 Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Dennis Dimmick. I'm the Executive Environment Editor at National Geographic and this session is actually very exciting for me because as an editor of a magazine that publishes lots of photographs that show many of the things that we're going to be seeing today where we never have the size and the scale that we're going to be able to see these things today and and what we're going to do is that we're going to use the power of images, big images to bring space down to earth. Our presenters are going to take you on a visual journey in three parts that will explore deep space, the origins of the universe, and the quest to discover life on other earths. We'll also learn about comets and a successful attempt to land a spacecraft on a comet and we will and we will also see how we are monitoring earth's vital signs, how we are changing the planet, and how we respond when big changes are occurring on our home planet. All of this is being done today with an eye to the question, how are space technologies enabling us to scale the universe and to safeguard humanity's place on it? And our three speakers today will each give about ten minute rundowns of their work and then we'll gather to probe what we are learning, what that means, and why it is relevant to all of us in this room and around the world. Our speakers are Mark McCockran, who's Senior Science Advisor of the European Space Agency, Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, and Jeffrey Tarr, who is President and CEO of Digital Globe USA, and he is a co-chair of this meeting. So our first speaker today will be Mark McCockran. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. It's an enormous privilege for me to be here today in Dalyan to talk to you about one of the most exciting pieces of space exploration in many decades, and that is the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. Comets are these extraordinary objects left over from the beginning of the birth of the solar system, 4.6 billion years ago. They're beautiful objects which appear in the night sky seemingly randomly in historical terms, often enough that you may well see one or two in your lifetime, but not often enough that they come every week and you get bored with them. But on the other hand, there's a scientific basis to comets which is extremely important to us, because our own solar system, when it was first born, the planet Earth was probably far too hot to retain any water during its formation or any complex molecules, but comets which were frozen far out in space maintained water and complex organic molecules, and those potentially rained down onto the planet Earth maybe a billion years after its formation when it was cool enough, and everybody in this room could well be comet stuff, both the water in you and the amino acids which are in your bodies which make up the proteins could have originated in comets. And so exploring comets is very much the story about understanding our own origins. In 1986, the European Space Agency was the first to fly past a comet with its probe Giotto. It flew past the very famous comet Halley. It flew past at about 600 kilometers, but more importantly, it flew past at a speed of 68 kilometers per second. The technology we had then was only capable of a brief rendezvous. Comets are on highly elliptical orbits, go far out into the solar system and come back in briefly into the middle. And imagine, if you want, the speeds are so high that it would be the equivalent of you wanting to have a conversation with Usain Bolt. I think I can guarantee that nobody in the room would be able to run alongside him in the 100 meters and have a meaningful conversation with him. But you could have a brief one, at least, by waiting at the 50 meter line, standing out in front of him and getting one syllable out, perhaps, as he went past you. And that's what Giotto was in 1986. But we wanted to do more. We wanted to get next to a comet, rendezvous with a comet, escort it through the inner solar system and understand its properties in great detail as it got to its closest point to the sun. And to do so, we built this machine. This is Rosetta. This is on the on your left side is the spacecraft at the far end of the clean room there with one of the two solar panels, 32 meters in total, the width, the wingspan of an Airbus A320. And here is the spacecraft in its full scale, two and a half meter cubed, three tons, half of which is fuel. And there is the filet lander on the side, 100 kilos in size. And in 2004, we were ready to launch Rosetta. This was launched from our spaceport in Kuru in French Guiana on an Ariane five, but even the Ariane five wasn't powerful enough to get where we were going directly. Where we were going was comet 67p, Turiomov-Gerasimenko, a comet which goes all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter at its furthest point from the sun and in between the Earth and Mars is its closest point on a six and a half year journey. And so the Usain Bolt story is still true. With that rocket, we will not at a high enough speed to catch up with this comet. Instead, what we did was three rendezvous with the Earth and one with Mars in order to use the gravitational slingshot effect to power us on to the right orbit to catch up with 67p. And here's one of the pictures taken of the Earth in 2009. It's a very progressive social media aware mission at taking a selfie here back in 2007 with Mars in the background. Now, what we had to do after that was put the spacecraft into hibernation in 2011, far from the sun, not enough power to run the spacecraft safely. We had to wait for two and a half years for the alarm clock to go off on board. We were not commanding the spacecraft. We were waiting to hear from it. This is the scene in the control room in Germany, 18 minutes after the signal was due to reappear. And you can see the anxiety on the faces there of the control team, the flight operations team. There with the signal came, however, 18 minutes late and the equivalent of course, great joy and pleasure because at that point we knew we had a mission. We knew after 10 years flying through the solar system, we were on our way to 67p. And here are the first images taken from Rosetta as we approach 67p. We could see indeed it was a comet. There was some material flowing away from it. We hadn't mis-targeted and gone to an asteroid instead. As we got close by, we began to see a very bizarre looking object. This is the origin of the name the rubber duck, which with the 67p was named after. And it was at this point that in fact the scientists were getting very excited because they thought this could potentially be two comets joined together and for the price of one mission we were going to be able to study too. At the same time, the mission operations engineers were extremely concerned because how on earth do you fly orbit around an object like this, which is not spherical at all? And it got worse when we got closer up in August when we rendezvoused. This is 67p, four kilometers across an incredibly sculpted object, amazingly diverse terrain, and we had to place a lander somewhere on this. And we were only able to place the lander, as you'll see in a moment, to the precision of one kilometer on a four kilometer wide object. So this was again great joy for the scientists and some head scratching for the engineers at that point. This is the terrain of 67p, just a couple of pictures here to show this amazingly diverse landscape. It looks geological. It looks like it's rock. It looks like there are boulders rolling down hills. But keep in mind that this object has the density less than half that of water. It is a mixture of water ice, CO2, carbon monoxide, dust. It would float very high in the sea if we placed it in there. And the processes that give rise to this sculpting here are nothing like the geology we have on Earth. And indeed, the gravitational potential of this object, the gravitational field is very diverse as you move around. There are areas here where you say, you simply pose the question, where on an object like this is down? Look at these boulders over here. These boulders are obviously being pulled onto the side of the comet there, but equally there are boulders up there being pulled in a completely different direction. The gravity is extremely weak on this object, and this is one of my favorite pictures of the comet. The gravity on this comet is 100,000 times weaker than it is on the Earth. And so when you look at this 100-meter-high cliff on the comet, your first thought, of course, everybody in this room is thinking base jumping, of course. And you could. You could base jump off this. You wouldn't need a parachute. It would take you 20 minutes to reach the bottom. It would be the most boring base jump in history. And you wouldn't need a parachute. There's no atmosphere, but you would get to the bottom at less than walking pace, 25 centimeters a second. So you would just walk off the bottom. But here's the interesting point. Everybody knows, everybody that's done base jumping knows that when you do, you stand and you have to push up to make sure you don't hit any rocks just beneath you. So I'd ask you all at this point to stand up because I'm going to teach you how to jump off a comet. The danger is that if you jump just 0.9 meters a second, you will reach escape velocity. And you will not base jump, you will go and fly off into outer space. To reach 0.9 meters a second, it's the equivalent of jumping just to four centimeters. If you can jump to four centimeters, you can jump off a comet. So we're going to do that together. One, two, three, up! You have just reached escape velocity from a comet. Well done. So everything we know about this object is affected by the low gravity, the cold, the temperature on this comet is extremely low when it's far from the sun, minus 100 degrees. But when it's close to the sun, it gets well above 300 degrees. The change in temperature is enormous. And of course, the comet is active. The closer it comes to the sun, the more the material, the volatiles, the carbon dioxide, the water, the CO, bursts out from under the surface and creates this activity. And this is important because firstly, we want to understand this process, but we had to land before we got to this point. Because we needed to land before the comet got too active. So we had to pick a landing site. And again, I say we had to pick somewhere roughly a kilometer across on a four kilometer wide object. This is the place we chose in the end. The circle here is a kilometer in diameter. And we were aiming right for the center here. But of course, you can see how dangerous the terrain around us is as well. If we didn't hit the right place, there was always the danger that we would tumble and not land on the surface properly at all. This is the descent of Philae on November the 12th last year, seen from Rosetta as Philae descends away towards the surface. And after that, we actually see it traversing the surface, flying down towards this comet at a speed of one meter per second, just walking pace, a very slow drift down onto the surface. This is the final few meters, from 69 meters down to nine. This took a minute in real time, because again, we're falling at just one meter a second. And that's nine meters across. You can see even at this scale there are boulders, there are structures there. And in fact, what we think happened is that we hit that triangular boulder, which you see more or less in the middle of the image. This is the touchdown point at 1534, a UT on November the 12th, 2014. You can see the three feet there. And you can hear the sound of landing, which I'm going to play for you now. This is as transmitted through the legs of the lander. And actually, that tells us an enormous amount of what happened next, because we can get out of that the acceleration profile of the spacecraft. And we understand from that what happened next was we bounced. Because here we are, less than 10 minutes later, flying again. We flew up to heights of 200 meters above the surface of the comet. We flew for two hours in total. This is where we touched down in the top left corner there. And then where we brushed the edge of a cliff about one hour later, we started tumbling. And we came down into an area of the comet that in November last year was very dark. Philae landed in a shadowed location up against a cliff of pristine cometary material. And we ran the experiments from Philae, the laboratory experiments to investigate this material. Lots of scientific papers have been published from both Philae and Rosetta by now. Philae then fell asleep because there wasn't enough power to power its solar panels. In June this year, it woke up again as the comet approached the sun. There was enough power in this location to wake it up. We've heard six times from Philae then. We haven't secured a full connection in order to be able to do more science with Philae at that point. But in the meantime, Rosetta, the big spacecraft, has been investigating the comet in enormous detail. At the time of landing, of course there was enormous joy from around the world in the control room, the front pages of all of the newspapers. And at least part of that was driven by the fact that we ran, I think, a very innovative PR campaign within ESA, not only with social media engagement, but also we went to the degree of even making a science fiction film. If you haven't seen it, I recommend looking for Ambition Online. If we have time at the end, I'm certainly willing to play a five minute film for you. And also anthropomorphic cartoons, which played an enormous role in engaging children. And we know many adults are fans of these cartoons, which we've put out. And explain the mission in great detail, but in a very personal form as well. So as we have proceeded, we've got to the point now where the comet has become more active. And this is just a representation of that activity as the comet has approached the sun. This is just the day before we approached the closest point to the sun on August the 13th this year. And you'll see a huge outburst from the comet. This is what we're actually witnessing every day now. We're standing quite a long way from the comet because it's making it rather difficult for us to work close up. It confuses our star track as being in that cloud of dust and gas. But we've learned an enormous amount about this comet. And again, by doing so we're learning about the origins of human beings on the planet Earth dating back 4.6 billion years into the past. The mission is not over yet. By this time next year, we will end the mission in a rather spectacular fashion by landing Rosetta also on the surface of the comet, slowly spiraling down until we make contact. The mission will be over at that point. We'll have no way of relaying data back to Earth. But it's a fitting end to what has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the exploration of our own solar system. And there is more to come. Thank you very much. Mark, that was that was amazing. I guess one question I would have for you is, are there any surprising things that you've learned from actually having landed on the comet now that you weren't expecting? Well, from the landing, what we found were lots of organic molecules which have never been detected on the surface of a comet before, or in a cometary environment. So we're beginning to see these building blocks of life. The analogy I make there is that, of course, the raw materials of life, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen are available universally. But if you went to your local hardware store, imagine you went, let's put it this way, if you went to the forest near to your house and you set off a bomb, you have all that raw material there, the chances of it making life are, you know, slightly unlikely. But if you go to the local hardware store, you've got windows, doors, door handles, a refrigerator, maybe you have the raw elements. Of course, what you have to do is blow it up again because that's when comets hit the earth, there is that explosive event. But we actually think that promotes the formation of the more complex molecules. The explosion, the impact itself. Great. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. One thing I'll do is hand around a scale model of the comet for everybody to get tactile with. This is what the comet really feels like. All right. Great. Thanks. Next we have Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University and he is going to take us to the far reaches of the universe. Thank you very much, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, astronomy kind of bridges the gap between the two speakers or other speakers today. As Mark has already shown you, the pristine earth probably shed most of the interesting things from life's point of view. And so the comets that shed water but also probably amino acids are the things that might bring life to planets. Now, astronomy is all about exploration and one of the biggest possible questions we can explore as astronomers is the question about life around other planets or in other planets. And so, baby, there we go. If you think about our, as humans, we interact with the idea of alien life forms of life around other planets throughout popular culture, through the ideas of aliens through our movies and TV shows. But we're actually able over the next 10 years to go out and really start in detail asking the question is there life out beyond the earth? So, here is Venus going across the sun. As Venus goes across the sun, it only does this every 100 years or so, it causes the sun to dim a little bit. Now, of course, when we look out into the sky, we see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of stars and this same effect will occasionally happen. So we can go out and identify planets in this way and the Kepler mission was specifically designed to do this. So the Kepler mission went out and looked at a big piece of sky in the northern hemisphere and it used this technique to find many, many objects. Here is an example of a planet going front and dimming the light just a little bit. It's sensitive to one part and 100,000 were there abouts and it has found thousands of planets in this way. So as of about a month ago, we were up to almost 5,000 planets and quite remarkably, we're beginning to find Earth-like planets and our best estimate is that if you look like a star like the sun, on average, there is about one terrestrial planet per Earth-like or sun-like star. We have found many, many habitable in principle exoplanets. These are planets going from being a little smaller than the Earth to being quite a bit larger than the Earth but made of rocks and located near their stars so that we think they have liquid water. So there are a lot of planets out there. Now we can go and learn interesting things from these planets because we have 100 billion stars out there in our Milky Way in our own galaxy alone. And let's think about what a planet looks like when it goes in front of its star. This is actually Venus going in front of our sun. And what you can see here is there is a rim of light. That rim of light is starlight refracting through the atmosphere and picking up the chemical signatures of that star so that if we can look at that, we can actually identify the composition of the atmosphere and look for the signatures of life that we understand like ourselves such as oxygen or perhaps something more exotic. We are going to find almost all of the nearby objects over the coming decade. Coming up very soon, we're going to have the test mission from NASA. That'll be launched in roughly 2017, followed by the European mission Plato. And these will give us essentially the senses of all the nearby planets. And then with the next generation of telescopes, 25, 30, or 40-meter telescopes that we're going to be building over the next decade, we're going to be able to make the very sensitive measurements of seeing that tiny amount of light leak through a planet's atmosphere. And perhaps we will see oxygen, for example, in the next 10 years a great signature of life. Now these big telescopes can look for life around other planets, but they can do far more. They can allow us to look into the distant universe. And so the distant universe is actually quite interesting. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we can go in and see in a very tiny piece of space around 20,000 galaxies. And these galaxies extend back 12 and a half billion years in the past. That's how far away they are. Their light takes that long to reach us. But in the future, we're going to have an even bigger space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. And the James Webb Space Telescope, six and a half meters in diameter, will take a picture which we think will look something like that. And you can see the dark space has been filled in with lots of little dots. Those little dots we think are the first stars and galaxies. So we're literally going to be able to look at the universe being born. Now, I'm assuming when I say that, most of you are familiar with the idea of the Big Bang. But let's just do a quick cosmological primer. The universe is expanding, and that's something we've known about since 1929. We think about it in the past. Things will have been closer and closer and closer. And there will be a time when everything in the universe was on top of everything else, the time of the Big Bang. So there is a time, about 13.8 billion years ago, where the universe literally was created by some act that we don't completely understand. If we go out and we look 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this is what we see. We see an image of the universe when it was roughly 3,000 degrees in temperature, before stars, before galaxies, and we're actually seeing sound waves ripple around a very hot universe. The universe becomes transparent as it expands and cools. And then 10 million years later, this is what it looks like. It's not very exciting. Well, it's actually, that's what it looks like to our human eyes. If you were to be able to look at it in radio waves, then you might actually see a very exciting pattern. And that's because hydrogen, which was created in the Big Bang, emits radio waves when it gets bumped around and its electron can get disoriented with its proton, and you get a 1.4 gigahertz radio wave, which, if we build a large enough telescope, we can detect. And we are building those telescopes as well. Giant radio telescopes in places that have no radio communications, for example, the very barren parts of Western Australia. And here we're building telescopes that we put together using computers so that we don't have to make these giant structures that are giant parabolas. Instead, we can use computers to essentially mimic the idea of a telescope. And so the Merchison-Widefield Array is looking for that detection of hydrogen from the dark ages of the universe. But we're going to be building an even larger telescope with many, many countries in the world known as the Square Kilometer Array, which will be built in Western Australia and in Southern Africa over the coming decade. I'm impatient. And so one of the things that I like to do is look for shortcuts in research. This map has been taken by a recent European space agency mission known as Gaia. It's going through and it's looking at the properties of every single star it can see in the galaxy, billions of stars. The universe was created. It was made of hydrogen helium. The first stars have no iron. They have no carbon, no oxygen. So this mission and a similar thing we're doing in Australia, mapping the sky, is able to pick out the pristine early fossils of the universe. We can use the fossilized record to reconstruct how the Milky Way, our own galaxy was formed, and infer how the first stars came into being. Now as these missions map the sky, they're mapping what is equivalent to the inside of a globe. We take literally petabytes of data and have to use quite complicated techniques to go through and analyze it. But of course these satellites can also look down. The same process of mapping the globe, our Earth, is almost identical to looking up. And I'll stop there. So Mark, you mentioned the new telescope is at the square kilometer array. Yes. And it's being built in both Western Australia and South Africa. Is this like the binocular effect, stereoscopy? What does it do, allow you to do distances better? Unfortunately in this case, what we're doing is we have sort of different sites that have different positive aspects. So the Western Australian site, there is no FM radio. And when we want to look at that hydrogen, we need to be clear of things like FM radio. But it's very remote and very hard to build huge amounts of infrastructure. So the Southern African site has a bit more ability to, for example, connect to power grids that we need. So the two different types of telescopes, it turns out you can't see all radio waves with one telescope. You need to have ones that have dishes. You need to have these dipoles, as we call them, across the desert as looking at very low-frequency radio waves. So we have two telescopes to see the whole spectrum. So these, you say that within the next decade or so most of the planetary discoveries will be made. And then it's all these new telescopes that are being built that will help qualitatively determine what it is these planets are or contain. Yeah, so we're going to be looking with these missions at all of the bright nearby stars. So there's tens of thousands of them, or hundreds of thousands of them. Some of them just will not have planets because they won't be lined up right. You'll be unable to see planets even though they're because they don't go in front of their stars. But the ones that do, we will detect. And then these next generation of big telescopes will be able to pick them off one by one. And it's going to take a long time because it turns out such a small fraction of the light is actually going through that atmosphere. You have to collect billions upon billions of photons to see the very subtle signature. But it appears we'll be able to do it. And so I think that we have a very good prospect of determining how often lifelike what we have here on Earth occurs around these types of planets. It'll keep you busy for decades. Yeah, we astronomers don't like to put ourselves out of business. Thank you. Okay, our next speaker is Jeffrey Tarr from Digital Globe. And he's going to, after the lenses have been pointed at the solar system and the universe, we're now going to see the lenses pointed down right here at our home. Jeffrey, thank you. Thank you. We've just seen how looking upward and outward can provide us all with a better understanding of the universe and our place within it. The same technologies that enable us to look outward into space and explore new worlds, when pointed downward also enable us to see, understand and explore our own planet in new ways. When it comes to mapping and monitoring planet Earth and protecting her natural resources, we're providing for the safety of her people. The view from 400 miles up brings a unique perspective that helps us address the most pressing global challenges of our time. Digital Globe pioneered high resolution commercial satellite imaging 15 years ago. We've since built out the world's most sophisticated constellation of Earth observation satellites, serving governments, commercial customers, and global development organizations. In this brief period, satellite imagery has become integral to our daily lives. More than two billion people benefit from satellite imagery every 24 hours. We enable the internet maps we use every day. The satellite images that flash across our television screens every night. And we help our governments keep our nation safe around the clock. We can detect objects on the ground 30 centimeters in size, determined speed and direction of objects in motion, map remote villages, see through smoke, and peer beneath the ocean surface. All from satellites traveling at 7.8 kilometers per second, orbiting our planet every 90 minutes. Mankind can now bear witness to our changing planet in ways never before possible. When a natural disaster or crisis threatens the health and safety of people around the globe, we document the damage from above so that relief workers can provide aid to victims on the ground below. By combining these advanced space-based capabilities with new technologies on the ground, including social media, crowd computing, big data analytics, and crowdsourcing, we can provide new solutions. Let me share a few of the many examples where our unique perspective is being used to tackle new questions and global challenges. One of the most devastating threats to the environment, economy, and human health in many parts of the world is fire. For decades, forest fires have been intentionally ignited in Indonesia, the clear land for palm plantations to meet the world's growing demand for palm oil. These fires release a cloud of toxic haze and smoke that sickens tens of thousands of people in Indonesia, Singapore, and across Southeast Asia. A lack of timely information has made it difficult to intervene. A year and a half ago, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, I met Andrew Steer, the visionary leader of World Resources Institute. Since that time, we've partnered with the organization he leads to help enable global forest watch. This online platform uses satellite imagery, crowdsourcing, and analytics to monitor, map, and measure fires and track deforestation in near real time. High resolution imagery identifies fires and progress, and spectral bands not visible to the naked eye pinpoint the hotspots underneath the smoke for better situational understanding. We support first responders, then later document burn scars and measure the impact of the fires on the environment. Satellite imagery also provides clear visual evidence that governments can use to direct law enforcement. I'm especially proud that our work with WRI led to Indonesia's ratification of the agreement on transboundary haze pollution in 2014, and to the Indonesian government's creation of a fire focused situation room that's now used to coordinate first response teams. Many of the people at greatest risk of infectious disease live in the world's most remote villages. The absence of accurate population estimates and the most basic of maps, detailing roads and structures makes it difficult to execute an effective vaccination program or treat deadly outbreaks when they occur. Satellite imagery and the power of the crowd were effective tools during last year's outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. Volunteers helped us create the first complete maps of Ebola stricken villages for doctors without borders. The previous most current available map of this village in an at risk region contained little information while our satellite imagery revealed the true picture. With the help of the crowd, the map now looks like this. In 29 hours, 68 contributors mapped an entire city, 20,105 buildings, every road, every alleyway, every structure. These same tools that address outbreaks also help prevent them. Since last year, we've engaged with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative to support vaccination planning activities in Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. We mapped remote settlements and measured population density to ensure healthcare workers know where to focus their resources. This past summer, both Nigeria and Somalia marked a year without polio. On the evening of April 25th, 2015, Nepal was hit with an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the rector scale. Damage was widespread throughout Kathmandu and the surrounding villages, many of which were isolated and unreachable. Digital globe satellites captured high-resolution images of affected areas that were shared with thousands of volunteers who combed through each picture pixel by pixel to identify damaged buildings, find safe helicopter landing zones, map useful roads, and identify impassable ones. All told, these volunteers mapped 13 million structures, objects, and points of interest in an area that was largely unmapped before the earthquake. This information helped governments and aid organizations plan transportation routes for food, water, and medical care. Each day with updated imagery, we monitored makeshift camps, documented progress, and kept up with the changing landscape. By harnessing the power of satellite imagery and crowdsourcing, governments, aid organizations, and a community of committed volunteer mappers, forged a targeted response that no doubt saved lives even after the earthquake's final shocks. Modern slavery affects an estimated 30 million people according to the Global Fund to End Slavery. In July, Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter with the Associated Press, called asking for help on a story. But this was more than a story. This was a mission to save lives. Men from Myanmar and Cambodia are lured to Thailand with the promise of employment, and instead are sold into slavery, forced to work on fishing trawlers hundreds of miles from land in horrific conditions. 22-hour days for years on end, with no medical care, foul water, and little food. The reporter needed visual evidence. On July 13th, we received the coordinates of an area of interest, 500 square miles in the open seas. Using our highest resolution satellite, we collected imagery and downlinked it in near real time. It was then analyzed by our team in Westminster, Colorado. Within hours, imagery analysis confirmed the identification and location of a cargo ship with two slave boats tied alongside. Days later, authorities in Papua New Guinea freed eight enslaved men from one of those boats. Weeks later, the Indonesian authorities detained those responsible and freed more. Look at our planet. It's not just continents and rivers. It's seven billion people working and interacting with their environments. Offering a glimpse of our planet from our perch in space reminds us all that despite the vastness of Earth, we are connected. Our imagery paints a portrait of our planet in broad brushstrokes and in fine details, from which we can derive new insights and create new solutions that help all of us to see a better world. Thank you, Jeffrey, very powerful. So I'm going to ask you about a recent news event. What role have your satellites been able to play in helping trace the migration of people that were seeing in the boats from the Middle East to Europe, which had dominated the headlines of, has your company been able to provide insights to aid organizations? Well, it all starts actually with monitoring and anticipating the migration out of Syria, out of the Middle East, before these poor people actually get on the boats. So we've been tracking activity on the ground in the Middle East for years and I think you start early on, images of the expanding refugee camps in Jordan. It's a tough challenge. It is one that we're involved with helping governments and other and aid organizations both with that situation. And you've also been able to document the destruction of some of the archeological sites. Yes, we do do that as well. And discover the discovery of archeological sites too, because with the multi-spectral imagery, you can actually see what is going on or what features beneath the surface of the earth, as well as mineral content and other aspects that you can't see with the naked eye. Great, okay, so we're going to bring the rest of our panel up and we have a bit of time for a couple of questions and then questions from you. Okay, so I'm supposed to... So thank you, Jeff, for that. I guess my first question actually is going to go to Mark and Brian and it really is this, I think that Jeffrey has demonstrated at least what we can see, what imaging of the earth can do to help us understand. So I'm a legislator. I want you guys to make the case to me. Tell me the value, the long-term value in the work that you're doing, both in the solar system and in the universe. Let me pick that up first. Sure. You know, it's clear that one could argue with limited resources in a time of austerity in some parts of the world that exploring comets is perhaps something you could leave for later on. But I think the critical thing for us not only is it to do with technology and industry and inventing innovative ways of solving very serious problems. For example, Rosetta has some of the most advanced solar panels on board for very low temperature, low intensity, and that's been spilled out into industry. Perhaps more fundamental though, for me in particular, is the inspiration value of what we do in exploration that Jeffrey has pointed out. And as we all know at a meeting like this, there are many problems we face on the planet earth. And many of those problems will be solved by having children going through into STEM education subjects which we desperately need. We need people to be rational. I mean, as one of my metaphors is that we need to live in a world where two plus two equals four all the time. It doesn't depend on who you vote for that two plus two equals four. And that's just not unfortunately true around the world. So I think from our perspective we provide a degree of inspiration. And I look forward, we've seen it from the Apollo missions. We've seen it from the Mars missions over time. And I think Rosetta will inspire a new generation of kids to and hopefully adults as well to think rationally. I mean, how do you solve the problems which we have involved in getting 350 million kilometers away and rendezvousing with a comet moving at enormous speed? That takes quite a lot of planning, diligence, but also resoluteness following a path. And that's what we need on the planet earth today. And so Brian, a lot of the tools and techniques that you use are adaptable to the work of everyone here, right? Yeah, that's right. So, you know, we're doing things that I think the average child finds actually quite interesting. And the people, it's an incredible motivating factor to get people to spend their lives working on very complex, hard things, trying to solve hard problems. And so for example, when we look around in our mobile phones, we have CMOS detectors. Those are developed for missions to jujuper. And we all use them now. The imaging devices on your satellites are almost certainly have an astronomy heritage. And I say that not even knowing what they are, but they're almost certainly true. My colleagues in Australia who are, you know, looking for evaporating black holes, invented Wi-Fi. My colleagues at CERN invented, you know, the World Wide Web. These are things that were not planned. We were motivated to solve very hard problems. The reason we're so motivated, not out of money, but out of passionate interest. And that is an incredible motivating factor for people. And it has continually allowed us to develop new things that we can then spin off into companies, those ideas. And so it's a very important part to keep people motivated. Because going off and learning calculus when you're six, you don't normally convince a six-year-old, you know, when they're starting math, which is the first step of calculus, all right? Yes, I'm worried about your children, man. That's okay. It's an invisible goal. You know, making a million dollars a year is not what a six-year-old's all about. What they're really interested in is just understanding the way the world works. And so the work that you do is a visible goal that can animate these children as they're thinking about what they want to do. That's the way it seems to work, yes. So, Jeffrey, I'm gonna ask you. So, how has the space industry grown over the years? And what does it mean now that such tools are no longer available to just two or three elite governments? I mean, the nature of satellites is transforming, too. No longer just big monolithic satellites, but many smaller things, right? Is that... Well, if you think about it, the life that we all live is dependent on space. Not only Earth observation, but weather, communications. What we do, our devices, are all dependent on space. And space is incredibly hard. Some make it look easy, but the fact is, we're sending these satellites, whether they're large or small, into a very harsh environment on rockets that are basically towers of explosives with huge G-forces and vibrations, and when they get there, you can't fix them if anything goes wrong. So, what we do, it's all dependent on each other. The work of governments, the work of academia, and the work of business, together is driving innovation that is gonna unleash new opportunity, whether it's as better weather forecasts, which save lives and enhance agriculture, Earth observation to more bandwidth and better communication that lets us move these big video files all over the world. So, it's all necessary, and we're all working together in all sorts of new ways. Great, so I'm gonna ask you guys one, each short answer question, then I'm gonna open it up to the rest of you. So, this work that each of you have done over your careers, how has it changed your view about humanity's place in the universe? Well, I think the interesting point, it really comes out of what Jeffrey said, and Brian as well. I joined the European Space Agency just six years ago, but almost the great majority of my career has been in the European environment, and I've thrived on the fact that we have large numbers of member states within ESA, but also the European Union and so on, that are working together to solve many big problems. And I cannot for a second envisage, not working in an environment that involves multilateral collaboration of that kind. The kinds of challenges we're seeking to solve in space, but also on the Earth, require this international collaboration as an absolutely fundamental component. And I'm not naive, we live in a difficult world today, a difficult political world, but I think some of the things we're achieving together are shining examples. Astronomy, for example, has no borders whatsoever. Throughout my life, my career, I've traveled around and everybody speaks the same basic language, whether it's the scientific language or how you do science. So I think for me, that's been the one lesson I've learned is the power of cooperation and collaboration. Great, okay, short answers, and then I'm going to open up. We live in this vast universe. We look out and there are more planets out there that we can see than there are grains of sand on Earth. We are a tiny, tiny piece of the universe, yet through working together collectively for tens of thousands of years and being able to take the ideas of each person and combine them and train the next generation, we have been able to piece together this amazing story of our place in the universe. Humanity is amazingly powerful, precisely because it is able to work collectively together, share ideas and not just live our lives in isolation. Digital Globe is not the first business I've led. One of the things I've learned here in this industry that we share is that space and the impact of space on lives, and I think you've seen it, that we literally save lives every day has created a really meaningful experience and a connection with other organizations, all focused on really making a difference and I believe that by making a difference together, whether we're for-profit or not-for-profit, our businesses and organizations can all thrive. Thank you, so questions from the floor? How about over here on the right, second row? Thank you. My name is Taro Kono, member of the Japanese Parliament. Japan has been participating in the ISS program, International Spaceship. Every six months, one Japanese astronauts go up in the sky and come back, but we never heard anything like your presentation from those astronauts or ISS program. Are we wasting money, spending money on the ISS? Should we divert the money into a better program? What is your evaluation of the ISS program? I'm gonna give a short answer and say, one of the things that I do in my life is I'm a board member of Questacon, which is a space and, well, it's a science museum and our sister organization is in Tokyo where we have a very famous Japanese astronomer, Mori, who seems to be incredibly good at connecting to thousands upon thousands of people. So it is certainly working at some level. He seems to be able, through the museum there in Tokyo, through his efforts, I think, to really reach large numbers of Japanese children. That being said, if you feel like you're not hearing about things from ISS, then get them out there because astronauts are really inspirational and sometimes you just have to ask because we just don't go out and stand on our boxes and talk unless we're asked. And I can say myself from having researched a story that will come out later this year on this whole idea, I spent weeks researching the archive of pictures from the International Space Station over the last five years. An amazing collection of very beautiful images of our Earth are available in the public domain. I mean, I think just in the last week or so we've had the first Danish astronaut fly in space and watching that and seeing the enormous take up of interest in Denmark, but around Europe as well. And partly through the power of social media, Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut, exercised that very well a couple of years ago. I have a British astronaut, the first one, the European Space Agency going later this year. So at that level, they have an enormous power to inspire. I mean, of course, when you get to four-year-old, five-year-old children, they ask questions like, what's it like eating in space? What's it like going to the toilet in space? I mean, as an astronaut, you probably get a bit tired of this. But I would say that the critical thing that we must do going beyond the ISS, we need to go somewhere. We have been in low Earth orbit for too long and it is time that we actually picked up the reins of exploration elsewhere in the solar system. Not only again, because people like me think it's very cool to go and do that, but the Apollo era and the shuttle itself in the first few years of the shuttle were very powerful. But I think there has been that sense that we've seen it all before on the ISS now and it's time for us to pick up as a world to go somewhere else. Again, it's costly, you can't do it easily, but I think it's time we did that. Okay, thank you. Next? Yes, sir, right, center front. Microphone, please. Thank you. You showed us images of habitable planets that have now been discovered and extrapolating out based on the small area you've covered, that means there must be hundreds of billions of habitable planets. I know it's a long-standing question, but I'm interested to hear your personal opinion on why we haven't heard from intelligent life so far. So why have we not heard from intelligent life? One of the reasons is we haven't been listening very much. So earlier, a couple of months ago, Yuri Milner, a very wealthy Russian American, called me up and said, I'm interested in listening again. What do you think? And I said, okay, sounds interesting to me, but there is a real problem. The technology is developing and we can hear further and further, but in any given time, if you ask how are we gonna hear ourselves, we're gonna have to be not just relatively close, but humanity has only been around on Earth in a capacity to listen for 40 years, 40 years out of 4.6 billion or 40 years out of 13.8 billion. That's like a second in a day. So we've been here a tiny fraction and so maybe humanity will last for billions of years. I think if you ask most people, that may not be as likely as we would like. And so if we have a finite amount of time, the chances of us literally being awake when the ships pass, that is we have two active civilizations, could be quite small. But if there are really advanced civilizations, they'll be able to broadcast over whole areas and so I think it really is worthwhile going out and listening and we just simply haven't done that. So stay tuned, let's see what happens over the next five years. Okay, next. Yes ma'am, in the front, microphone please. Thank you. So the first time I understood really what it took to pull off the Rosetta mission and you know, comprehended that, my main thought was wow, what are we capable of as a human race? We could solve all our problems. It was a profound realization. That's the inspiration I think you talked about. And then understanding more about all these problems we can solve on earth, the trafficking, all of these things. Yet I think the average person, when they think about space, think about oh yeah, we're wasting money doing something out there. To me it's obvious that in order to secure our survival as a human race we need to accelerate all of these activities. We need to step off the planet faster. It's an urgency. So my question is how do we yet governments to realize that and invest more and maybe take from things like defense and put more money into space? I'm sure this is something on all of your wish lists but any insights on how we can make that happen? Well I think this question of providing ourselves a safe haven, there are problems on the earth which are man made, climate change is one but of course we're sitting ducks for a large asteroid strike at some point. Supervolcanoes, we could go through the list of potential disasters which can affect the humankind way beyond which point you won't be looking at the pictures coming from Digital Globe you will be running for cover. My concern about some of this is slightly wishful thinking that there's a blending of kind of geek fantasy about let's find a place, let's go to Mars because we'll ensure the future of humankind. Mars is a deeply inhospitable place. We like to think that because it's got a little bit of atmosphere and you can see things that are valleys and they look like they may have been watered there before that it's going to be kind of easy. The soil will not support plants. There are many, there's no atmosphere in effect. Anything that we do to go to Mars if we can put a hundred, a thousand people there we will still be dependent on the planet earth for the next hundred years at least. So there's no way of disconnecting ourselves from this planet in that way but there's also a moral dimension to this. Who's going to pick the thousand colonists and leave the seven billion people or 10 billion people on earth to meet their fates? I think we have to deal with the problems we have on the earth at the same time as we provide that lifeboat. And I think that's getting a bit disconnected in some of the, let's call it more fantastic thinking about we must go to Mars today because we need to save the human race. No, we'll save the human race by living here. So then Jeffrey, I'll let you have the last word about here on earth. Yeah, and the good news is that there is a lot of innovation happening in academia, in government and in industry. And I'm confident that's going to continue to unlock amazing things that does make life on our planet a better place. So as you can hear, for me, it certainly rekindled my imagination about the value of space exploration and I hope it did you too. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Thank you all for being here and to our panelists. Have a good evening.