 all right well thank you so much for coming out it's a real privilege and a pleasure to speak to people who actually get paid to work on Linux I have a system 76 laptop which is a Linux laptop it's my weapon of choice and I have a system 76 desktop at home which did a lot of the work that you I'm gonna talk about here but I've only been using Linux for 14 years so I feel like a bit of an imposter here but it's it's an incredible operating system I was talking earlier about this it's kind of amazing that Linux forces you to work on cool stuff because the boring stuff doesn't work so well but the cool stuff does so so I guess part of my talk here is kind of a call a call to action to take your skills and apply them in the real world and of course Linux in many ways has been built by hobbyists and people working in their free time and the projects just that I'm going to talk about today were largely projects at least began as kind of free time spare time projects so I'm going to speak about three separate things that I've worked on over the years and a couple of words of biographical introduction as well but first it's important to have at least one slide that is a wall of text and so I'm not going to read all these out but on the left we have a list of Robert Boyle's list of scientific projects and of course Robert Boyle I think holds the record for discovering the most elements of any of the scientists back in the time when you could discover elements I think he discovered like 14 or something and back then which is about 18 20 or there abouts he said wouldn't it be cool if we could figure out how to prolong life figure out how to fly planes make submarines flexible glass various advanced pharmaceuticals perpetual light the attaining of gigantic dimensions and all that kind of stuff and then I kind of made my own list about a year ago of projects that I thought we might be able to address in our lifetime on the right and some of them are more whimsical than others you know obviously solar power fusion better AI terraforming tunnel boring machine mining zeppelins post-scarcity and transhumanism and I think it's actually super exciting that we get to live in 2024 I know most of you are probably bored into this but if you've ever done any genealogy or anything you'd probably appreciate that the lives we live unspeakably charmed by the standards of any reasonable historical comparison one of the projects I'm going to speak about is the scroll prize which you know refers to these artifacts that date back 2000 years and the richest people in ancient Rome hell the richest people here in Pasadena 50 years ago had less worse access to things of extreme luxury that we take for granted like I fly home to Australia once a year like that's crazy Robert Boyle would lose his mind and of course lastly the XKCD cartoon pointing out that radioactivity is still we don't know what to do with it so this is this is a mid-journey generated image of kind of a nice looking futuristic city obviously opinions on aesthetics differ but but this kind of is a vision for what I hope that we can agree would be good to build toward which is to say a future where where there's lots of lots of greenery and plants and we're environmentally conscious and we have urban spaces that encourage life and human interaction and at the same time we are finally finding ways of building buildings out of glass and concrete and steel that less boring and and humanity as a whole you know has this kind of incredible opportunity and wealth spread all around the world and the cool thing is like I mean decent health for a man in his mid-30s I think it's good chance that I will live to see a world that looks a lot more like this than the world we're in right now let alone the world of 1970 and this is super exciting here's some biographical photos some of these are kind of old but essentially when I'm not hacking on computers I'm either climbing mountains or exploring Siberia or jumping out of planes or whatever or volcanoes actually I mean like don't sue me but if you have the opportunity to see an opting volcano in person definitely do it it's a it's the second most spectacular natural occurrence that you'll ever see the other being of course a meteorite impact but those are hard to plan for so I came to the United States from Australia in 2010 I still celebrate the day I arrived show of hands anyone here's who's an immigrant are great well welcome to United States and it's really kind of extraordinary thing that people can come from all over the world to United States sometimes with a little difficulty and and build a world for themselves here I've been 14 years I'm naturalized I can vote now but but I came out in 2010 and this is the peak of my academic career which is what I managed to get this figure into a journal and it's actually it shows me my advisor fighting with lightsabers and another advisor shooting force lightning in the shape of a gravitational wave signal that was detected from a black hole binary in spiral that's kind of pictured behind behind the lightsabers there and Disney did not sue me so actually I think this is before the sale but but this is relating some rather esoteric work that I did in grad school again using Linux of course but we were simulating these black holes colliding and I just to give you a flavor of how annoying and difficult that is if you just kind of set up your black holes in a default coordinate system and press go the default the coordinate system gets eaten by the black hole so like all your yeah all your coordinates just kind of fall into the black hole and it breaks so the awful lot of very very hard work was done there over the years and I was kind of fortunate to play a small role in that although I did leave Caltech the same day as the detection of this gravitational wave signal the first ever so that was poor timing I left left Caltech I left academia I wanted to work in hardware I was inspired by what JPL does but I and what SpaceX did but I could not work at the time on rockets because I did not have a green card so I went and worked at Hyperloop one where I was a levitation engineer working on magnetic machines and well Hyperloop kind of went through various cycles but but we did manage to build this incredible test rig out in the desert near Las Vegas and again like the the gentleman you can see next to me in that photo remained good friends to this day some of them I think even work for me now yeah one of them does all right after that I went to JPL for some most of you will notice but JPL is just up the hill here in Pasadena it's the NASA center that specializes in deep space robotics and on the top left you can see me on my first day and on the bottom left on my last day so I was there for about four years and one of the amazing things you can do at JPL is is as an employee and even as a as a tour guest you can walk through a gallery that overlooks the high bay which is this central picture here that I took when they were assembling the Perseverance rover which is the most recent Mars rover which we'll talk about a bit later on and then in the top right there's an image of the Sky Crane which is a component of that rover that basically lowers it down to the surface and in the bottom right an image of the Sky Crane in action this is a photograph of an alien spacecraft you know an alien robot landing on an alien planet and the colors are perfect and even though the rockets are firing you can't see them because Mars' surface is practically a vacuum yeah it's just it's kind of mind-boggling that this can be done at all but my wife was actually involved she worked at JPL as well and so we were working from home in the pandemic when this happened and she was one of the first people and me standing behind her desk to see this image come down which is JPL was fun but ultimately it was not really scratching a deep edge I had which was to really kind of cut my teeth with difficult management challenges and actually some of you I know will have experimented with entrepreneurship I wouldn't necessarily say that you definitely have to do it especially if you don't want to it's one of these things where if you have to be convinced to do it it's probably not the best idea but if you have considered at some point maybe starting a company and becoming you know a mechanism by which you can help your fellow humans earn a living and build value then I do recommend it it's by far the most satisfying thing I've ever done with the exception of course of having children so on the left is me in my lab coat in my garage pulling benchtop experiments reviving my first year undergraduate chemistry knowledge and then in the in the central and right hand photos you can see the castle that we rented and or least in Burbank where we're building stuff I'll talk a bit more about this later on but it's just kind of I think Linux you know kind of echoes this idea like like Linus had this idea like what if what if we could make an open-source operating system and you know it's obviously an insanely difficult unfinished project but he got far enough by himself not so differently to me with too much hair in my garage feeling I was tough doing something that he'd never done before because no one had ever done it before just seeing if it can be done all right so onto the matter what gives people feelings of power money status and thinking about the Roman Empire of course there's a reference to a meme that did the rounds recently and on the bottom right we have an image of a bronze sculpture that was found underground near Herculaneum in the Villa of Papyri and and then in the top and the next to it we have photos of more contemporary libraries and these libraries are beautiful that not not every library is beautiful but these ones are and the reason they are is that books themselves are fairly undistinguished when they're on the shelf but the reason that people build libraries like these and that they build libraries like this in the ancient world is that if you want to convey prestige if you want to brag about your wealth and your taste and your skill then you build a library and you fill it with beautiful artwork and sculpture and books and books were then not commodified by Amazon they were extremely expensive to procure and own and to produce and so it is not exactly a surprise that we when we read essentially the tatters the remnants of the ancient texts that we retain to this day we find references to libraries and people who had great reverence to books who read them more or less continuously I think Pliny the Elder lived to a relatively advanced age and spent his entire life surrounded by multiple scribes who either continually reading to him or continually taking dictation that's how he spent his time like like this production function of these people they kind of knew what it was about anyway so it turns out that Calpone Calpone's Piso who is a contemporary and ultimately the father-in-law of Julius Caesar built most likely it was him who built this incredible replica of the Getty Villa in in the Neon Ables and this is a reconstruction if you like a rendering of what it might have looked like and it was discovered by accident in the 1750s and excavated and just amazing I mean like these people were not so different from us they enjoyed a beachside vacation but this house which is absolutely enormous contained within a working library we know this because in the scrolls we found in there here's another image we have found multiple copies of the same text with like revisions and notes on it right so like if you want to show how astonishingly rich you are not only do you have a library that's full of ancient scrolls you also have like a troop of philosophers and scribes who sit in your library generating new new work over time right it's not actually all that different from kind of the venture capital like seed funding type thing but but they're actually collocated here so if you wanted to go and speak to Philodemos you had to go and he lived in this house with his philosopher buddies and wrote road stuff and of course this house this villa was around about 160 years until it had a very very very bad day so on the left we have a painting of one of the major eruptions of Vesuvius that occurred it kind of in the early modern period and it's actually a fabulous original work in the Huntington library which is just down the road here of another eruption of Vesuvius very similar to this and on the right some photos that I took when I hitchhiked my way around Italy in a previous life and obviously it has continued to erupt up until about 1944 was the most recent eruption but the eruption that occurred in 8079 was kind of less lava and more ash and it buried amongst other places Herculaneum and Pompeii which we know about so well and Herculaneum is somewhat less famous but it's actually better preserved because it was buried in about 70 feet of pyroclastic flow and subiated mud that had the effect of not only killing everyone there but but also sealing the organic material and then heating it to pyrolyzer which ironically preserved it so we know of all these ancient libraries like Library of Alexandria and so on and they've all been lost either through fire or depletion or the Dark Ages or whatever but in the Villa of Papyrus which is it's kind of hard for me to point it out here see if I can pull up a cursor all right is that visible yeah okay so this hole here is the excavated part of Herculaneum and just over here to the left is the excavated part of the Villa of Papyrus so right right by the town because in those days no one had cars so if you had to be close to the town in order to get access to labor and whatnot there and then up here of course it's the is the volcano that that pushed all the ash down here and historically this would have been the shoreline and this extra land is the result of mostly the eruption that occurred in 8079 so you know if you walk around this town you can see the ancient wood and the ancient rope and other kind of materials that generally would not have lasted for 2000 years and certainly over in Pompeii they did not because it was buried under ash instead of under mud this is a plan prepared of the Villa of Papyrus showing the tunnels that were used to excavate it this is actually the first I learned last night in an event the first modern excavation of of any archaeological site previously they would have dug it up and looted it this time they very meticulously dug and recorded every the location of everything I found and this meant that when John Paul Getty got interested in this and decided to make a replica over in Malibu he could take these plans and basically make replicas of all the sculptures and put them in exactly the same place that they are in the original that said as far as ancient excavations go the Villa is still mostly unexcavated and unexplored it is still buried underground and the structure itself had multiple levels only one of them has been excavated almost all of the books were found in one little room over here somewhere and this is what the excavation of Pompeii looks like today with the volcano in the background I do recommend visiting it if you if you ever have the opportunity all right so this is what the scrolls look like so these were discovered and people initially did not really know what they were they thought they were lumps of wood or something and threw them away but eventually someone realized that they were papyrus which is a a reed that's grown in the Nile Delta and processed to form paper or paper and papyrus at the same word but something like paper and they were kind of stuck together in a in a long roll about 10 meters long about 30 35 feet long and then it was all rolled up and each one is you know kind of a modest burrito in size and then of course not only did the scrolls get replaced slowly because they went photocopiers back in the day so they were probably already fairly degraded they were then crushed by a superheated mud pyrolyzed buried underground for 2000 years excavated subsequently damaged some of them lost people tried to unroll them obviously this is so crunched up that unrolling it would be extremely difficult and that's essentially it like this this scroll here almost certainly contains around 10,000 words of ancient text that no one has ever read no one since since it was last you know put back on the shelf and we have no way of knowing what it is how frustrating is that but the reason this exists is because people knew for the last 250 years that maybe someday we'll have technology that can unwrap this and the cool thing is we'd now do have this technology so enter Brent Seals Brent Seals is a fellow on the left here his professor at the University of Kentucky and he got interested in this problem and he and his students throughout 20 years have been working on using certain advanced technology to read scrolls and so this is a fragment of a Dead Sea Scroll and fortunately for this in this experiment they found that the ink was kind of a metal based ink or it had metal ions in it which glow rather nicely on X-rays unfortunately the Herculaneum Scrolls that we have scanned so far do not they are a carbon based or a soot based ink that is written on a papyrus layer that is now also completely made of carbon so it is somewhat more difficult to read it to say the least but this project went on and then Nat Friedman who some of you will have heard of former CEO of GitHub and then some of you on the right who doesn't use Linux got involved in this and Nat Friedman said he was not involved and basically proposed a prize to try and garner interest from people like you right people like you people like me who think this is cool who think I know how to use computers I know how to code I know how to automate stuff I know how to process large data files and I'm obsessed with the Roman Empire let's let's let's have a go see what we can find and so they started this competition I guess last year announced it and and you know they had a it's kind of an interesting thing it's kind of a blend of like the grand prize and then a blend and then progress prizes that in order to win them you had to open source what you already found which kind of made sure that everyone involved in this project was constantly brought up to date with the state of the art of the process I actually met a lot of these people at an event last night for the first time and it's just it's amazing it's actually a very small core of people like literally a few dozen people got together and and figured out how to advance the state of the art of this process by decades in their spare time over the course of a year so here's a cross section of one of the scrolls this should give you some idea for how difficult it is and actually the process of reading one of these scrolls using this technique that has been pioneered is first it is scanned in a essentially a computed tomography like a CT x-ray imager much like medical one but much much higher power the resolution here is eight microns which is 20 times narrower than human hair something like that and then the scanned data file is processed to what's called segmented which is to say try and unwrap sections of it into contiguous sheets that are flat and then those sheets are read using an AI kind of ink detection neural network to determine where the ink is and then that's all assembled and then the the ink detection layer is then you know optical character recognition but usually by hand or by I by experts edited and then holes and so on are appeared it's a very laborious process and part of what you can help with is accelerating this process in particular the segmentation process which is the process of starting with a file that looks like this and unwrapping it into a nice long 35 foot long sheet and as you can see this is a screenshot from one of my attempts to build a kind of autonomous agent that would trace these layers around the edge of this big gap and it went off the rails at the right hand side because I'm only moderately talented when it comes to writing this sort of code but it is a worthy problem and we do need to solve it right now if you incorporate the labor and computing it costs roughly a million dollars to segment a scroll there are 600 known extant scrolls and probably many thousands more that are buried this does not scale we need some way of like file segment done to largely automate this process okay and then my personal individual contribution as outlined here by Ashley Vance is that eventually I gave up on writing software to solve this problem and just stared at the scrolls for a really long time which I did I made a kind of a viewer that allowed me to do some optical some image manipulation and then I stared at this file for probably 20 hours eventually built an ontology of different textures and then recognize that one of the textures was ink and then basically I'll play this video and I'll give you a bit of a voice over this is how it worked so this is what the raw data looks like once it's been unwrapped you can see layers of pyros overlapping each other at right angles and you kind of scrub through the layers back and forth it's a thickness of a sheet of paper and you see this crackle pattern say that looks like it could be a pie or possibly an IOT ligatured to a towel so I got out my Sharpie and started scrolling on my screen to pick this up because it's nice and quick and then this is the AI generated image which obviously overlaps quite nicely with what I what I saw by hand and of course this allowed us to scale this to enormous enormous amounts of text so we have here I think 15 about half the bottom half of 15 columns of text that were written in the scroll that the scrolls are not read like this they're read like this and they are read from left to right but I'm running this from right to left and as you can see some of these sections are very clear and some of them are very not clear and we need your help to come in here and refine these algorithms so that we can first of all detect the ink and then second of all fill in the gaps with some kind of ancient Greek LLM because there's only about 50 people worldwide who can actually read Greek well enough to do this by hand like and they're all pretty old it's we're gonna have to use AI to solve this problem go to the next slide no next alright so here are the three three gentlemen who won the grand prize $700,000 split between the three of them now I don't know about you but 200 and something thousand dollars would be life-changing money for me so and Luke in the middle there's 22 he's a lovely guy but like it's kind of derailed his life plan I met his father yesterday and his father was like I don't know how to think about this my son has dropped out of college and unfortunately Yusuf on the left was unable to join the the prize ceremony because despite the fact he applied for a visa to visit the United States months ago the Department of Aggression told him to get stuffed so that's very sad but he's still working on it and then Julian Schilliger on the right has been working on a upgraded automated segmented segmenting system this is essentially this is the first time that anyone has ever read this much text anything like this much text using CT process data not all of it has been translated but we think that the sections of it basically are philosophy it's talking about like what is what is pleasure in life essentially so maybe it's not like the most revelatory text you know there's a couple of blog posts out there that say you know what would be the most amazing ancient text to recover but at the same time the contextual hints you get from this give you a picture or an insight into the lives of these people who lived 2000 years ago that we would otherwise never have we have so little from the ancient past and this is a chart that I put together to illustrate the point so in blue we have by a number of scrolls essentially the entire ancient corpus that has come down to us one scroll for reference is about one tenth of a novel that ten thousand words so it's almost nothing there's a an addition that's put out by Harvard called the Lerb edition which is translations of ancient Greek and ancient Latin texts and you can fit all of it on a bookshelf that I know if you just stack them in front of this stage it would come from that corner to about here so like any of you could go and buy these books for you know less than a new car and read them all in a year or two and at that point have read all the ancient text that has come down to us via the medieval scribes and yet we know of relatively undistinguished private citizens in ancient Rome having personal libraries of over 40,000 scrolls which would be about 4,000 books Thomas Jefferson's private library was about seven and a half thousand books which he sold to the Library of Congress in the early 1800s so this graph here assumes that this library only had 25,000 scrolls which is probably conservative and that the scrolls were constantly produced during the period the library operated around about 80 years I decided the turn of the millennium and plus some number of ancient scrolls that predated it that had been preserved up to that point which we know from later attestations did exist at the time right like you could just go down to your bookshop and buy these works that's probably underground right now it's probably at most 10 feet from an existing tunnel it's already been dug and I'd say within a year within a year we'll have a much much improved pipeline that can actually like take one of these scans and produce something like that text with a lot less work and actually Elon Musk put into just over two million dollars for this year's scroll prize bonuses which is like reading 95% of one of these scrolls so regardless of your opinions on Elon Musk I think we can all agree that he would survive with less money so you should you should compete with these prizes all right so that's that's wrapping up the scroll prize I probably should have mentioned that I studied Latin for seven years in in high school so like this is I knew about this and I was like one day we're gonna x-ray these things and figure it out it's kind of crazy if you keep your ear to the ground you can see these incredible opportunities and the grand prizes for these are generous like I want a progress prize of ten thousand dollars which you know I spent on a new computer wonderful but like the a lot of the other people who got involved in this in this project one significant sums of money all right so the second section of this talk is going to be about building a better future for all of humanity and here's another journey generated image of a cool futuristic city although I don't know I kind of like the the hodgepodge of the you know the urban environment but different tastes whatever so this is the good news I kind of alluded to this earlier but the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is around 500 million today which is a lot larger than I would like it to be but it seems that that number will probably converge to zero in the next few decades and so we can actually say with relative confidence that the number of human years of extreme poverty that are left to be endured by the human race is a few billion maybe 10 billion of west which is extraordinary right because if you had looked at this graph in 1970 say 1980 and you said can you put a bound on the number of years that a human mind will have to endure extreme provisions in misery the best answer you could give would be three quarters of the human race will always be enduring misery which is a lot better than it was in 1800 when it was 99.99% of the human race essentially living in abject poverty but it's not great and so we are at this point now we're moving in the right direction this is extremely encouraging the vision that I kind of outlined here is like the emancipation of every last man woman and child on the surface of the earth from condition of material want and if we eat our vegetables and we do the right things it will happen in our lifetime this is the reason why it's occurring which is explosive economic growth worldwide it turns out that when everyone gets rich it's it's a good thing obviously some people richer than others but overall everyone's getting richer and the main reason this is occurring is that we're getting much much better at using energy there is no such thing as a rich low energy country and so the the zero order solution to this problem is to take the remaining poorer countries on the left down there and greatly increase the energy that they have available there are a couple of challenges to doing this of course here's the United States economy here's another chart that's full of text or say energy budget in 2021 and if you look closely there you'll see roughly two thirds of the energy that the US economy consumes comes from fossil sources which poses two key problems the first is that it's finite there's not enough to go around even though it is fabulously good value to yank out of the ground and burn it it's roughly a hundred times cheaper as a source of energy than food in terms of mechanical work that can be applied which is why we can afford to drive cars around which are significantly more energetically intensive than like some ancient war elephant or something but the other problem of course is that it's melting the world gradually the CO2 builds up in the atmosphere hits the planet this is actually not necessarily terrible news if you live in a very cold climate but it is terrible news if you depend on trade and agriculture that occurs close to sea level which is most of us and the usual set of solutions to this problem which are well simply stop burning oil well we know what that'll do or will force big emitters to pay for carbon sequestration are also very problematic because as you can see from this chart on the bottom right essentially the corporations in the industries that are responsible for the highest emissions which is typically materials utilities oil and gas also have the lowest revenue per ton and the lowest profit per ton and so the actual amount of economic power that is available to sequester the carbon that they emit is on the order of a dollar per ton of CO2 and the cost to capture and sequester a ton of CO2 is more like a thousand dollars so it's not close it will never be close the result of forcing these companies to pay to sequester their CO2 even if we were able to do it worldwide would be that staples we depend on such as concrete steel food oil would become completely unaffordable and obviously result in a reversal of that of that graph showing number of humans in extreme poverty so we need some other some other solution and really technology is the way there's three key ways to do this this is probably the most controversial slide in my entire talk and this is likely to make at least some of you quite annoyed but essentially we need to decouple these three problems we've got a temperature global temperature problem we have a global CO2 problem and a global energy problem and so in order to solve the temperature problem we need to take some of the sulfur that we recently took out of marine fuels particularly in the North Atlantic and put it back ideally if you put it in the stratosphere then we can make do with about a hundred times less sulfur and have the same net cooling effect but actually if you if you look at the graphs of the recent temperature rise in the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans it is stark and it correlates perfectly to the cessation of use of high sulfur marine bunker fuel and that is because sulfur pollution reflects heat from the sun back into space extremely effectively it also hurts people particularly in port port areas so I think overall it's a net wind to desulfurize our fuel but we should take some small fraction of that fuel of that sulfur and put it back in the stratosphere and this is not forever this is to keep a lid on our temperature for the next decade or two while the other two prongs of this approach get into place but I think it would be my personal opinion is it is extremely irresponsible given that we understand and have this technology to allow the world's temperature to rise to the point where we destabilize ice sheets and things and cause mass famines just today in Ghana average temperature of 43 Celsius which is about 110 Fahrenheit this is the temperatures which are no longer survival for human life and with tiny investment we can keep a lid on global temperature for as long as it takes for us to move our economies away from oil. The second step is CO2 removal that's most likely the easiest way to do that is via enhanced weathering so pick a mountain somewhere in an equatorial area grind it up into dust put it in the ocean soak up CO2 that's dissolved in the ocean sinks to the bottom we can yank out one or two trillion tons of legacy CO2 that we put in the air over the last hundred years and then the third step is cut greenhouse gas emissions aggressively so this is done by electrification of our industry so as much as possible switch industrial processes switch transportation over to electricity and then the step that I'm getting to work on a terraform with this band of killers it's amazing to get to build your own team I've never gotten previously gotten to work with people where every single person I felt was like really cool to work with there was always one person who ruined it but now I'm that person look at these people so we're doing synthetic fuels we're making carbon neutral fuels out of atmospheric CO2 so when you burn it you're not putting new CO2 into the air you're only putting CO2 that was already in the air back into the air and of course that's a nice idea but you have to figure out how to do it cheaper than drilling a hole in the ground which sounds impossible but actually drilling is really expensive so it might be possible this is this is our facility about 15 people in this photo and you know big news coming out this week so the only reason this is possible is that the other thing that humans do is silicon other than run learning servers is is solar panels and since about 2009 the learning rate for solar has been about 44 which is to say that every time production has doubled the price has come down by 44 and currently production is doubling roughly every two years although that is gradually shortening which is the same as saying that the price for solar energy is coming down by about 20 per year this is extraordinary right like we live in a world where we're enduring insane inflation and where everything else labor materials land etc it's becoming more scarce and at the same time energy this thing that is unlocking global prosperity and curing poverty and enabling us to get beyond fossil fuels is coming down in price by by 20 per year and doubling in volume every two years this is it's mind-blowing and so if any of you are thinking of starting a company in the hardware space think of something to do with solar power that is not yet being done there's about 20 or 15 or 20 different industries out there that that need to be disrupted with solar ours is just one of them so i don't want to give you as the hard sell too much but this is our product it takes in power and water it produces hydrogen in the electrolyzer it captures co2 in the direct air capture area and converts co2 and hydrogen into natural gas and critically on the bottom right it makes money how much chemistry do you guys want i mean like i guess i guess the interesting thing i can say about this without without going too much into high school chemistry is that the science behind this process has been understood since at least the late 1800s it was put into mass scale in germany in the 1920s the nazi war machine was run on synthetic fuel made from coal which is a fossil fuel but it was they made kerosene and gasoline from coal and this process is not that different to the chemical synthetic fuel processes developed by bsf at loner and other chemical plants which still operate to this day so it's not like this has to be invented from whole cloth like fusion we just have to figure out how to take the coal out of the process and put solar power in which is what we're doing with the direct air capture right and here's the workshop so for most of my career i have to work in front of a computer and you know in a room full of people with front of computers and and keep the kind of the workshop work to the garage at home but now i don't hire a single software engineer um and my life is so much happier um software engineers are so expensive um maybe one day but but mostly it's just machinery which is a lot of fun and as you can see this it's not the the prettiest building on earth um bits of the ceiling are falling down but yeah it is what it is um our machines are meant to work outdoors anyway so if it rains on them occasionally indoors well it might be a deal so um i'll show you some more photos of hardware this is this is the reactor that converts co2 and hydrogen into into methane the reason i show you this is that we will use these things on mars one day because mars does not have naturally occurring hydrocarbons and we do need hydrocarbons to make plastics amongst other things so we'll have a system like this on mars and that's dr. noda is our chemical engineer and um this is our electrolyzer stack so it's critical to be able to make cheap hydrogen and we figured out how to do that again i'm not going to jump the gun on our announcement later this week but uh if you follow green hydrogen you'll be quite surprised at our numbers i'll put it that way and then this is direct air capture well again we're we're breaking your ground in terms of being able to yanks here to out of the air cheaply this is the vision so i mentioned earlier that that oil and gas is about 100 times cheaper per calorie than burgers um burger and fries uh which is a good thing because it because on average americans consume about 100 times more energy in the form of electricity and oil and gas than in the form of food which is one of the reasons why our lives are awesome compared to our ancestors who if they needed mechanical labor had to either use their own muscles or whip an animal um but it also means that the solar panels and the solar synthetic process is significantly more efficient than than plants um at capturing co2 from the air and then reducing it into useful useful chemicals like a thousand times more productive and that means that we can actually have these two processes they can coexist right we can have 90% of the surface essentially restored to um you know whatever antecedent state we we prefer uh and and actually when we think of like wilderness actually what we're typically thinking of in this country is like actually a fairly carefully curated garden by indigenous american people um but whatever whatever aesthetic we'd like to build and then with you know a modest addition of solar arrays we can actually get all the energy that humanity will will need unless ai gets truly out of control um to uh to supply the energy that our industry needs uh in relative to compact cities um and actually the neat thing is you can put solar arrays out in the desert just across the mountains here in in mojave or whatever and the shade that they put on the ground can actually reverse the desertification that has only occurred there in the last 2000 years so now 10 000 years ago during the last ice age all our local deserts were actually pretty lush that's we can we can this this is a rendering of mojave in 2050 um and so lastly i'm going to talk about the roman empire on mars and um which of course is a reference to building cities there um but you know mid-journey wants more with the goods um so this is a photo that i took back when i used to fly planes of the grand canyon um and the human eye connected to the visual cortex is pretty extraordinary so you can look at this picture um which is a two-dimensional image and if i gave you a piece of paper and a pencil you could probably draw a pretty accurate map of the grand canyon in this in this picture including the various terraces and how they connect to each other um the the more or less impossible cliffs where the water flows all that kind of stuff you're able to deduce geographic information topographic information from a single image uh just just on the basis of shading and shadows and texture i thought if human eyes can do it why can't we train an ai to do it it turns out it's really hard um we've been evolving for billions of years um but this is the best image we can get of the planet mars from earth this is with the Hubble space telescope and there's a lot of detail there you can see some some craters and and the south polo cap um and a few other details but if you wanted to do a high resolution hydrology study you're kind of out of luck because you don't have the the data this is the best we can do from earth um and that's pretty good actually if you if you got to mount wilson you can rent out a telescope there for an evening and if mars is close by and you look through it you can see it about as well as this because that telescope is the same size um as the Hubble which is kind of amazing like there's more detail there than you can see on the moon with a pair of binoculars so yeah big telescopes are cool um but you know we recognized this problem a long time ago so nasa sent mariner four took these photos of mars i mean kind of craters at the time actually a lot of people thought that mars had like canals and forests and stuff so this was like kind of a downer on that and then they sent mariner seven which took this photo um obviously they got a lot better at building satellites with cameras on board i wonder why um in the 1960s uh of the edge of the south pole cap um which is pretty extraordinary and then um and then this is a photo that's actually taken by an engineering camera on the Perseverance rover as it came into land in on Jezero crater so this was taken just just a minute or so before the previous photo of the alien spacecraft landing uh and that that disk in the foreground here is the heat shield that has fallen off uh and then this shape here kind of this arc here is the edge of Jezero crater which is about a hundred kilometers across um and an ancient time this was a lake because these features down here are the remnants of ancient delta and then this is the horizon of the planet in the distance here um i think it's cool image um and then here's a photo taken by mars reconnaissance orbiter of the rover coming down under its parachute again here's the delta feature on the left coming down to land um that's that's that's kind of cool bragg marites jpl you're like yeah i took a photo of my mars rover landing on mars like that's kind of cool um and then another mars orbiter more recent one called mars global surveyor had a laser altimeter and made this data set which has about a 450 meter resolution um which is great so on the left you can see uh some giant volcanoes and on the right some actually almost as giant volcanoes the one on the left the big circle is um 20 i'm gonna say 24 kilometers tall it's about three times taller than Everest which is pretty cool and then and then these giant holes particularly these two ones on the bottom uh giant impact craters from the noakean period like back just after the planet formed but mars's surface has never been really really comprehensively resurfaced as earth has so you can see these ancient ancient scars um and i got interested in terraforming and so the first step terraforming of course is to form a hydrological survey and this is a simulation that i did of um of of where rivers would form on mars based on the molar data set which i just showed you and what you can see um is these like red lines showing lots of flow in a narrow area and if you look at the visual imagery there you can actually see canyons like mars has had water flowing on it in the past uh and cut these holes and for a planet that's made almost entirely of craters the drainage systems are actually pretty rational like there's long rivers and stuff it's not just like the canadian shield with a bunch of like muddy lakes and things all over the place that's pretty amazing and then there's an ocean in the north of course but this is not good enough this is not good enough um because when i went and made some renderings of what um what a terraformed mars would look like it's actually kind of kind of cool like little islands and bays and so on but it's all kind of higher resolution like you know higher altitude like the the camera altitude in these images is much much higher than like a jet like you're flying over flying over to Australia or something and if you zoom in you can see the pixels it's very unsatisfactory uh and so i embarked on this project to try and make a higher resolution map because i felt that if we could make a a beautiful enough rendering of what mars would look like when it's terraformed then there's that that giant volcano again here on the right it would motivate people like you to be like this is something we should do a terraformed mars a mars that's green and blue with clouds and lakes and life be the most beautiful thing that humans have ever built um so we go back to this this camera image here it turns out that the orbiter that made this image has taken so many photos of the planet that is now a five meter resolution black and white data set of the entire planet which you can download from the Murray Lab at Caltech it's only eight terabytes um and uh of the planet's kind of large uh of the entire planet and because the orbit is in a unsynchronous orbit uh all the photos are taken with consistent lighting ah now so if we train an ai to deduce topographic variations on one of these areas it will work on all of them because the lighting is the same so that's what i did on the left we have the the the high resolution optical black and white image and on the right we have the topographic image rendered as a relief map and um this particular image is about a thousand kilometers wide and so the the resolution uh here is actually the laser altimeter data set and we're going to zoom in on this crater in the middle uh just here this is Jezero crater which is where the rover is um so we're going to zoom in on this crater and this is about 500 kilometers wide 500 meter resolution this is the limit of the resolution of the laser altimeter every subsequent image after this the ai takes the best topographic image we've got plus the optical image at twice the resolution overlays them and interpolates using this trained trained rule and um we get this fabulous detail that otherwise does not exist in any form actually it's not true in this particular place nasa spent millions of dollars doing um stereo mapping which you can use for ground truth but for the most of the planet that's never been done so this is the the delta feature you can see the river flowed in from the left and then spread out into this lake on the right um continue to zoom in on the left you can now see some sand ripples uh on the on the optical image those are sandians um in the ancient channel and um continue to zoom in here some of those sand ripples are now visible in the topographic data set and actually this coincidentally happens to be the place where um the Mars helicopter crashed about a month ago uh landing on these sand ripples because it's very very difficult to use stereo control over sand because it's so uniform in color you don't know where you are you run into it and then the little helicopter died oh man anyway um we're zooming into the pixels here so so this is the this is the this is the vision we build the the rad city on mars too anyway um to wrap up let's say if there's anything that that that pulls all these ideas together it is if your vision for the future includes elements that will not occur by themselves you have to build them no one else is going to build them the frontier is inefficient if i had not started terraform industries no one would be doing synthetic fuel this way if i hadn't done this Mars mapping no one would have done it so yeah think about your vision for the future and the missing pieces and the ones that don't yet have an economic imperative all right that's the that's the end i'm i'm going to take some questions if that's okay but thank you for your attention thank thank you casey that was uh that was quite enlightening um so ballo's running around with a mic if you've got questions raise your hand while he's doing that um i think you will be the only husband and wife care that are part of the scale family with a scale jersey a couple fun facts casey uh i believe casey's partnered with our with a keynote we had three years ago four years ago here in this room uh so it's the first husband wife keynote uh couple you've got um but thanks thanks again for joining us he wants to show the name uh and then i think other little fact i think there's some folks on our av team that helped write the flight software for that helicopter that crashed into mars that you were talking about so yeah yeah lots of lots of h.e.p.l folks on the team one of the challenges of course on mars is that it's it's roughly 20 minutes light time away so the helicopter has to be completely autonomous yes so and it also has to be like all the control hardware and software has to weigh like a couple of dozen grams so if if you want to learn about that michael starch has given a couple talks here at scale about that you can go back and look from on our youtube channel um but i'm i'm looking around the room ballo do we have a question someone anyone please so there's a new technology that i read about that seems very promising a company wants to produce nickel 69 batteries that will decay into copper and they'll last they say 50 to 100 years yeah so if you could eliminate the need to deliver power that would i think have a great impact on the world to eliminate the distribution yeah so the technology if any of you want to look it up later is called beatable takes um and there's a handful of um nuclear species that that decay via beta decay and so instead of using solar energy to kick your electron across the Fermi gap um in a solar array you can use a radioactive art um mission to do that and they've actually been employed in pacemakers there's some people walking around today that have um radioactive beatable take battery in a pacemaker but it um it has not yet been like reached major uh commercial scale so um i hope i wish anyone who's trying at well i think it's a neat technology the major challenge actually if any of you want to solve it is is current density so um 1860 cell such as you might have in a laptop or or or a car or something electric car um can discharge essentially all its power in a few minutes um and while it's true that the beatable take battery can last for a hundred years the amount of current that it can actually produce at any given time is pretty small um because the process of emitting that beta particle also makes a lot of heat um and so it it gets too hot anyway you were showing us that graph of sort of energy distribution and usage in our economy is that yeah yeah that was is that pre-ai or does that include a that's from 2021 so yeah so that's pre that's pre-chat gpt is what you're telling me and now now the bubble for microsoft or open ai is just like that much bigger well it there's a lot of a lot of kind of chit chat um now about um kind of growing growing demand for power partly as a result of us reindustrializing after you know 30 or 40 years of not not much um and partly as a result of kind of previously avoidable and now more or less unavoidable um drag on deploying more grid transmission power um but but mostly ai data center demand so we're talking like gigawatt scale data centers going in and you can't just like plug a gigawatt scale power cord into the grid and expect everything to work right so i think i think it'll mostly be solar and batteries kind of islanded beyond the grid to do that i know what edlin charges us for a power outlet in one of these rooms i wonder what they i can't imagine what they would charge us for a gigawatt plug versus so power outlet like typical power outlet in the united states is about 1.2 kilowatts so a gigawatts about a million of those cool so um i'll put a donation box outside um so my question is uh how would you tear for mars if you get to set the plan yeah so actually i'm going to a workshop next next month to talk about this um god that sounds like a dream job um and they're not paying me but it seems to me that to tear for mars you have to solve the heat problem and you have to solve the atmospheric composition problem um and the heat problem is easiest most easily solved with you know an array of millions of of relatively small scale maybe the size of this room solar sales so you could mass producers in a factory in in taiwan say and then and then just hurl them into orbit with starship and then they'd fly from low earth orbit to mars and then hang out there and and essentially make the sun shine on the dark side as well um to heat the planet up a bit um but then then you can have a warm poisonous planet instead of a cold poisonous planet so you still have to fix the chemistry of it and that's uh i think that's a much more involved problem but i think step one is the heat problem so just getting some ideas for like slides i can add so i have several questions but i'll i'll pick one i i heard a proposal back in the 70s of dropping tailored algae into the atmosphere of venus yes to to make it nice yes does that seem at all plausible to you no okay i mean i'm aware of the idea it's a cool idea the problem is that that venus um this has almost no water in its atmosphere uh and algae require water lives so um you would end up in a situation where you would if if the algae could survive they would deplete what little water remains and not really affect the climate um terrifying venus is almost certainly much much more difficult okay you didn't mention nuclear you must have an opinion on it nuclear well so i'll i'll preface this by saying that i taught nuclear physics at caltech for a couple of years including in the lab and i have a um a tritium source in my bedroom uh that glows green and that's completely legal by the way um uh you can just buy them on amazon um so i'm not anti-nuclear in any sense of the word um i think technology is interesting but i think that you know since the 1950s it's been extremely challenging to develop nuclear power plants that uh kind of economically compelling um and particularly now against the backdrop of solar falling 20 percent a year it's it's very very difficult and of course nuclear and solar are a little bit different in some ways in that you know solar works during the day nuclear works you know most of the time but um but but essentially you can you can pay your solar or batteries and and then that will provide you know as much as much power as you're prepared to spend on batteries essentially indefinitely um and and you know you can do that in a few months and and right now there's not a not a single nuclear power manufacturer like nuclear power plant manufacturer in the united states that can deliver you a nuclear power plant in like 10 years um so and let alone at the scale that we'll need so to do the synthetic fuel thing we'll need 400 terawatts globally uh 400 terawatts of nuclear is more than a thousand times more than is currently deployed so like i don't know if there's enough uranium floating around and if we wanted to do um ai at the limit it would be more like i think 173 000 terawatts of solar insulation on earth so um that's a problem any other dreams that i can crush um sacred say yeah yeah i mean i think i saw hawaii is like almost primarily powered by solar plug into a battery at this point or or yeah a lot more than other places um there's a handful of yeah so like a common canard against solar is that like well you know it can only provide a part of the market or it needs to be paired with wind or you need to have like a thousand mile transmission line to make it work um but there's quite a number of island nations now that are essentially solar plus batteries and yes they don't have like a massive industrial base but um but they can kind of give you a glimpse into the future uh because the the economic conditions that exist in these places is very similar to the economic conditions that will exist say here in five years time um but like Los Angeles is almost all solar during the day even now in in early spring uh anyway you can look it up on the the California ISO website uh for yourself um and then and then you're probably 10 or 20 percent batteries overnight as well already and that's this I think six six gigawatts of solar in the Mojave another eight gigawatts in the pipeline so um we're not we're not done yet awesome well thank you again Casey for joining us thank you um