overhead. And ever since, it's above the horizon 24-7, 365 days a year. So we never have to stop mapping. We can engage what we refer to as relentless observing. These are the five cameras having at it. Each of these slews here takes about a minute, since it's sped up. It takes over a day to map out our field, but once done, we just do it again, over and over and over again for years. We average these maps together to average down the noise and look for signals beneath. So this thing isn't too large. Here are some people for reference and for scale, right? So if you had Superman vision, you could see inside this thing, and you'd see cameras like this about the size of the person, just enough to get the job done, without going overboard. And they contain a pair of lenses that image the sky and enjoy focal plane that we stuff full of sensors. They're basically thermal sensors. We're looking at thermal radiation. We put the whole thing inside of a cryostat. It's a glorified thermos. We want to chill the optics down so they're not glowing in front of thermal sensors. So here are the detectors, the sensors. They look like this. We make them in-house at JPL. Each pixel contains an antenna that routes the two polarizations to two separate superconducting detectors that look like this. This thing is pretty large. It's about a centimeter on a side, the size of your thumb. So you only get a few hundred for focal plane. That pales compared to your modern digital camera with a megapixel array. But then again, the wavelength that we're looking at is several thousand times longer. So this actually works out to be pretty good. It's difficult to make a camera that's more sensitive than this. And we have five or six of them on the ground. Nonetheless, it takes years to make a map that looks like this. This is the 1% of the sky that we observed. Each of these lines here is telling you the direction of dominant polarization whereas the length tells you the excess power in one direction versus the other. And you can just see by eye that it's dominated by circles and by asterisks patterns. In other words, what I was describing earlier as the emote pattern. In fact, if I filter this for nothing but E, it looks almost unchanged. So that's E. I'll go back and forth here. Total and E. You can see subtle changes. And what that means of course is that the B power is subtle compared to that. But we can just change the length scale and now you see this pinwheel pattern popping out of you. I'll stress that this is fairly uniform across the field. There's appetization around the edge that's a result of how we make our maps. That's not physical. It's very as if this sort of degree scale here and what you'd expect from inflation. And lastly, this is not just noise. It's above the noise floor of the camera. Here are the two side by side. You got E above and B below on different color scales, mind you. The key signature stress has been seen before by other teams, albeit not of this high fidelity, but there's a general agreement that this comes from the gravitational wells from inflation via those sound waves. What's new here is the B mode map. No one's ever made a map quite like this before. So I don't know if you and the audience were also at Caltech and you'll be amused to know that the Mark Pan and Kasky there around the time we were there was anticipating that such a signal might exist. Other people worked too. And people are trying to make it ever since. And interpreted cosmologically, this should trace the gravitational well, sorry, waves from inflation. In fact, you can even see the ratio on the power between them, right, by the color scale, so it was like a five to one ratio. And once you've established that ratio, you can calculate how hot the universe was when it inflated. And the answer is damn hot, 100,000 trillion degrees, which is similar to what's known as the Grand Unification Temperature. The four fundamental forces here only appear different because we live in a cold universe, three colors on average. But the idea is that if you witnessed the universe at temperatures that prevailed right after the Big Bang, they would have looked like different aspects of the same thing. And those accelerated experiments that you occasionally hear about, they have demonstrated that the middle two here, the weak force in red that triggers radioactive decay and the electromagnetic force in blue, where they act identically at temperatures 100 billion times hotter than we experience on a daily basis. The discovery of the Higgs boson was the last piece of that puzzle. We like to think that our measure may someday prove to be the first piece of the next, which is the relationship between these middle two and the strong force that binds the atomic nuclei together. It certainly calls for great wonder that inflation appears to have occurred similar temperatures. Inflation also predicts a multiverse. That is, the inflation fields themselves undergo these quantum fluctuations. So maybe in some distant part of the universe that we can't see too far away, maybe it fluctuated so far upwards that it continues to inflate today. Perhaps other reasons have fluctuated downward a minute early. So these different multiverses would have radically different properties. This is unsettling to some people philosophically. Apparently, there are worries that a theory that predicts everything, therefore predicts nothing. And it's inspired competing models such as this cyclic and parodic model, championed by this handsome double here, Paul Steinhardt out of Princeton. And his thinking is that our universe undergoes trillion years of expansion and then re-collapsed into a big crunch. And his goal was to explain the early conditions of our cycle with physics that may be driving more exotic cosmological behavior today. And the common explanation occurs through the magic of string theory. This is a string-inspired model. Now I'm not a string theorist, so I can't explain this to you. We don't have Paul Steinhardt here to explain it to us. But I did find the next best thing was Paul Steinhardt on YouTube. You know, it's a new concept. It's really exciting. And you actually made a lot of universe. Have you heard about this? You can't say it again. It's very difficult to say. It's a pure robotic universe. Wow. That's the main thing you're reading. Well, the model we have now, Conan, is based on the idea that our big-bang universe was created in the collision of two three-dimensional worlds moving along a hidden extra dimension. But conceptually, it's like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. There is no inflation or rapid change happening at all. The approach to collision takes place very slowly. Over an extremely long period of time, it's quite fascinating that the rapid change and very slow change can produce nearly the same effects. The difference results in one distinctive observational prediction. The inflationary cosmology predicts a spectrum of gravitational waves that may be detectable in the cosmic way forward in the background. The erotic model, however, predicts no gravitational waves effects should be observable in the cosmic microwave background. And I'm just so relieved by this. It's difficult for years. Through their heads, but they don't listen to me, you know? They call me Matt. You should check out the full video on YouTube. Stephen Hawking calls it in compliments, Jim Carrey. I mean, his genius performance. You might have missed it while they were yucking it up. The crucial point here is that Steinhardt had gone out of his way to make a model that avoids multiverse, but it involves gradual changes. And that has no mechanism to produce the sort of gravitational waves that we may have observed with bicep 2. So if this result holds up, it puts serious pressure on that model. It lets us say truly fundamental and profound things about the nature of our universe. And it lets us speculate that it's ultimate fate. Will it expand forever? Will it re-collapse into the fire? So it was forged in. That's what I meant by bold claims when I started out. It's sufficiently bold that... We will public... It hit the top of the New York Times. Of course, anyone who's known this sort of attention before can tell you this can turn against you. And two months later, you can enjoy gems like this. Backlash to Big Bang Discovery, Gatter's Theme. This is his cast-down of landmark experiments claimed to observe gravity waves from the Big Bang. So thanks to the question that we just messed this one up. And the concern that's been voiced is that our galaxy itself kind of polarized microwaves. And in particular, dust can heat up and glow in such a fashion. Perhaps that's all we saw. And in principle, you can tell these things apart by mapping the sky in different colors because they have different spectra. And so, in principle, you can tease them apart. It's certainly how your mirror can tell the difference between a trumpet and a flute playing the same note. They have different spectra. The dirty secret behind Bicep 2 was a monochromatic camera just observing at 150 gigahertz. That's where the microwave background is the brightest. So on its own, it's difficult to tell these things apart. And we've had to rely on outside data sets. Now, the original data, the legacy data from Bicep 1 had some sensitivity at 100 gigahertz. And that suggests that what we saw was indeed cosmic, but it's not definitive. The signal-to-noise was only so-so map. So the outside data we have relied upon comes from the Planck satellite team. So this is a map they put out in May at 350 gigahertz. So it's a higher frequency where dust is brighter than CMV. And you can see from this fingerprint pattern on here that it's indeed a polarization map. Conspicuous here, though, is its absence in the southern and northern polar regions. The signal-to-noise is very low in those proportions. And they're dogged by very systematic challenges. Guess where our field is? It was right there. So it's difficult from this data on its own to say a whole lot about what we've seen. That hasn't stopped some people from taking preliminary releases and speculating that maybe it was all dust. But really, the only way to make progress is to correlate our maps with theirs. That's going on as we speak. Actually, we're collaborating. So we'll know very soon whether there's something to these maps. We're not holding our breath, though. This is serious heat. This is bicep rain. This is equivalent to five bicep trees. They're all 100 gigahertz. So that will provide a second-color follow-up. We're going to take the five cat cameras. Two of them actually have been observing for the past six months at 100 gigahertz. And we're already three to four times snow more than four times deeper than the original bicep one maps at that color. We're going to replace two more with cameras that are going to be sensitive to 270 gigahertz. Let's stay tuned to see how this shakes out. I can't tell you now. I simply want to leave you with this image here. This is a slide that our late leader, Professor Andrew Lang, down at Caltech used to show in his slides. And I think for many of us, it reflects our sense of excitement and adventure that we feel towards our field. And it actually, very accurately, albeit poetically, depicts what we do. We literally look beyond the stars to understand the inner workings of our universe. But the difference, as Andrew was noted, in the countryside of France, this is occurring at the edge of the world, at the South Pole. Thank you very much. Do I? Any questions? What's up? What's up? Would they cook a hot pocket? Pretty damn slowly. Three Kelvin. How do you distinguish between the French and the Asian? Well, the question was, how do you know that you're looking at the edge of the observable universe when you're looking at the microwave background? And the answer is that there's a number of properties that the model predicts that you would expect to see in the data and indeed the data is consistent with that. It's a three Kelvin background. And it has this uniformity across the sky as you might expect from inflation. So there's a number of benchmarks that we're checking against the theories. We go through there, with all the data. So I'm starting to think of the splits that are specific to that. But that's, ultimately, it is that when we do the analysis, there's many things I didn't share here because 25 minutes is a much time. But there's a number of things that we are comparing against what you expect from other data sets and from the existing models. And indeed they check out, and of course, if they didn't, there would be a bigger deal than perhaps even this. They come from the fact that the space itself is sort of teaming with these vibrations we suspect. Yeah, sorry, I'll get the question. He was asking where the gravitational waves come from and the source is exotic. You can have binary stars, pairs of stars orbiting one another and they create ripples that one in principle could detect. This is with this experiment LIGO and other related ones that want to do. So those are extra physical sources. The ones that we're looking at, however, is the space itself on a fine scale sort of buzzing with this energy. So we'll dump some ripples popping into another existence. You would never see them except that inflation stretches them rapidly to cosmic scales and freezes them into place. So it's a bizarre mechanism, but that's the idea. Right. So the polarization is, switch back to the original slides that were shown. This is a good question. Yeah, just go back to the other ones that I have there. There we go. You can get the conch. It was quite long and quick. Let me go to 50. I'll find this real quick. So the idea is that as the space is being stretched and compressed you've got heating and cooling on opposite axes. And so the idea here is that if it's hot and cold on some diagonal axis, so will be the polarization that gets scattered. And what would have been more clear if I just didn't try the webcam thing was that if you put the grid in front of here and you rotate it back and forth you can see you get dim and bright on these opposite axes where the light's coming in from in test directions along the diagonals. Right. And the crucial point that we're looking at here is that this, if you were to reflect it, it would go to the opposite diagonal. That's okay. And so that was the feature we were looking for that hadn't been seen before. So I don't know if that makes it a little more tangible. Two more. Anyone else? Yo. Can you start over and explain it like I'm five? What? I guess the crucial point is the cliff notes version. What? One more. The crucial point, the cliff notes version here is that this rapid expansion amplifies all these funny things in space that we can't see because it's too faint, right? It only happened once, we think, in the early universe. And the features that we're looking at here from the gravitational waves produce a phenomenon more exotic than things we had seen before. People looking for years haven't seen them yet. We think we may have seen this time around. That's my life. Nothing funny behind there. Anyone else? Yeah. I consider myself kind of an armchair physicist. I watch all the Carl Sagan. I watch all the news, the grass ties and convos. I keep up with this to read all these articles. And I'm not going to say I understand everything yet, but a question that I always have, and I don't think ever gets answered, I don't think it's going to answer this time, all these experiments that you do, has anyone figured out what it was that blew up, why it blew up, and if it will ever blow up again? I mean, what is exploding? We understand all the evidence, but I always have that question, what exploded? Well, so the explosion, and the Big Bang is a misnomer. It was a terrible terminology. Back in the 1950s, there was a big bang, or just a steady-state universe, and people who did not like the idea of an early universe, who were annoyed that it was a Catholic priest who suggested this occurred, and it was also a physicist. So Big Bang was actually a name that was meant to deride the model. So it's not really an explosion at one place. It's sort of meant to be an explosion everywhere. It's supposed to be a state of seemingly high temperatures, but it was happening everywhere at once, and that's the model we have. And this figure, this figure here is meant to communicate that. At extremely high temperatures, you have all of these forces presumably acting as the same thing. So a lot of us speculate that the things that may have driven may ultimately be explained by the relationship between these things. This is the long-term goal of physics for decades and probably for decades to come. Now, in terms of whether this occurs again or not, that's really the whole point of this business with the economic model that I was talking about. This guy has speculated maybe it continues to expand forever, or he says maybe it recollapses into the same thing, and repeats over and over again. The gravitational waves, or at least we may have measured these gravitational waves, puts pressure on the idea that this would occur over and over again because the model that was constructed to suggest such a thing really doesn't leave a lot of room for these things to exist at these sort of magnitudes. So it could happen again, but the data suggests perhaps not. We'll have one more. There's an enthusiastic woman there of the balcony. All right. Okay. I'm just wondering about the figure where you show the four forces kind of vibricating. Yeah. Is there empirical evidence for, or someone we can measure when that would have happened, or are those all the products of the applied theory? So these two, that is on fairly firm footing because that temperature has been achieved in accelerators over at the alarm chain. So that, there's a consensus that indeed these have a relationship that's sort of reflected by this figure and they expose on discovery that people made a big deal about a couple of years ago was the last piece of that whole quest. Higher up, it becomes more speculative, right? This is a temperature a trillion times hotter than down here and so we can't make that on our planet. We would tax the resources of our planet perhaps to construct us an experiment, but we can't look for cosmic signatures of it. But yeah, when you're on it, it becomes increasingly speculative and the relationship between gravity and these guys is, well, it's very challenging and the people who work on these things are hard pressed to predict things we might measure. So the answer is yes, and as you go up. Thank you, Roger. People want to come play with this thing. I'll leave this thing up for the time being and people can stir around with it and maybe you'll learn something. And if you have additional questions for Roger he'll be over in theatre too. We'll be back in about 10 minutes with a talk about Hogan R. Lee. That is some science and making robots like new stuff. I just want to say I really enjoyed that currency talk. I'm enjoying all of our talks tonight. I think they're awesome. Prior to Scott's intro and Jeremy's talk, everything I knew about currency was in DuckTales episode with the biocaps. So that was awesome. Let's talk about citizen science. So not everybody is going to build robots that go underwater and do awesome stuff. But there's many ways that we as residents of the Bay Area can participate in scientific research and help out in whatever way we can. So I thought it would be really interesting to talk about the ways we can all science. Yes, even you. So there are many awesome science organizations around the Bay Area. If you visit their websites, it's really easy to find stuff. But I thought I'd get you guys started with a few ideas. For example, we have California Academy of Sciences. They're looking for people who are willing to document the biodiversity that they observe in the Bay Area. This is just a screenshot of their website. We also have Shabo. They're involved in this project about the coastal redwoods and how the habitat of the coastal redwood is changing due to climate change. So you as someone who lives in the area can very easily contribute your observations. If you don't even want to get that involved, there's even easier stuff you can do. Like if you see a river otter you can take note of that. And it's really helpful because people are trying to track river otters and their behaviors and what they're up to. I particularly like this one because it's the Bay Area Frog Watch Chapter. I didn't know we had a frog watch chapter. Just some neat ideas. If you want to be a citizen scientist you don't have to start from scratch and build your own robots. You can, I encourage you to. But if you're not quite up for that there are so many opportunities to add your own observations to this sort of crowdsourced science project. And you can really help out that way. So to talk more about citizen science and open ROV and underwater robots we have David Lange. Thank you so much. Theater 2, can you hear me? That was an awesome introduction. I wasn't expecting that and it actually works perfectly for a lot of the stuff that I want to talk about. The first thing I want to do is I was giving a talk a month ago and I went through the whole talk and I was telling good stories and there were people who were looking at me just like you're looking at me and nodding and smiling. And then at the end of the talk I put my hand in the back and goes so what's an open ROV? And I just went through this whole talk and not even explained actually what an open ROV is or what the underwater robot is. So I never want to make that mistake again. I felt like a knucklehead. So that's what I'm going to do. That's how I'm going to start off is just telling you what an open ROV is. So that's an open ROV. This is an open ROV here. And very simply and it's got lights, LEDs, it's got thrusters which are these brushless motors here. It's got propellers. It's got batteries on board and you can drive it around and see what it's seeing. So this is a shop from Lake Tahoe with an ROV that's underwater looking at a little sunken sailboat and we're all up on a boat with a little laptop and we're able to see what the underwater robot can see. And so that is what it is. A lot of open ROV and now I want to go and tell you the why. And the why is a little bit more fun. So it starts like all good stories with sunken treasure. I met my friend Eric Stackpole about three and a half years ago and a few people know Eric but as soon as I met him he launched into this crazy story about treasure up in the Sierras and how there was a gold mining operation and there was a gold rush and the gold was taken and thrown in its underwater cave and there was this whole elaborate story about cave divers and treasure hunters who had all gone after this gold and no one had been able to find it. And Eric was building an underwater robot to go and explore this cave and he showed me this little underwater robot and he put it on the table and I wanted to help out and I just thought this was the coolest thing. And so Eric is an engineer I'm not an engineer, I'm also not a scientist so going back to the introduction we did we had this initial prototype but we really didn't know what we were doing, this thing didn't work there was a lot of problems with our plan for sure but we did have the internet and so what I kind of convinced Eric to do was I said you know what we should do is we should just put our big idea of having this low cost underwater robot we should put that online and we should say this is an open source project if anyone wants to come and help we welcome their contributions and so we put up this website openrov.com and started talking about it and for a year it was just me and Eric on the forums just me asking him really basic questions about physics and buoyancy and all this stuff but slowly and surely we got other people I think just because they took pity on us they started contributing and giving us ideas and saying well you should actually just think about this this is how everybody else does it and so it slowly began accumulating and we just wouldn't stop talking about this cave we were going to go explore this cave and so we actually did that we kind of mounted this makeshift expedition with a group of our friends and went up to go explore this underwater cave and sure enough there was this underwater portion and we went down he said the robot down and that became actually a big deal like the New York Times wrote about it and then all of a sudden we had so many people on our website and so many people saying hey I want an underwater robot to explore blank and we got all of these wonderful messages and so what we did is we decided to put our project on Kickstarter and again we didn't really know what we were doing but we did it anyways and we set this a goal of raising $20,000 and we raised that in about two hours which is really exciting and on Kickstarter two years ago that was a lot of money now it's like that happens every hour on Kickstarter but two years ago it was a big deal and so you push this button and your project is live and you see the money going up and you're high fiving and it's a lot of fun and it just keeps going up and you're thinking oh my god we really gotta make these things and so we were basically offering these kits and we thought oh well that's not a big deal I mean we'll just put these kits together and we'll ship them up to all our backers that's manageable and you think that's manageable until the boxes start showing up at your garage and you realize the magnitude of what you've done and you have to build all these things and do all these things and Eric was leaving to go to Antarctica for a job for three months so I was stuck in a garage trying to sort all this stuff out it was really hard but thanks to Zach and others we actually got it done and we built these ROVs and we shipped all the kits and here we are, these things have now been all over the place now this is Florida this is in San Jose, Mexico this is in Antarctica someone sent me this last week this is from Cuba, this is a silky shark she didn't send me a video she just sent me this she just sent the screenshot, no messages but so that's what I they're all over the place and so this is an old slide of all the people who have joined our community and it's in over 50 countries it's thousands of people it's a really cool thing to be a part of it's a really positive group and it's a really I think optimistic and exciting and smart group and we've created a cool little tool and I snapped this photo in the airport because I thought it was really interesting because it was two guys three ROVs and it was all carrying on luggage and for you guys just hearing my story, I think of course it's all carrying on luggage but I showed this photo at an ocean exploration conference with leaders from Woods Hole and Scripps and NOAA and all that stuff and this slide their jobs were on the floor because they're so used to these really really expensive tools and they have to get cargo containers and expensive ship time and we were just some kids out of the garage with these robots in our backpack and this is actually a really big deal for ocean exploration for exploration in general and it's not just us the things that are going into this are the maker movement is what's driving a lot of this so these digital fabrication tools like 3D printers and laser cutters and maker spaces like Tech Shop Monster Toys and all these things are creating these building blocks for people to make just about anything and people like us are making underwater robots and drones and all this stuff but you know it's all of everyone's got a phone in their pocket all those components are getting really really cheap and people are reconfiguring them in interesting ways and so this is another oceanographic tool but this is kind of where I'm at now is I've been thinking a lot about this idea about what this means it's like okay yeah we can make these tools but I think the next step is something that's even more exciting and even more interesting and that there are all of these tools that are out there and all these people are coming together and kind of working together but also to plot these little expeditions like we did to the cave and I've been calling this kind of thing citizen exploration or connected exploration and this is a photo of John Dobson who was passed away earlier this year and he was a monk who started making his own telescopes and just was obsessed with building telescopes and getting people to go outside and look up and see the moon and see the stars and he spent his whole life building telescopes from scratch and then standing on the corners of San Francisco and every night just showing people the skies and he's one of my big heroes because his Dobsonian telescope the telescope that he designed became this this tool for amateurs to see into these deeper catalogs and it's now to the point where amateurs are making really significant contributions to the field of astronomy so that's why I have this picture there and so this is a photo of my friend Chris Anderson so people know Chris alright he's a great guy but he's also got a pretty interesting story so when he took this photo he was the editor in chief of Wired Magazine but he on the weekend he was flying one of these remote control planes with his kids and also playing with Lego Mindstorms and kind of realized that he can make a low cost autopilot and so he started this website called DIY Drones which was really a model for Eric and I when he got started and he and his whole community started building these open source autopilots and that was really the basis kind of one of the kick starting moments for all of these drones that you guys now see everywhere and these things have become ubiquitous and so that kind of weekend with his kids has turned into this big company called 3D Robotics they make them manufacture thousands and thousands of these drones and they're in all sorts of devices but they're also being used for conservation this type of thing is being used in Indonesia and Africa to combat poachers and people are even using this ocean conservation to find illegal fishing vessels and I was just talking to a guy last week who's a volunteer with NOAA who goes out and if he gets a report of a whale who's caught up in crab traps then he goes out and he said I want to get a drone just so I can go out and find his whales because sometimes it's very hard to do so all of a sudden these tools are not just kind of hobbyist toys anymore they're actually serious tools for people to go out and understand our world and protect our planet this is another story like that this is a group of guys in the exact same garage that I put up before our garage so these were Eric's roommates Robbie and Will and a few other guys and they thought they could make a cheaper satellite than what NASA was doing and they were looking at all these same factors and components that are going into cell phones I think we could do this for a little bit cheaper, we could do this a little bit better and so what they did is exactly that they started making a satellite in this garage and they've since made several satellites and they've launched I think they've been doing this for the past three years or so they've since launched I think already 70 satellites and Planet Labs is now the name of their company and they're running a space program out of an office building in San Francisco and their constellation of dubs is what they call them are going to get an image of every location on the planet every day we've never had that in our world and that's really it's really exciting and that came out of the same garage that we started making these underwater robots in so it's not a far away thing that some geniuses but it's not a far away thing this is something that's happening in your neighborhood in your city, it's pretty cool and so these are the images that they're getting back this one they got last week and I wanted to put this one up there because they got this image about 10 minutes after this wildfire was reported and this is just an example of the way that we're going to be monitoring our planet in totally new ways and the same thing goes for illegal fishing and forestry there's an infinite number of ways that this stuff can be useful and again I think this kind of gets back to this idea of connected exploration so we're going to have these cheap low cost tools and then we're going to have these ways that everyone can understand our world and our environment in a way that we haven't before and so we're trying to explain this in a bunch of different ways and people always want to jump into this idea about citizen science and I think it's a really cool idea I love citizen science but I think that's a really small sliver of what's happening so far I've been to the citizen science meeting summit whatever it is in London really and all they can talk about is how are we going to get amateurs sighted on papers I was thinking I don't care about getting sighted on paper for me this is about the thrill of adventure I want to go and explore and discover is a more important thing to note is that this isn't about just getting your name on a paper because for a lot of people that doesn't matter what this is about is about building new tools to help you go further to make your life richer and to know to have a question and to go out and pursue the answer and so for me this is amateur curiosity it's a really cool thing and that is actually what this is about is all of these new tools are fuel on that fire and so you know if you want to go out and you want to participate in any of those citizen science projects that got published earlier I encourage you to do it because you're going to meet some great people and it's going to be really helpful for the science that those institutions or people are doing to make broader than that and to understand that you have all these new tools and resources at your disposal that you can with a group of friends you know go look for lost treasure and who knows where that's going to lead we certainly didn't know and so you know all these things have been going on and we were continually pushing the boundaries like okay so we were able to do that well let's try and do this and we were always trying to push it and so we thought okay well Craig Venture sailed around the world and did all this metagenomic sampling what if we used our tools and some of these other low cost DIY bio tools and went and tried to do the same thing so we plotted this whole expedition and I guess it was kind of an adventure to the Sea of Cortez earlier this year and you know we had a bunch of who's affiliated with any kind of a university and you know we mapped it out this is our site called Open Explorer where you can see kind of all these DIY adventures that people are putting together and it was a disaster not a total disaster but you know we ran into all sorts of interesting problems and one of the big ones is that you need permits to do this stuff and like expensive permits and six months of paperwork and the kind of thing that you you have to like apply for a grant and do all this stuff I mean we didn't need the money to do it we just needed the permission and we wanted to take water samples but it turns out that you can't take a water sample in Mexico you can take a big fish like a big part of the ecosystem and you can't just take a little water sample which is interesting so we didn't want to get arrested for biopiracy in Mexico and so we just decided this would be kind of a trial run just to test our tools and we did learn a lot and I think you know if we go back we'll jump through the appropriate hoops and go through with it but that was a really important learning experience because we bumped up against all of these kind of administrative hurdles of what's going to stand in the way from these amateurs and people with questions about finding those answers and frankly a lot of those rules are in place for a lot of good reasons too so it's an interesting discussion this is also happening so as soon as we got back I found out about this thing called Ocean Sampling Day and this was started by a group of researchers in Germany or another lens or both I can't remember and they wanted to get a bunch of people out a bunch of researchers out to take metagenomic samples all these different places around the globe on the same day and they had put together this Ocean Sampling Day handbook that had almost all the information that I needed before we went to the Sea of Quartets like that it took me like a lot of research to figure out everything we wanted to do and they put it together in this packet and they put together this thing all you have to do is give this to the municipalities that you're operating in and this will be like a waiver so here's one end there's these amateurs, us coming and being more curious and seeing what we can do and on the other end there are these researchers who are providing these tools and resources to make it easier for people like us so the way and they also made an app so you can just take a sample it has all these things you mail it into the sequencing places that they already set up they already have these relationships from a totally different perspective and they were inundated with all of these citizen scientists who wanted to participate in it that really surprised them and so the way that we've started talking about it is that the maker movement and the traditional kind of science world are on a collision course and it's going to be really interesting to see how it all plays out this is a site that was made by the digital, oh it's the ocean networks Canada which is a big huge funded thing where these scientists are creating this really interesting ocean observation network and they put up this citizen science component to their site and I love this first line we're looking for a few hundred thousand volunteers it's so audacious so you know they're trying to get all these things going where they want people to participate and identify the fish for their observation network and I don't know where they're going to get them honestly I'd love to hear more about how that's going but that's such an ambitious ask I don't know how they're going to do it and on the flip side I'm part of this group on Facebook called the ID Please Marine Creature Identification Group and it's run by this girl named Katie, she's a German living in this island called Romblon Island in the South Pacific and she's a diver and she just started posting photos and asking people to help identify what she was seeing and this group is fantastic if you put a photo up here from a dive or anything they'll identify it in seconds and this group is you know it's got 3,000 members but they're super active and I've actually talked to marine biologists who actually use this group and if they're out in the field and they don't know what something is they actually go to this Facebook group because they've just become so fantastic so to me this is the same thing we have these big organizations these big institutions who need this kind of help we have these amateurs and these people who are just excited and interested who are trying to you know who want to do it anyway so I think there's a I think that we're going to continue to see that and then this is just a clip so we launched this site Open Explorer, I mentioned it before but we just launched it basically a week ago and we just started posting and saying hey what do you want to explore what's the question what are you curious about and in the week we've already gotten over 50 people who have these really awesome expedition ideas or project ideas the things they want to go explore these sunken caves in northern Wales the photos from these guys have been up there is fantastic and open ROV so they can put in their backpack and actually get into these mines and go down and explore what's in the sunken portions which is so cool and these are shipwrecks in Slovenia in the Adriatic Sea this is in San Francisco this is a butterfly corridor there's this group called Nature in the City which is fantastic you should all check them out habitat for native butterflies they're basically saving species that are they're an amazing group and this is one I saw today which is a woman who wants to go to the Salton Sea in Southern California and actually go down and explore and see what's going on there because very few people actually go in and check it out all of this stuff is just popping up you ask people what they're curious about and what they're interested in it's a very different question than here, just come participate in my citizen science study and take samples and build these things and I think we need to get to that question what are you excited about what are you interested in and I'm really curious to hear what all of you have to say to that question and I also invite you to take part in this because I think it's really exciting so, thank you thank you questions this is the other one that I always forget to so the question is did you find any treasure in the cave and this is always the first question and we didn't I always say that the treasure was all these people that we met so the question is is the ROE wireless and this is so it's not it's got a 100 meter tether so it's a very thin 2 wire tether I cut it off of this one but you can see it's very thin and it goes down to 100 meters and that's the depth of the ROE oh you could we've done that but you can't control it from underwater you can't control it from the surface the balcony yeah yeah so the question is it's great that there's a thousand thousands of people how do we get this to be millions of people and I think that's a really good question and I said I I love the idea millions of people who are if it's butterfly corridors who are thinking up their own expedition or adventure or question whatever it is I I don't know how we get there but one thing I'm pretty certain of is that it's not going to be me telling someone here's the idea here's how we're going to do it and here's how everybody can participate in that I think the answer to that is just continuing to hammer this message that yes not my ideas aren't the best ideas it's this idea that all of a sudden we have these tools where we can have these I think it's a richer life when Eric and I started this we always talked about maximizing our return on adventure you know I got two emails today from people who were like hey David there's this shipwreck in Maine and this lake and we're going to get some people together can you come and I got another email from a friend saying hey David we're going to do a motorcycle trip to the headwaters of the Nile to explore that like that's amazing and I don't think that's just unique to me I think that's a situation that is we don't have to be a personal geographic anymore we can say actually why don't we just get some friends together and do some research on some history of these places and learn about it and dig deeper and that's how I think it gets to millions is more people kind of wake up to this idea that we don't have to be a passive consumer of adventure and curiosity but that's like a right as a human to try and understand that's the question one more question one more question one more question but that was a good end thanks David thanks to all of you for the awesome night thanks to the open public library as well as the new parkway I just wanted to touch with you what kind of events there's a bone cleaning class this week the bone room the bone room is awesome eventually there may be a nerd night field trip there but there's still an opportunity to like apply to like go to that in front of us WonderFest and Nazca scientists are awesome they're having an event at Chabot I rarely talk to you about what I do I hope that I only delve into metallurgy once every other month or so I'm going to give a talk to the American Society of Metals in Mountain View check it out there's dinner involved so that's good iGEM Revolution iGEM is the international genetically engineered machine competition so we had Terry Johnson talk about that a few months ago there's going to be a larger talk about what this means in the future of humanity for the long now Foundation at SFJAS nerd night time for Cisco is this month next week here September 29th we have our own librarian Sharon McCuller someone should take a picture because Sharon is following us on social media she's going to talk to us about picture books she's on the Caldecott committee so this talk is going to be fantastic Kelly Wintersmith who runs the podcast for weekly Wintersmith as well as science is going to talk to us about parasites that make futures into zombies and we'll have live specimens they won't turn you into zombies i promise and then Matthew Lewin from Calcabby we'll talk about creating an astute first week bike so hope to see you then thanks for coming, bye