 Good morning. Welcome, Space Cadets. Welcome back to the MIT Media Lab for our third annual Beyond the Cradle. We're really thrilled to have you here. We hope to see many new faces in addition to our now returning veterans, or veteran Space Cadets. Today, you'll have a fantastic program of artists, scientists, engineers, authors, astronauts, explorers, and we're really excited to share this day with you. The spirit of Beyond the Cradle is democratizing access to space. And at this particular moment in time, as we think back 50 years and celebrate the anniversary year of Apollo, we are really excited to be co-designing the future of space together with you all and thinking about how we chart the next 50 years, the next half century of space exploration. Couple quick housekeeping notes for you. Throughout the day today, if you need to check the agenda, this is, I think it just disappeared on me, but Beyond.media.mit.edu is the agenda where you'll be able to find information about our speakers, the gallery pieces that you see outside, and the workshops. We do hope you spend a little bit of time maybe over lunch picking which workshop you would like to go to, because we'll send you off. You have about an hour to dive deep into some really fascinating content, and then we'll ask you to come back for the plenary at the end of the afternoon. And now it is my distinct pleasure to welcome Joey Ito, director of the Media Lab, and Dr. Maria T. Zuber, vice president of research for MIT to kick us off for the day. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Media Lab, which is a part of MIT. And I think that this event and the initiative that we're doing is very reflective of what we're thinking a lot about at the Media Lab. So if you just a brief history of the Media Lab over 30 years ago as part of the architecture machine group where they were using computers, graphical computers, to help architects design. And one of the ideas that the Media Lab was founded on was this idea that we could take these computers and put them on desktops and democratize access to computing and kick off the personal computer revolution. And later, the internet and email, a lot of these things came out of the Media Lab. And it was a part of taking the technology from academia and government and bringing companies together. Another key feature of the Media Lab was we have over 90 companies that we interact with. So it's the connection to industry, but also very much about pushing innovation to the edges and helping startups and artists and people who don't traditionally interact with technology, give them access to this technology. And 30 years ago when we launched the Media Lab, it was kind of an explosion of techno-utopianism. If you remember back then with Ellen Kay saying things like, you predict the future by inventing it, some of our faculty still say that. But I look at the internet today and I say, wait, I thought we would just connect everybody together. We'd have world peace. And we don't. And one of the things I think the Media Lab is currently grappling with is reflecting on this techno-utopianism and saying, could we have done better? Could we have been more responsible? And if you think 50 years ago, everybody wanted their car. There were ads. It was this age of growth and prosperity. And if you think about exploration, at the end of exploration is extraction and exploitation. And I think one of the things that I think is important to do on this kind of reflection of 50 years is I think that exploration is tremendously important, but we also need to be very vigilant about what's happening. We have climate change as a result of our prosperity and our extraction and our productivity. And interestingly, it's the reflection back on Earth that helped us really understand that the Earth is this very important thing. So I think that as we go forward, it's important to involve everyone in this conversation. But as we explore, we have to be vigilant about what we're doing out there when we go. But we also have to use that as a tool to try to fix things back down here. And so to me, the balance, and this is what I'd love for us to talk about is how do we keep the wonder and the joy of exploration that science brings us together with the responsible nuance that we need in order to be reflective and not cause harm? And so not to end on such a downer, I'm gonna hand it over to Maria, who will pick us up back up again. Well, but I'm gonna continue in this vein just a little bit. So I think it's really interesting that very recently we all celebrated the first commercial launch of the Dragon that went to the International Space Station. And we were all thrilled and delighted about that. And it occurs to me, really, should we be thrilled and delighted? And of course, yes, but okay. I was thinking back to Charles Lindbergh's first flight. So his first flight was in 1927 and then commercial aviation, transatlantic, started in 1939, okay? So 12 years, okay? And then it didn't really take off cause there was this event called the Second World War that started after that. But then after Second World War in like 1946, commercial transatlantic aviation really took off, okay? So, but even taking into account a world-changing event like the Second World War, we're still talking about like 20 years for commercial aviation to really take off after we had the first transatlantic flight. So here we are, depending on whether we start at the launch of Sputnik or whether we start with the first landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, we've had 50 years. And we've now just finally put a commercial entity up at the space station. So now I'm gonna get optimistic though because we've had this 50 years and I remember back to the 40th anniversary of Apollo that the Aero-Astro department threw and it was also excellent, but it was so different than what we're doing now at 50 years because in the last 10 years, now at this event here, we have not just the Aero-Astro department and the physics department and EAPS, but we have people from all over campus. We have the Media Lab solidly involved. Tomorrow we have the Astropreneurship conference that's sponsored by Sloan. We've got people at all disciplines who are going to all three days of this conference. And so if we really wanna take advantage of the opportunity that space provides for us, we need all the smart people and we need more than just all the smart engineers and scientists, we need all the smart people in every discipline that you can conceive of, the poets, the architects, the designers. And so that's why I'm so thrilled to see so many of you yesterday, today and I hope you come back tomorrow as well. So that's my note of optimism. So hopefully I picked it back up to kind of kick us off. And so now I have the distinct honor to introduce our keynote speaker here, Professor Sam Ting. So Sam shared the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his discovery of the J Particle and you can only get the Nobel Prize once, okay, but Sam has had multiple discoveries over the course of his career, that including what I think you're gonna hear about, but he looked at the size, really defined the size of the electron family and he had really important detections of antimatter and I could go on and on. But what we're here to hear him talk about today is a little bit of the results, but the story of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. So yesterday those of you who listened to Thomas or Buchan's talk, Thomas talked about the issue of is there really great science happening at the space station? And he talked about the amazing science that was happening outside the space station and the poster child for amazing science happening outside the space station is Sam's work on the AMS. It's an international collaboration with over 500 scientists involved and for the young people in the audience, this is a story that is not just a scientific story, it is a story of perseverance and keep to it as Sam needed a dedicated shuttle flight to deliver his experiment into orbit and it's not easy to get a shuttle flight, okay? Well, it's impossible now, but even at the time it was very, very difficult and Sam really motivated by the science and the interesting thing is that AMS, when you're going into higher energy regimes in physics, you really don't know what you're gonna discover. I mean, every time we look in a place we haven't looked before, we make discoveries, but it's often difficult to make a pitch to sell something when you don't know what it is you're gonna get at the end and that of course is the fundamental nature of basic science and to do it at the scale that Sam has done and to lead an international collaboration. All of you young people in the audience who are contemplating careers, think about the effort that went into and that's what it takes to succeed at the highest level. So happy to introduce Sam now to come up and speak to us. Thank you.