 Good morning everyone, so thank you for coming to my talk, and I'm happy to be here in Bangalore with you this morning, and I know it's a bit early, so it's a bit early for me as well as I'm based in Los Angeles. Thank you for the introduction. Basically, all my background is in aerospace engineering, my PhD is in propulsion systems, specific electric propulsion, which is interesting because that's an aspect of a new company. I did spend most of my career working for the space program for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is the NASA Center responsible for the robotic exploration of space. I was there for about 16 years, and then I decided to enter the private sector, and I worked for a Hyperloop technology startup for about a year and a half, Virgin Hyperloop 1, and then I decided to start my own company. So I think I got a wonderful training working for the government in terms of how do you do engineering process development? How do you create a product, a very complex product to land on the surfaces of other planets? But I really want to do something here at home to be able to solve some of the challenges that we have here at home with my engineering skills and, of course, my leadership skillset. And I think there's a simple reason for that, is that I like to show this graphic and a lot of the talks that I give around the world, and of course, everybody knows the planet in the middle, obviously, it's Earth, and the planet on the left-hand side is Venus, and the planet on the right-hand side is Mars. And so these three planets are actually known as the terrestrial planets, and there's a significance to that because the planetary science community believes that the formation of our solar system, those planets were actually similar to each other, and the fact that they had an atmosphere, they had water flowing on the surface. But moving forward, roughly four and a half billion years, you take a look at Venus, the surface temperature is around 475 degrees centigrade, the surface pressure is 100 times what the surface pressure here is on Earth, you take a look at Mars, the surface pressure is 1% of what it hears here on Mars, and there's no essentially water on the surface. And so what that means is that over the course of the past four and a half billion years or so, our sister planets have experienced planetary level climate change. And so we can use multiple data points to understand trends, and we can actually learn a lot about our home planet by visiting our neighboring planets, to understand how these processes happen on a macroscopic scale. And what that does mean, though, as engineers and scientists and computer scientists and technologists, we do have a responsibility in what we do to understand how we're impacting our home planet and how we can actually prevent us having the fate of either Mars or Venus. And I think we take it back a step further, and everybody knows about the Big Bang by a show of hands. So basically the universe started as a ball of energy, and as it expanded, it cooled, as it cooled, it formed basically the nuclei of atoms that we understand. Eventually it formed galaxies, and then it formed galactic clusters. And then many, many, many billions and billions of years later, we came around as complex human beings. And if we look back in time, this has actually been a motivation behind why human beings have been so interested in the things above them, the stars above them, how they came to be, is understanding their place in the universe, understanding how the universe itself evolved. But my very favorite quote, and I was saying this last night at dinner, is that interestingly enough, if you take a look at what we understand to be the universe, 95% of it is something that we don't even have the ability to measure. It's dark energy and dark matter. Only 5% of it is the real matter that you and I and the plants and the trees and the plants around us make up. So we really don't understand much of where we are in the universe, which I think the Socrates' favorite quote, which is the only thing that we know is that we don't actually know anything. So you can go back and look in recorded histories around the planet. The image on the left-hand side is New Grainge, which is an astronomical observatory in Ireland, which I think is 5,000 years old. You can go over to Delhi and check out the ancient astronomical observatory there. So for human beings, the desire to understand where they came from is actually the driving force behind scientific discovery. That scientific discovery then leads to the ability to create applied science, which is engineering. And then I was recently in Amsterdam giving a talk, and I'm a big fan of Vincent Van Gogh. And I saw this wonderful quote that was associated with one of his paintings, which is that, when I have a terrible need of, shall I say the word, religion, I go out and paint the stars. And everybody's familiar with, of course, Van Gogh's Starry Night. So it's just interesting how that common theme exists throughout our societies around the world. The desire to understand how we came to be. And one of my favorite quotes from an engineering perspective is actually from Theodore von Kurman, who's the father of modern aerodynamics, which is that science is the study of what is, and then engineering builds what will be. So what that means is the engineer creates based off of the understanding that we get in science and mathematics. And I think that's a great segue into the rest of my talk, which is focused on engineering developments. But one thing that I think we all experience when we have our own companies, we're in the private sector when we're trying to raise funds, is that sometimes we'll have people tell us things like, well, you know what, that's not possible. That's not a good idea. Nobody's going to fund that idea. And I think a great example is to go and look back in time with the Wright brothers, where basically right a few years before they demonstrated the first, you know, lifting body flight, a very famous British scientist, Lord Kelvin, who invented the Kelvin scale, said to them that heavier than air flying machines are impossible. Lo and behold, a few years later, they actually demonstrated the first flight. So I think in life you're always going to face people who say something can't be done, but I always view that as a reason to go off and do it. And then another great quote from a very famous Indian scientist who basically has developed Raman scattering, which we use in the space program to make measurements on the surface of the world, is that you have to be the master of your own failure, and that's how you learn. And part of agile, part of software development, part of any engineering development is to test, to check, to potentially fail, to learn from those mistakes and make things better. And I think that is kind of the purpose of these conferences. I think it's the purpose of a lot of the sessions here, which is to change your way of thinking so that you can constantly innovate and learn from the successes and the failures of your past and other people's past. And from the science fiction side of things, one of my favorite quotes is actually from the movie, The Martian by Joe Ahans, how many of you have seen that movie or read that book, which is that in the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, which is to science the shit out of it. And I think that's what all of us do, actually, in our daily jobs. So it's kind of fun to think about that way. But one of the reasons why I love science fiction is because I think science fiction, and somebody else said this, not me, inspires a sense of wonder in people. And when you have that spark of imagination to create something that hasn't existed before, you actually create the technologies that we see around the world. And if you take a look at Star Trek, which happens to be one of my favorite TV science fictions, you know, they had the Motorola football back in the 1960s, and Kirk and Spock were communicating with each other. Move forward two decades, they had tablets on the next generation where people were using that interface as a means of transferring data. So science fiction actually has served as a source of imagination, which then people on the engineering and technology side will create and turn into a technology. So literally, each of us can create this future that we imagine, whether it's in my space, which is transportation and space travel, or it's in your space, which could be in e-commerce or in application development and web development or in new technologies for IT purposes. There's so many ways in which what we create can actually become a reality. But I want to focus the rest of my presentation on the development of the future of travel. And this is really interesting because I think there's a lot to be learned by looking back in history to see trends. And what you can see is that transportation technology revolutions have actually changed the world in a major way. Go back to 3000 BC, the invention of the wheel. Imagine how much the wheel changed human society in terms of being able to get from point A to point B, in terms of being able to transport goods. Basically cities and villages were formed because of this technology called the wheel. Move forward, you know, just over a thousand years or so, the development of train travel, which facilitated the Industrial Revolution. That once again changed everything, the formation of much, much larger city networks and transportation of goods across large distances in a way that had never been done before. Move forward a couple of decades, and the development of the internal combustion engine and the ability to have personal mobility with cars, which allowed the development of suburbs. Of course, it now results in the horrible traffic that we all experience in our daily lives. Nevertheless, the convenience factor and the change to society with that personal mobility is really hard to express how it actually grew our economy. Then move forward a few more decades, and the invention of air travel and then global connections. So instead of having a society that interacted within a radius of a couple of hundred miles, now we have a global society that interacts from a commerce perspective across the planet. And so each time one of these technologies was created, it had a huge economic impact, it had a huge societal impact, and essentially just grows who we are and what we're capable of doing. And so that is why I think transportation is so important. The problem, however, of course, is that transportation networks do lead to waste. They lead to a whole suite of problems. If you take a look at any of the numbers coming in from studies that different consulting organizations do, if you take a look at goods and ports, passenger cars on the road, trucks on the road, goods at airports, everything is already at capacity and the projections show growth on the order of a factor of one and a half to a factor of four over the course of the next three decades. So that means that our existing transportation infrastructure networks, whether it's for cargo or for people, are already at capacity and we're not keeping up with demand. And so if you take a look at some of the standard solutions that people propose, which is add another runway to your airport, make the airport slightly bigger, add more railway lines, add more freeway lines, which is where they do in LA, where I live, that actually doesn't do anything to adjust the problem and eventually you're going to run into a space where you're cutting through people's land masses and farmland and homes and that's not really a good thing. So these kinds of solutions are essentially non-sustainable and they're the same old, same old and you really have to disrupt transportation just like people have disrupted other sectors of our economy with new technology. So what we really need to do is to reinvent transportation and the best way to think about that is ultimately to think about what your customer needs. I spent many years in my career as a systems engineer and that's kind of what you do is you get a customer need, which in my case was a science customer, you can decompose it into engineering requirements and then you decompose it into subsystem requirements and you go off and build your product and test it, whether it's an agile or waterfall methodology. But for transportation, it's pretty obvious, right? You want to reduce people's travel time, you want to give them a good passenger experience, you want to be able to address the capacity needs of the municipality that you're in and you want to be able to have a system which is scalable which can get bigger and add more people over time. You also want it to be safe. You can't imagine inventing any form of new technology which is less safe than the prior forms. You want it to be affordable, which means it shouldn't just be for wealthy people who have lots and lots of money. You want it to be open to the masses, so mass transportation. And you also want it to be environmentally friendly because at the end of the day, one of our greatest challenges as a society is to make sure that we do something to address climate change. So whatever you come up with has to be engineered for environmental impact. And so there's a few forms of transportation which I'm going to talk about today which are the areas which are now disrupting the way we think about moving people in cargo and are using new high-tech solutions. And so by a show of hands, how many people here have heard about the Hyperloop? It should be, because the news in India has been quite a bit. And so I like to go back to science fiction. So some people think that the Hyperloop was invented by Elon Musk in 2013 because he released the white paper. He studied that he had done with his team. But the Hyperloop has actually existed in the public consciousness for many, many decades, actually in science fiction. So you go back to the Jetsons. You see people traveling in tubes. You go to Futurama now, which is another TV show cartoon in the U.S. You see people traveling in tubes. You go through science fiction. You see the capacity to move people around at high speeds as a means of personal mobility, as a means of transportation. So that concept does exist. And the real motivation behind Elon Musk's white paper actually was a proposed and is a proposed high-speed rail train in Southern California to Northern California, which is where I live. And so the argument back then went on the ballot as a referendum. It was approved. It was passed. But people were saying, well, if we're going to spend all this money on a new mass transportation system, it's going to take decades old. And so then the white paper came about saying that what about a hyperloop because it's more efficient means of saving the same purpose of being able to transport lots of people from Southern California to Northern California. And so the hyperloop is a relatively simple engineering system in the sense that most of the technologies that go into it already exist. It's just being put together in a different way. And the way that it works is you have a magnetically levitating, electrically propelled vehicle is known as a maglev train. Maglev trains already exist in China and Japan. So putting the two together actually gives you a better solution because as you go up in speed, the primary energy loss mechanism is aerodynamic. And so that's a new technology in terms of being able to pump down something to low pressures. A magnetically levitating electrically propelled vehicle and the primary energy loss mechanism is aerodynamic drag. So if you remove the air around the vehicle you essentially eliminate aerodynamic drag you eliminate that energy consumption mechanism and you can go to very fast speeds literally supersonic speeds at a low energy consumption once your tube is pumped down. And so the challenge of course is that the vehicle itself has to be pressurized but that pressurized vehicle cabin is sort of like an airplane without wings. When you go up in altitude in an airplane you obviously have to have air inside your cabin and it has to be a pressurized vehicle so even that doesn't exactly impose any new technology constraints on how you create that kind of vehicle. So the controls of a vehicle moving like this at high speeds inside of a vacuum chamber is actually more like a spacecraft because you're also magnetically levitating so you don't have to do with any kind of frictional resistance. So this is the concept of what our Hyperloop is. This is something which hopefully will get introduced all around the world in 20 years and the great news is that there is a really big community of technology companies specifically startup technology companies who are working on making this become a reality. I worked at one for about a year and a half. There's several. I think there's at least two in India because they get contacted on LinkedIn all the time by different Hyperloop people from India but here are some examples of the technology developments that are underway. The one that I worked on we actually developed a half kilometer Hyperloop in the desert outside of Nevada which you can see on the upper right and demonstrated pretty fast speeds not our peak speed just because the test facility isn't long enough. We demonstrated the construction of a vehicle which it wasn't pressurized but it had the appropriate mass distribution and shape to be able to carry people. There's another company who's working on developing a Hyperloop in Europe and I think they're already underway building the facility and you can see those two images on the bottom side where they've also demonstrated a vehicle in this case it's a pressurized vehicle and it'll be going inside of a vacuum tube. The startup world which is actually addressing how to make this become a reality but the only way you're going to get government customers to pay for these types of transportation system is that if you can make it affordable and at least the same price as an alternative means of mass transportation just because everybody has a financial constraint that's really important and that's where new technology and innovating the way you do business as usual comes in but there's some simple solutions there that can actually help you from a cost perspective. If you can establish autonomy in your transportation system that's smart, number one, right? It's easier to do scheduling. You can actually make it safer. You can't have a human being in the loop driving something at supersonic speeds. You have to have autonomy. That actually helps you in terms of being more efficient in your ridership models. It also helps you at being more efficient in the sense that you don't have to have human beings doing sort of mundane tasks and there's a cost associated with that and then ultimately if you can be really smart in the way that you make predictions using AI of what your network usage is going to be you can increase ridership to a maximum and only run the number of vehicles that you need to be consistent with ridership which is if you couple it to a front end application development where people have own demand travel capability you can get those numbers up which generates the revenue which makes it affordable and then you can also find synergies with technologies that already exist and one of the big things going on in the automotive sector is of course the development of electric vehicles and autonomous cars. Autonomous car is a much more difficult technical problem because as you can see in this graphic your ability to detect obstacles is essentially what defines your safety. When you have a hyperloop you're inside of a controlled environment a vacuum tube by definition there's nothing else in there except for the other vehicles therefore it's a sort of a one-dimensional problem versus a three-dimensional problem from a collision avoidance perspective. So utilizing existing diagnostic packages and software developments from the automotive side and coupling it to this mass transportation actually can work and then you don't have to pay for that development cost which then lowers the need of the startup to raise additional capital and you make the thing happen. But how do you innovate and I think we probably most of us in the room understand this now which is that you do have to change the way of doing business. You can't be a dinosaur of a company to do things the way they've always been done and that has to also couple to the transportation and so startup life is a great example of that. So there's a lot to be said about groups of people who can work very efficiently together in small teams and collaboratively and so I call that startup life and it has made it into the public consciousness in terms of different TV shows that exist but I think it does work right because I think most of us now working companies we have our own companies or in startups or we're in teams of 10 to 50 people as opposed to if you work for a mega conglomerate like I don't know Boeing or we have thousands and thousands of people so there's a certain level of inefficiency in being too big. How do you disrupt infrastructure? This happens to be very challenging I don't have a solution for it yet and that is infrastructure is very expensive because it requires lots of materials you know stretched over hundreds of kilometers and then right now if you do all of that with just people connecting things and mixing concrete it's quite expensive so there needs to be automation in that infrastructure area. But how does the hyperloop work? It actually works more like a highway than a train system and so you can see in these two graphics which are two interpretations from two different companies a hyperloop is like a highway a tube going in each direction and all of the cars in that tube are traveling towards the same destination. They exit off of the highway on an off ramp to go to their final destination all the people in the tube are always traveling at that peak speed they don't have to stop and start, stop and start which results in energy expenditure and waste which is what we get with the traditional train line so you can think about it as the cars or the passenger vehicles are coming off the highway going into the station so whoever is in your vehicle is going to the same place as you which is how you can really improve efficiency and because you're doing this autonomously because you're doing this with a front end ridership app you can schedule the service as you know as high density as your municipality needs and that's the ultimate architecture behind it and it makes a lot of sense the footprint of these systems are quite small in terms of the amount of land that you need on the ground compared to additional rail or certainly high speed rail and it's actually a lot smaller than a Maglev train but the only way we're going to make systems like this happen is to work directly with governments to figure out what they need to figure out right of way rights to figure out how would you purchase the land to do the route alignment from the places that people are interested in and the good news is these studies with governments are also underway they're underway in India they're underway in the United States and in some places they're underway in Europe so this is definitely something which is going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years in my personal opinion so moving forward focus on the area where I am now working which is on air travel and reinventing urban transportation once again I'll take you back to the analogy of science fiction with the Jetsons that not only did they have hyperlubes but they also had flying cars and why can we not have flying cars we actually can so when you go to any city in India when you go to any city in the United States any city in Europe I would say the biggest problem is being able to get from the airport to where you need to go in the city because of traffic because of ground based congestion because we typically think about travel in two dimensions we don't think about urban travel in three dimensions but we certainly can and that's where the flying car or air taxi model comes into it and I like this quote from very famous scientist and politician from India which is you were born with things don't crawl learn to use them to fly and fly and so why not get off the ground why not move urban transportation in two three dimensions and so I'll give you a short video on what we're attempting to do with my company airspace experience technology everyone used to helicopters or rotorcraft rotorcraft happened to be very energy inefficient because they don't have the ability to use aerodynamic lift off the wing so if you can get the best of both worlds which is by having a tilt wing you'd also do a tilt rotor you can actually get the energy efficiency and cruise doing a traditional aerodynamic flight within the convenience from an urban density perspective of doing vertical takeoff and landing by actually tilting the wing and so this type of solution because you could make it small because you could make it lightweight because you don't need to carry as much fuel you can actually shift entirely over to batteries and so there are as interest in the United States right now to be able to set up various transportation networks the goal is to make them electric maybe hybrid electric or fully electric but if you're a range of travel between let's say the airport in downtown or different places in downtown a city is 100 miles or less you can actually do it purely off of battery power and right now we don't have any commercially certified aircraft like this nor do we have any commercially certified for passenger use electric aircraft so this will kind of be the first time when this is going to happen so we're not the only company in the sector obviously there's several companies working on it from startup as well as from big aerospace companies but that's the ultimate model behind it and I can't speak to India's airspace I can speak to Europe and I can speak to America's airspace and the interesting thing is that we all go to major commercial hub airports like in Bangalore or in Mumbai or in New York City or in LAX in Los Angeles surrounding each one of those major commercial hubs are multiple small airports I myself am a pilot most of the people in my company are also pilots we all fly aircraft out of these small airports nobody uses them they're used by people like me who go on a joy ride to have lunch somewhere and come back the next day so there's existing infrastructure all over the United States all over Europe which isn't used and the government's already paying for if you have the ability to have an aircraft that can take off in a shorter distance because it's taking off vertically and it's landing vertically you can actually take the congestion away from the big commercial hubs and put it to existing airspace infrastructure which the government is already paying for so this is a way you can get around the congestion that you see in airports you could also use it a way of transferring people to these smaller airports and then using helipads, using parking lots using the tops of buildings to get people into downtown locations of course the real challenge with any technology like this is the cost so right now if you take a look at a unit cost of a helicopter which is a very complicated machine and not very energy efficient it would then translate to a pretty high cost for the individual consumer which then would limit the ability to fly to people with lots and lots of money which doesn't address the problem of mass transportation the ultimate way that you can make this happen is to reduce the price point of the vehicle which means to engineer it in a different way and that cost savings will then translate onto the ultimate customer facilitating new network of urban aerial transport and what we're doing is we're using automotive design techniques we're actually based in Detroit to be able to use mass production industrial design to reduce the price point of one of these vehicles which is more like a single engine propeller airplane which then becomes quite affordable when you share it in a leasing model with people who would ride it in an urban aerial network to give you an idea of what we're looking at in terms of a model and many other companies are is to carry cargo high value cargo for example but primarily to carry people and so these types of systems can carry four passengers one safety pilot because eventually you'd like to have autonomous flight but it takes time before regulatory agencies would get to the point where they'd feel comfortable with that to start off with the carrying four passengers would it be one passenger going between point A and point B like an Uber you can pick or it can be a shared wide option which makes a lot more sense because in an urban environment most people are going to similar locations like if you took a subway for example and so the way that you make something like this happen is you can't just have fancy CGI movies you have to prototype and test the technology so what we've done so far is we've built aircraft that are fully capable of vertical takeoff landing transitional flight and cruise flight but we've built them at a subscale because when you do aerodynamic development the same thing from the space program you can do subscale demonstrations to validate the physics behind what you're trying to do and then you take it to the full scale so we've built a total of six vehicles third scale and fifth scale and demonstrated the software needed to do the flight regimes and we've demonstrated the flight at our facility in Detroit and so our next phase we will then transition to a full scale vehicle with geometric scale and then demonstrate flight with that and start our certification processes and this gives you a little bit more idea of what the system would do with a certification from an FAA perspective or the Indian equivalent is that you can start off to get certification for cargo then you can get certification for emergency medivac, humanitarian missions and eventually get your certification for carrying passengers in a full on commercial mean so there's ways that you can generate revenue from the get-go so you'll be able to help support the case of your business model but in general and all the modes of transportation that I've shown here terrestrially one of the things that we can think about is ways to be energy positive and being energy positive also does a lot to address our carbon footprint and then of course CO2 emissions so if you think of ground based transportation even building there's no reason why you couldn't put solar panels right along the tubes of a hyperloop for example so that generates its own power and that's just a smart thing to do and another way of thinking about it from a hardware development perspective is to shift from a linear economy model where you basically generate a lot of waste and you throw things out to a circular economy model where you reuse things so if they gave an example with our aircraft company those batteries even though you may not be able to use them in the airplanes anymore because they've started to degrade you could give them to other ground based applications who need power storage capability so we have to think about how we can minimize the stuff within our supply chains so that we generate less waste and that actually ends up helping you on the bottom line and so what we're looking for of course is to create technologies from a transportation perspective which can connect the planet in a green way but of course what comes next because things don't end here on earth they continue beyond and that means space travel and I think a wonderful quote from an amazing Indian astronaut is sitting out to have the vision and the courage to get on with it and so where are we going as a species? Right here in India you had the Indian Space Agency, ISRO I wasn't able to visit them this trip but I was able to visit them in the last trip and so you have a launch vehicle capability here in India which has the potential to actually revolutionize the launch vehicle market just like SpaceX did in the United States because you can come in at a much lower price point than the traditional aerospace competitors I was able to visit another company just yesterday which is located right here in town it's called Team Indus they're the first privately funded lunar surface mission anywhere in the world and so they've actually built a vehicle which we're looking for a ride on which hopefully will launch in 2020 and so a team of engineers and scientists just down the street from here and I'm hoping tremendous progress in that area in the US we have privately funded commercial space travel here's two examples one is the Amazon Space Agency which is looking at sub-orbital flights which is a company which is founded by Jeff Bezos the Amazon founder and on the right we have Virgin Galactic Spaceship which is doing sub-orbital flights as we speak to carry passengers they haven't started carrying commercial passengers but they've already demonstrated the technology and they've flown their own people and so that's just about to start and these are not technologies that get us off the planet but they are precursor technologies that get us off the planet for a lower cost way of going into low earth orbit and then beyond in terms of space travel beyond sub-orbital beyond low earth orbit and then off to other places we have both government developments and private developments under way on the left hand side is me standing in front of the Orion capsule which is kind of like a version 2.0 of the Apollo capsule and this is NASA's vehicle attempt to send people to Mars on the right hand side which is a large Dragon capsule which is fully commercially developed right now it does go back and forth to space station to carry cargo but they're certifying it so they can carry people to space station and then I assume it won't just be for astronauts so the astronaut program will also be for regular people who are willing to pay and these technologies do directly feed forward to going deeper into space you just have to carry more propulsive capability on board the vehicle and then of course the last thing that we have to mention to transportation is the exploration of Mars and the future establishment of human colonies on Mars and so when I mentioned the circular versus the linear economy the space program in terms of human beings on the international space station they very much use that circular model all of their wastes whether it's their feces or their urine or their food products get recycled to extract water get recycled to get as much out of them as they can and so when we do eventually we use something called in situ resource utilization where you get your power from solar panels where you get your radiation protection from basically putting soil in bags or going subterranean where you extract water from the subsurface because we know it's there where you actually create your own rocket fuel to get home from the CO2 that already exists in the atmosphere and although most of us don't like genetically modified plants you probably do need to have GMO plants which require very little oxygen and they will also produce oxygen as a result of photosynthesis so really what is coming up I would say in the next 20 to 40 years is the establishment of colonies and other worlds of course starting with very few people to begin with but eventually hopefully expanding into larger colonies like we see in the TV show The Expense and so I'll leave you with one final thought which is that if you want to live on Mars I do think it's going to happen in our lifetimes maybe we won't go but certainly our children will go and they will be going to Mars in some capacity and so I'll take the last five minutes for questions and if you can't get to me today asking a question you can certainly get to me via Facebook or Twitter, thank you Questions? Thank you Anita that was wonderful and very empowering and informative my question is today hyper loops seems to address more of a long distance kind of a commute right? I don't see that addressing to like 10, 20 kilometers range but today we have similar if I can bring it down to a very micro level today we have metro rails going from I can go 30 kilometers in 30 minutes but then the last 2, 3 kilometers takes me half an hour or one hour the kind of last mile do we have a solution to address that maybe the air travel is one but seems like still a very high expensive kind of one so far at a very low level do we have a solution to address at a fast mode of commute point to point and my second question is you have been teleporting so it's a really good point so hyper loop is only good for long distance travel and the reason for that is you only get the benefit when you get up to speed and you need a certain amount of distance to be able to accelerate without like exposing people to multiple geese and then to decelerate so it's only good for basically 50 kilometers or more travel you just don't get the economic benefit or the energy savings benefit for that so for short distance travel I mean metros and subways are great to be able to and anybody who lives in Mumbai or who lives in London knows this when you have to create a metro system in an urban area you have to do it subterranean there is a tremendous cost for a kilometer to do tunneling especially in an urban environment so when you don't have an existing subway network that got put into place like hundreds of years ago it's so expensive and so costly to do it now and it's very disruptive and actually makes traffic work so yes you can do that but our urban air taxi proposal is actually to think about things differently the vehicle cost is high for a train car versus an airplane for example but there's no infrastructure cost associated with flying so if you create highways in the sky that's the way that you get around that and you can't have people flying them right it has to be autonomous at some point because you need to be able to control the density of traffic so I think that is important but I think the elimination of cars on the road is the right way to approach it so I saw this wonderful graphic I was at this mobility conference in Denver and this lady who ran the MTA in New York this graphic of like 50 people in cars 50 people in ubers 50 people on bicycles 50 people walking and of course the ubers and the cars is the exact same thing because it's still single people traveling so we have to personally as individuals change our way of thinking about driving ourselves around and the only reason why we do that is because we don't have another option people in London, people in Boston actually do take the subway because they can the challenges for places that don't have that network it's very difficult to establish after the fact is to get more people into shared rides whatever that happens to be I think the air taxi one works for larger distances not for short distances and then I would eliminate cars from all central areas altogether and everything should be buses, mass transportation maybe from 4 to 8 to 20 people but I think it's the cars that are the problem and so that does have to change and I will say I go to a lot of mobility conferences I go to the consumer electronics show every year even the automotive market recognizes that everything is changing young people in the United States are no longer interested in car ownership they're actually interested in using shared ride services so I think everyone is coming to that understanding and that's the push for autonomy in vehicles is to actually facilitate that mass transportation shared ride network it's got to be a combination of things and there's scooters that people do need to get on bicycles so I think that works really well in European places but I do see a challenge for places that are already high density populations to be able to tunnel is quite a challenge I think that's a good attitude as well good question, thank you another question in the back teleporting I worked on something kind of related to that my last job at NASA I don't think we're there yet this was a fantastic session thank you for it and my question is that they have proposed a hyperloop between Ahmedabad and Mumbai and the distance is above 50 kilometers so they are still going for it to just 50 or isn't it I mean it won't be limited to 50 kilometers or 100 kilometers but it can extend more oh yeah so that's just the minimum right so ultimately it's more can you get the land rights to get the right of way to where you want to go but 50 kilometers or more I mean you can go for a thousand kilometers but it takes time obviously to build it and you have to get permission to be able to lay the route but certainly more so won't thank you again but thanks so much it's quite interesting hyperloop is looking to be one of the solutions you're trying to put in place to solve the ground problem the traffic or the mobility from one point to the other how exactly are you involving the young millennials and young minds in this journey because in the end this is supposed to yield results 15 years 20 years from now as you said so how are they getting involved in all of this are you doing something about that so I never want to think you just call me old that's funny just kidding but I think the way is actually engineering work force so at the hyperloop company that I worked at it was primarily millennials who worked there so I was one of the old people that worked at the company and then at my current company same thing all of our engineers whether they're the mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, controls engineers they're also young people so I think they are the future of the work force and so you could certainly hire them they work really hard and they've got the training of the best skills and so that's a model for a lot of startups is where you hire a lot more young people I think there also has to be the public relations component of it so you have to explain to people what the system is going to be like how it can impact you because ultimately you need regulatory updates to facilitate new modes of transportation like hyperloop or updates to the FAA so public engagement to make people feel comfortable with these types of systems is also important so one of the reasons in my job I actually do a lot of communication for that reason so I think then you can get to people directly in that way but I think my personal way of doing it is by hiring them and I also speak to kids a lot to make sure that they become engineers because I still think engineering and computer science are the best fields that's how I do any more questions? yeah so hello Nita it's a wonderful session and it was a very eye-opening session also I'm just curious about one thing that aviation that we have now has been gone to so many loops and bounds and we have aviation medicine still we see a lot of hazardous things happening and hyperloop is getting developed and we know like it is going to take some time is what about safety have we considered how it is going to impact the usability the life of people who would be travelling and are there any medicine experts getting associated with engineering are they doing right kind of study to ensure that when it goes to the mass population that we don't find some new kind of diseases or new kind of hazard that we don't have answers about so I think you asked about safety and then also like what impact could we have when we send humans to bars for the safety one that is obviously incredibly important so anytime you have human beings in the loop you have a responsibility of an individual right from an ethical basis to make sure that what you are doing is not exploited to do no harm in that sense the good thing is we all have governments and one of the purposes of government is to provide regulation and one of the purposes of regulation associated with transportation is actually almost entirely governed by safety so when you set reliability constraints from an engineering perspective that actually maps back to what is needed to ensure the right levels of safety for society so for aviation it is actually relatively simple because it is already prescribed so whether you are doing a rotorcraft or a combination of a fixed wing aircraft you already know what you have to meet from a criteria from a safety perspective there are some regulations that don't exist like for example a battery usage for a power plant you have to transfer having a reserve requirement on fuel liquid fuel now you have a reserve requirement on how much extra battery storage capacity you have that kind of regulatory framework already exists so the individual companies like me don't have to reinvent the wheel every time so you simply meet those standards and then you meet the safety requirements and air travel minus of course as we heard about recently with regards to potentially the control system on the 737 MAX air travel is a very safe form of travel those aircraft are designed incredibly well are maintained incredibly well and so air travel is very very safe compared to almost any other form of travel so I think there is a little bit more of a challenge on the hyperloop side just from a pure because the regulations don't exist because the hyperloop isn't a plane it isn't a train it's somewhere in between so that makes it harder for a company to figure out what do I need to do to ensure that the government is going to approve me downstream but that's more of like a financial risk as opposed to a technical risk and that's underway so right now as we speak people around the world are looking at updating regulations maybe from the rail association side of things to be able to capture travel on a hyperloop so that's underway with regards to Mars that's a really good point so right now there is already a framework that space agencies from around the world have signed on to which is the planetary protection agreement so when you send a spacecraft to orbit around a planet that might harbour life or to the surface of the planet that might harbour life you have a requirement to make sure that your spacecraft isn't carrying any bugs on it and so you have to keep it really clean you actually have to cook it in an oven take it up to temperature as a means of killing bacterial spores only bacterial spores can survive the transit in the vacuum of space so that's how we address it now when you send people there all of a sudden well now you're actually going to expose those plants to the organisms that live within us in our biomes so that is a challenge that governments once again have to get together and say well we're going to choose to send people here which means we are going to put some bacteria on the surface of the planet I don't think there's I mean I don't know but from what we can see there really isn't much evidence of I don't know on the front like human beings coming back from the Andromeda strain I suppose that risk does exist and even so in that planetary protection agreement if you bring a sample back to Earth from Mars you have requirements on how that sample has to be contained your requirements and the reliability of the engineering system that lands it so that it doesn't expose it here on Earth so people actually do think about this and there are requirements that go into the engineering systems to make sure that we don't have exposures on either end but the one thing that we haven't approached yet I think is when we send people to the surface of Mars now we are going to expose Mars to the bacteria and the viruses in our body and that's something that we have to choose to do as a species that that's okay but once again it's a sort of like a philosophical discussion as opposed to a dangerous one so I probably should stop now right thank you