 I'm going to take you guys squishy, but I'm going to ease you into it. We've been talking a lot about physics and a lot about control, which is all good. But I need you to think less about control and more about collaboration. But don't worry, I'm going to ease you into it. We're going to start talking about space. I bet there's a lot of... I cannot work this computer up it. There's not a computer yet that can beat me. Yet. It's trying though. Okay, here we go. So I bet there's a lot of science fiction fans in here. Come on. All right, thank you. I love science fiction, but it wasn't for the reasons of really neat tech or really fast ships or even space battles. It was because of first contact. How do you meet another species that might be competitive with you and not have to kill them or have them kill you? And even better, how do you meet another species that exists completely orthogonally to you? How do you tap into that market? And so I was into the Star Trek where they go make that look easy. Look, here's some aliens. We can talk to them. They speak the same language. It's all cool. They all eat sugar. It's fine. That is not real life. I really thought I was going to get shot in a space to be a xenobiologist, but then I turned 10 and realized I was going to have to stay here. But I'm lucky. I'm a microbiologist. My work is here. The strangest life on earth is right with us, and it is existing orthogonally to us. We used to work in the same ecosystem as them on the same economy as everything else on the planet. We used to do biomass. We burned hydrocarbons to be keep warm, fresh hydrocarbons. We switched our economy. We moved to petrochemicals, and the rest of the world didn't. Most of the world didn't. And we are not part of their economy anymore. They're very alien to us, and we're having trouble tapping into it. The most alien things on life live on and in us, and they are rocking this planet. They're running this planet without our input. This guy, I mean, he looks like the sort of art properties for a really great science fiction thriller. He's a bacteria called myxococcus, and he eats poop. He likes poop. He prefers rabbit poop and even more picky than that. He likes wild rabbit poop. But what he does with that is he makes anti-cancer drugs. They're very important to him at his scale, but he's turning something really cheap into something that is very expensive. They're all doing biomass conversion very efficiently. We're not on that level. But the planet is so rich with these recipes that we can't even exploit right now. We know they're out there. We know they're doing these things, and we're just sort of ignoring it because it's just poop in the soil. But a genome, every single bit of DNA on the planet is a part of a collection of recipes that worked. If there's a bio problem, if there's a chemical problem, there is a biosolution. It's out there. You can see it working in the organisms that are still alive today. A genome, your genome, is a record of all the recipes that worked for some chemical problem. So if you step back, the planet is a library. The planet is just full of recipes for how to solve problems that we are approaching with petrochemicals and intense energy and a lot of brute force. We need to go back and check out some books at the library. Some of these recipes have been harder to access than others. There are bacteria on this slide. I'll give you a hint. It's the green ones. They make 70% of the oxygen on our planet. Y'all thought it was plants, maybe? It's not. It's the bacteria in our oceans. They're responsible for keeping us alive. We're not even sure how to talk to them. They exist orthogonally to us. They're doing something that we're critically dependent on and we cannot manipulate them. If the oceans change too much and they decide to stop doing it, we're over. There's other bacteria on here that do more mundane things like make magnets out of river water or turn urine into rocket fuel. Those are really cool. There's ones that turn all of the biomass that otherwise we would leave to rot on the field into methane. That's cool. There's also bacteria on here that convert the nitrogen that's inorganic in our atmosphere and is the largest part of our atmosphere into organic forms that we can access. We crashed that whole economy when we realized they were doing it for plants. We just started making nitrogen the hard way. It runs off into the oceans and into our ponds and makes it so we can't use those waterways anymore. These bacteria were much tidier about it than that. They made sure the plant got exactly that nitrogen. But when we started dumping nitrogen, instead of talking to these bacteria to figure out how they could tune it or work with different plants, the plant stopped fostering the bacteria and the bacteria went away. We've lost some of the books in our library because we didn't even know they were there. I hear what you're thinking now, though. I've heard this before. We were supposed to have biofuels already, right? Why didn't we get biofuels? Well, it's because we don't know how to talk to these bacteria. As an example, this is a bacteria called Sacropolysporia erythria. It's one of those soil poop bacteria, but it happens to make an antibiotic called erythromycin. It uses a really cheap biomass to make something that is really, really important for us. But we can't talk to it. He does his thing, or she does his thing, depending on how you like to see your bacteria. She does her thing. We can't really manipulate you. We can't make variants of erythromycin. We don't like how fast you grow. What if we just stole the genes out of you and put them into something that we're good at manipulating? Then we could work on that in there. We went for E. coli and yeast, which are the most domestic forms of microbes on the planet. Those two things only eat the same things we eat. They're basically our symbionts. E. coli and yeast eat five and six carbon sugars. Actually yeast is such a diva, it won't even eat five carbon sugars. So they also have no motivation to make erythromycin. You don't care. It did not work. At the macro scale, this looks really silly. It's like if you saw a cow eating grass and making milk and go, that is a really valuable product, but I can't scale that up in a cow because I don't even know how to talk to a cow. Do you put a leash on it? What do you do with it? But I have this dog here who I know really, really well, and I know he eats meat, which is expensive in what I eat, but maybe I could mess with his genes and get him to eat grass and make milk. This is the status quo of biotech right now. Every time I see a company starting up, I'm like, we're going to turn abacteria. It's E. coli. We're going to turn abacteria into something that eats methane. I see dogs eating grass and getting milked, and dogs hate getting milked. Trust me. If you haven't tried it, they really hate it, and these E. coli hate it too. We are never going to approach these systemic problems with this one pot solution. Our solution has to be to think of the planet as a library, to think of it as a robust macro organism that has a bunch of individual parts that we barely understand how they work and get to understand how they work. No one is going to be releasing E. coli into our waterways to deal with this nitrogen runoff. This is a systemic problem of many, many microbes in the way that we have to get to know and then work with them. We're not going to control them. We're going to motivate them. Can you help us clean up our mess or can upstream? You help us feed the plants so we don't have to brute force it. We already depend on microbes that we have not characterized to clean up all of our poop for us, and they just turn it into methane. Could we ask them to turn it into something else? Could we ask them to do it faster? Could we understand them well enough that we could reprogram wastewater treatment so it doesn't take months? I mean biomass moves through a cow in about a day, but it takes a month to move through a wastewater treatment plant. That's because the bacteria aren't happy in there, but they love being in a cow. They're really happy in a cow. Cows are better at it than us. That's crazy. If we can fix some of our problems, there are bacteria that will pull metal from water for you if you ask them nicely. Definitely. We talked about methane. If we can't talk to microbes, we're definitely not going to be able to contain some of the gases that we and they are putting out. Even better, my vision for the future is you take your compost from your kitchen. You add a bacteria that you probably ordered off of Amazon, and you drop it into your compost and it's going to convert the compost into a polymer that you can feed into a 3D printer and make yourself a shirt with the latest meme on it. And when you're done with that shirt, you can put it back in the compost and add an activating enzyme that will help the bacteria turn it back into biomass and switch us to a biomass economy because look, if a nanillion bacteria are doing it, they can't be wrong.