Dr Mae Jemison - Are we alone in the universe？ Can we become inter-planetary？

So what we start off with is just letting you know that sometimes you just have to get in and take control. You have to let folks know that here's what we're going to do. I want to start off with just one place, an African proverb that says, no one shows a child the sky. I start off with that because space and space exploration is something that is part of us as humans. And I really want to start there because so much of our oldest technologies actually came from space, right? The first time we started to figure out how to plant crops, and seasons, and cycles. The movement of the stars, the phases of the moon, it's part of us. So I just want to start off with that, that's really important. And I am, I promise you, I'm going to talk about going large distances and those kind of things, but I want to deal with something that, so I got the slide up, and I hope it's, I'm supposed to be able to move it forward. Can you take to the next slide? I shouldn't have said anything. So we start off with this whole idea about what do we do? There's always this juxtaposition, which I think you heard about where we spend money. So Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, said in the 60s, while they were trying to reach the moon, we were trying to reach the village. But again, I say that nowadays, we're actually able to reach the village because of some of the things space technologies do. And the reason I'm going to do this, I'm going to talk about space exploration and some of the technological innovations really quickly, because I think sometimes we forget about it. Seth said that for every dollar that went into the U.S., that the U.S. spent to NASA, 10 came out, it was actually, the number was like 14 that was showing up. So, but where does that come from? It comes from things like being up in space. People pull out their smartphones with the GPS on it, right? Global positioning satellite systems on it. And they forget that the satellites are in space, weather satellites. I live in Houston, Texas. We like to know when the hurricanes are coming, right? Remote sensing, arms verification treaties, microgravity, just being in space actually gives you a platform. These are just some sampling of things. Planetology, why do we care what Venus looks like? We care what Venus looks like because the more we know about one planet, the more we know about the Earth, right? It's like being a physician or choosing a doctor. Do you want the doctor who's only studied one person their entire life? Or do you want the doctor who studied many different people? I'm going for the doctor who's studied and taken care of many people. So all the extremes of the frontiers of physics, extremophiles, just innovation. That's what this conference is about. It's about innovation. So some of the materials you've heard about on the tile on the space shuttle, it's about this thick. It had the consistency of Styrofoam, about the same weight and feel as Styrofoam. Yet on the top of the shuttle, the frame is made of aluminum. It starts to warp at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. On the undersurface, the surface would get up to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit coming in. And in just that distance of something, the consistency of Styrofoam, you'd actually bleed off that much heat. So these are some of the things that I just want to tell you about. So we start thinking of it. Education, innovation. During the Apollo program, we had the, and this was really the space race, right? Going to the moon. We had one of the largest increases in people going into the STEM and the science fields ever. They didn't all go to work for NASA. They didn't all work on space. But it's just that dream. It made that difference. I bring this up because I believe it's really important. Will and Ariel Durant said the future never just happened. It was created. We have the opportunity to create the future from the choices that we make, right? It's not just sitting there. We have an opportunity to create it. So the project I'm working on now is called 100-Year Starship. The purpose of 100-Year Starship is to make sure that the capabilities exist to send humans to another star system within 100 years if we choose to, if someone chooses to do it. We're not actually trying to make those capabilities exist except for the radical leaps in innovation and creativity and knowledge that would occur as a result of it, right? And there's a little bit of a difference. It's not semantics. It's a real difference. Why is this really important? Why are we actually looking at this? We were seed funded by DARPA to be able to create this kind of organization. And the organization is really one that's global. We're building networks. We've been around for two years. We had two public symposiums. We've actually been here to the EU before. But that's what we're looking at. Let me tell you what we're trying to do. I'm going to put down the terms. So we're going from this, the space shuttle. This is what we know now, right? And we're actually trying to get to something like this. Arriving at another star. Completely different kinds of systems. Something that we don't know how to do yet. Where you can look at another way. I had to do a gratuitous picture of me on the space shuttle, right? So we're going from here. So we're going to transformation from low earth orbit to interstellar, right? This is where we're going to another star system. If you have a picture with Worf, you show it, all right? That really is there. Understanding this challenge. Sir James Jean said, put three grains of sand in a vast cathedral. And the sand is, the castle is more filled with sand than space is with stars. It's really important to put this in context. We heard about Voyager, which has gone outside the confines of our solar system. This is not like going to the moon, which took us three days to get there. Voyager has been traveling 35,000 miles per hour since 1977. And it has just reached the outskirts of our solar system. Our closest neighboring star is about 4.2 light years away, 25 trillion miles. And going at that speed, it would take Voyager 70,000 years to get there. We were not even cave painting well back then, right? So what we have to do is we're doing this differently because it requires different technology. Why do we do this? Is because exploring an extraordinary, pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow will create a better way today. Just think about it. 70,000 years. It means that we have to go much, much faster. So our energy has to be different. We can't do it with chemical energy. We're going to have to use fission, fusion, antimatter. It means that we're going to have to have radical leaps in knowledge. We're going to have to have radical leaps in technology design, radical leaps in human systems just to do this. Let's do something that seems pretty mundane, like clothing, right? Why am I talking about clothing? Because clothing is part of something humans do. It's also one of the most wasteful things that we do. It's incredibly toxic when we maintain clothing. It requires a lot of resources. You're not going to be able to carry your clothing up with you. And cotton, which we really love, is not recyclable. So we're going to have to go to polyester, right? Those 70s leisure suits. But we're going to have to think about clothing and fabric very, very differently. Even human systems, governance, and behavior. We've talked a lot about culture. What happens with culture under these circumstances? Let's say we build a ship. I think we can do it. We got it done. 10 years out, 5,000 people on board. Somebody says, well, I'm not going to do what you told me to do. I don't have to. Make me. What is the behavior that we would have to learn about in order to understand how you get a system like this to work? So there's so many things that could be involved. This was just a sampling of them. What we're talking about is blue sky. People talk about blue sky. It's everything we can see. Everything is open for us to consider, to develop, to exploit. We look up. They talk about blue sky. Space is actually black sky. When you go to deep space, you don't know what's going on. It's completely uncharted. And the challenge is benefiting from actually working toward the unknown. Just really quickly, health, blue sky, cyborgs. That's what people are talking about. I think, Seth, you started talking about how we're going to put things in people and stuff like that. I would challenge that black sky is optimizing human physiology and mental capabilities because we don't think about that anymore. We think about what kind of machines we can connect to without understanding what we could do. And this would push us to do something a little bit differently. Education. Right now, we do facts, technology. Black sky says we have to do framework, critical thinking, flexibility, and disciplines. So let me just finish with our proposal was called an inclusive, audacious journey transforms life here on Earth and beyond. And the reason why we were interested in this is because all the capabilities that we need for human interstellar flight are the very same capabilities that we need to survive here on Earth. What we really want to do is say we believe that there's a better future for all of us. We really want to inspire a collective ambition for humanity, something that we can all be a part of. We need another adrenaline rush. This is a mission to achieve human interstellar flight within 100 years. But actually, it's a journey designed to enhance life here on Earth. Eugene Cernan said, we went to explore the moon, but in fact, we discovered the Earth. And the question I would ask is, what would we find from another star? And that's it. Thank you.