[Music]
so what is an ocean humans have been
living next to oceans for millennia so
you’d think this would be a fairly
straightforward question they’re wet
they’re really big they interact with
the atmosphere so they generate storms
even hurricanes they’re full of fish and
at their deepest point you could drop
Mount Everest into the ocean and it
would disappear without a trace and at
their greatest steps they’re crushingly
deep now if you were to ask an
astronomer what an ocean was they might
tell you something about the Goldilocks
zone they might say you find oceans in
those orbits which are not so close to
the Sun that they boil away and not so
far from the Sun that they freeze solid
Carl Sagan said we live on that pale
blue dot a fragile planet unique for its
watery beauty yet as we’ve explored
oceans we’ve discovered that we don’t
really understand them very well at all
historically we explore oceans with
ships it’s kind of an expensive
proposition because ships are expensive
has it’s a limited danger as well and
because oceans cover more than
two-thirds of our planet I don’t think
you’ll be very surprised if I tell you
that we actually haven’t explored very
much of the ocean at all and as a matter
of fact our scientific understanding of
the ocean is rather poor so we’ve worked
hard to develop new tools for extending
our reach increasingly we develop robots
to explore and understand the ocean
think exploration robots now the first
of these robots were actually pretty
simple they were suspended from the ship
by a cable we kind of affectionately
called them a dope on a rope
and they weren’t very mobile right they
were kind of married to the ship so
those of us in the robotic side of the
community conspired to cut the tether
and we created an entirely new class of
systems systems that were mobile it
could roam the ocean at will now the
problem is is in the ocean environment
we have some real challenges and one of
the really big ones is that
unfortunately for all practical purposes
radio waves don’t penetrate you see
seawater has salt in it and the salt
makes the ocean a conductor and as a
consequence all of the usual radio
communication systems we use the GPS
satellite system that we depend on to
know where we are
all of those things disappear as our
robot descends beneath the waves and so
as a consequence we have to make our
robots autonomous or they won’t survive
you can kind of think autonomous or Die
we put them into an environment which we
understand very little you can kind of
contrast this to a robot which is
developed maybe a self-driving car where
the roads are designed by people they’re
built by people they’re mapped by people
our robots go into an environment where
the maps if they exist at all might be
completely wrong
when Malaysian airliner flight 370 took
off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and
disappeared and those frantic days
immediately afterwards
searchers figured that it probably had
crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere
off the west coast of Australia it was a
robot built by bluefin robotics be a
company that that I co-founded being
tested off of Hawaii and the operating
team there quickly wrapped up their
operations and deployed to the Indian
Ocean now this is a challenging search
in many ways but not the least
of them is that our maps of the Indian
Ocean are particularly bad so bad that
when the operational team put this
vehicle in the water for the first time
they didn’t realize the water was much
deeper than they thought it would be in
fact a half a mile deeper deeper in fact
than the rated depth of the vehicle
fortunately the vehicle has a lot of
software on board and it recognized that
it was being asked to do something it
shouldn’t it returned to the surface
probably thinking in this little robot
brain what the heck are they doing and
as events transpired the bluefin
engineers decided that their designs
were conservative enough that in fact
they could dive the full depth and so
they continued with the search but the
point is we’re putting these robots into
an environment we don’t understand at
all so let’s talk about failure gene
Krantz was the mission director through
much of the Apollo program as a matter
of fact he’s most famous for leaving the
team that brought the Apollo 13 crew
back to earth against all odds he titled
his autobiography failure is not an
option and the little embarrassed to say
that before I prepared for this talk I
actually thought that was an Arnold
Schwarzenegger quote
but and it is a little funny to me
because in the exploration business
failure is not only an option it happens
all the time and the problem is the
problem you’re confronted with is
preventing little failures from becoming
big failures so when an oceanographer
goes to see as they often do and a part
breaks on the cruise
they’ve got a problem there’s no repair
person who’s gonna fly out on a
helicopter and fix it
there’s no Parts Depot around the corner
that they’re gonna can go to for for
spare parts they have to make do with
whatever they brought with them on the
ship and their own ingenuity in the
business we call this a field safe and
I’ve seen some great field saves one
time we were running a fuel program in
the Arctic and as we were covered our
vehicle through the ice hole we broke a
blade off of one of our main propeller
it was bad news it was a disaster and it
was a disaster because we had a very
difficult time getting all of our
equipment out on the ice and one of the
boxes that hadn’t made it I’m sure you
can guess what’s coming was the box with
our propeller however we did have a lot
of building materials that had made it
and one of my colleagues took the epoxy
that we had and he made a mold using the
remaining propeller blade and then he
cast a new propeller inside of that mold
using if I recall correctly a tie
wrapped as a stiffener it was amazing
and it worked beautifully we used it for
the entire rest of the field deployment
so my point is is that failure happens
it happens a lot when you’re exploring
and what you need to be able to do is
fix things adapt and move on the other
thing that happens when you explore is
that you’re surprised
you’re going into an environment that
you don’t understand very well perhaps
there are things there that you don’t
know exist you’d be surprised how often
we discover new species in the ocean and
the problem is we program our vehicles
to recognize the things that we know to
expect so as a consequence when
something really
surprising happens often our robots are
completely oblivious so I’ll give you a
great example of this a colleague of
mine a Mika kulia likes to use her
little robot to follow sharks what she
does is she takes these tags and she
attaches them to a shark which is an
exciting procedure and this tag emits an
acoustic ping which the robot can follow
all right the robot has a camera on it
so Aimee can see what the shark is doing
I think of this as kind of stalking for
science anyway the first time that she
did this when she pulled the robot out
of the water it had scratches all over
it she had no idea what had happened
until she watched the video it turned
out well Amy’s robot was following shark
a shark B was following Amy’s robot
you know it turns out we’ve gone back
through our data and as surprised as Amy
was at the time it turns out that things
go bump in the dark all the time down
there I once recovered a vehicle which
had been motoring around in Monterey Bay
for several days with great white teeth
sticking out of its fairing apparently
sharks have some sort of robot catch and
release program so the point is though
is this is really the very definition of
oblivious because these robots had no
idea that they were attacked they just
kept motoring right along afterwards
fortunately one of our other colleagues
at Woods Hole yogi gear dar is working
on this
so here’s Yogi’s little robot paddling
around underwater what makes it cool is
it’s actually using a form of
unsupervised machine learning on board
which is so light that it can classify
things on the fly what you see on the
right side of the screen is what the
robot sees and the red dot is an area
which actually doesn’t fit its existing
classification scheme this is an area
which is surprising and the robot reacts
to that surprise by driving towards it
pretty cool so it finds the coral head
interesting it finds the diver that
swims in front of the vehicle
interesting it’s a vehicle
I’m not sure what the diver is saying
something like get it off of me laughs
if if you will but I think this is the
future of robots this is a robot that
can be surprised and what’s more it’s
curious about what it finds surprising
it’s probably the future of exploration
robotics now it turns out that one of
the truly great adventures that is going
on in the ocean today is the attempt to
understand life and probably the
greatest discovery occurred in 1977
entirely by accident there was a group
out there in the Pacific and they
lowered their dope on a rope out there
into the deep Pacific and what their
robot saw was unusual thermal anomaly a
region which is surprisingly warm now
the deep ocean it turns out is pretty
much think 35 or 36 degrees Fahrenheit
it’s kind of pretty much the same
temperature anywhere so if you see a
region which is a little warm this is
something which is worth taking notice
of and so they called over to their
friends who are diving nearby on which
holes Alvin submersible and asked them
to come take a look and in fact they
brought Alvin over and as alvin
descended to the seafloor
they found this incredible environment
there were superheated streams of water
coming out of the seafloor giant
chimneys and spires and perhaps most
exciting surrounding them a very unusual
range of sea life strange giant
tubeworms
large white crabs weird Tramp with what
we now realize our photoreceptors on
their back we don’t know why yet still
and even a purple octopus now the thing
is is this is deep in the ocean where
there is no Sun these creatures are born
in the dark they live in the dark and
died in the dark never knowing that
there’s a song or a sky above them
there’s no photosynthesis there there’s
no energy from the Sun being turned into
chemical energy to sustain these
ecosystem as a scientist peered out of
their little porthole into this unique
and strange environment they were
looking at a form of life that we hadn’t
known existed at all now at the same
time there was another robot adventure
underway the two Voyager probes had been
launched in 1976 the Titan rocket that
hurled them into space threw them past
the moon past Mars past the asteroid
belt out to the outer solar system which
is the realm of the great gas giants
Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune
three-quarters of a billion miles from
the Sun in 1979 the Voyager spacecraft
approached the Jupiter system now I say
the Jupiter system because Jupiter is
big it has a whole collection of moons
and some of these moons are so big and
bright that if you have a pair of
binoculars a decent pair of binoculars
you can actually see them from Earth and
as spectacular as Jupiter is as a planet
in fact the moons are the star of our
story as Voyager 1 flew through the
Jupiter system the discoveries just
rolled in the moon Io looked like a
pizza and as they look back as they
exited the Jupiter system they saw this
strange blemish on the side of the moon
it turned out they were seeing an
eruption that was so violent it was
throwing material hundreds of kilometers
into space
apparently IOT’s orbit around Jupiter
generates these internals tidal stresses
that heat the interior of that little
moon and create a level of volcanism
that’s truly astounding unlike our
geologically dead moon Jupiter’s moon
are very much alive now the second
Voyager that flew through Jupiter system
followed a different path and one of the
moons it flew by was Europa and there
was a collective gasp because Europa was
a ball of ice and it was missing
something it was missing
craters it turns out that objects that
have been around in our solar system for
a while had been knocked about by the
debris left over from the formation of
the planets just look at our moon full
of craters so if there are no craters or
very few craters on the surface of
Europa you have to ask what removed them
they thought to themselves maybe there’s
liquid water under that icy crust that
came up and resurfaced the moon and if
there’s liquid water is it possible
there’s an ocean on Europa now many
years later and after several missions
to the Jupiter system we know there is a
salty ocean on Europa it lies under five
to ten kilometers of ice those tidal
forces that heat the inside of IO keep
the inside of Europa as well and it
doesn’t take a lot of imagination to
think that perhaps there’s volcanism
there too and where that volcanism comes
in contact with sea water
perhaps there’s hydrothermal vents like
we have here on earth and if they’re
hydrothermal vents like we have on earth
maybe there’s life we need to go find
out and we are so it turns out that what
we thought was an ocean was incomplete
Europa has an ocean and if our math is
right that ocean is bigger than all the
oceans on earth put together and
Ganymede has an ocean and Titan has an
ocean and Enceladus has an ocean all
moons of the outer planet so NASA now
has two missions underway to return to
Europa one will repeatedly flyby it and
the second will attempt to land a lander
on it to begin that process of we hope
gradually making our way through that
ice cover in
that ocean on a distant planet but this
is a grand challenge and it’s gonna
require a different kind of space robot
and a different kind of exploration than
we have today for one thing it’s very
hard to have a conversation with a robot
on Europa he lives two hours away it
takes an hour for your signal to get
there in an hour for your to signal to
get back so if that little robot is
descending through that crust into the
ocean and it sends a message asking for
help it’s gonna be 2 hours before it
gets a reply and that’s if we replied
immediately now of course we probably
wouldn’t reply immediately because we
have to look at the data and figure out
what was going on all the while the
clock would be ticking possibly the
robot wouldn’t be there by the time a
reply got there so as a consequence
we’re going to have to make robots that
operate in the unexplored unexpected
world of these oceans they’ll have to be
able to adapt the other problem is is
the way we cycle space missions what
happens as we send one mission out which
teaches us something new about the
environment we take that information
back again and then we construct the
next mission design that spacecraft and
send it out to space to follow up and
make the next set of discoveries and
that iteration cycle takes a long time
it might be 10 years it might be longer
it’s a very long time and it’s very
expensive so you have to ask as you go
to the outer solar system is there a
better way to do this maybe maybe we’re
building our robots in the wrong place
maybe what we should do is we should
send a factory out there and we’ll send
a bunch of parts and maybe some 3d
printers and some assembly robots and
that way when the next little robot
lands on the surface of Europa and sends
its lessons back what we’ll end up doing
is designing a new robot here on earth
but we’ll send the plans back to Jupiter
and that little factory will manufacture
that robot maybe a Burling robot up
there in space in orbit around Jupiter
it’s kind of an amazing thought but you
can see the pieces are all around us
maybe that’s how we find life we send
robots out to explore and then to build
so maybe years in the future our
grandchildren will be in a living room
listening perhaps with their children
breathless to the news from Europa as
the little robot makes its way into that
alien ocean that robot will be able to
adapt that little robot will be equipped
with an onboard sense of wonder and so
when we first encounter life that arose
on another world
perhaps the way we’ll encounter it will
be through the eyes of our robots
perhaps as we explore these distant
worlds we’ll see them in a new way and
if we do discover life out there it will
shape the world because if life arose
twice in our tiny solar system as we
look to the Stars it must be everywhere
thank you
you
so what is an ocean humans have been
living next to oceans for millennia so
you’d think this would be a fairly
straightforward question they’re wet
they’re really big they interact with
the atmosphere so they generate storms
even hurricanes they’re full of fish and
at their deepest point you could drop
Mount Everest into the ocean and it
would disappear without a trace and at
their greatest steps they’re crushingly
deep now if you were to ask an
astronomer what an ocean was they might
tell you something about the Goldilocks
zone they might say you find oceans in
those orbits which are not so close to
the Sun that they boil away and not so
far from the Sun that they freeze solid
Carl Sagan said we live on that pale
blue dot a fragile planet unique for its
watery beauty yet as we’ve explored
oceans we’ve discovered that we don’t
really understand them very well at all
historically we explore oceans with
ships it’s kind of an expensive
proposition because ships are expensive
has it’s a limited danger as well and
because oceans cover more than
two-thirds of our planet I don’t think
you’ll be very surprised if I tell you
that we actually haven’t explored very
much of the ocean at all and as a matter
of fact our scientific understanding of
the ocean is rather poor so we’ve worked
hard to develop new tools for extending
our reach increasingly we develop robots
to explore and understand the ocean
think exploration robots now the first
of these robots were actually pretty
simple they were suspended from the ship
by a cable we kind of affectionately
called them a dope on a rope
and they weren’t very mobile right they
were kind of married to the ship so
those of us in the robotic side of the
community conspired to cut the tether
and we created an entirely new class of
systems systems that were mobile it
could roam the ocean at will now the
problem is is in the ocean environment
we have some real challenges and one of
the really big ones is that
unfortunately for all practical purposes
radio waves don’t penetrate you see
seawater has salt in it and the salt
makes the ocean a conductor and as a
consequence all of the usual radio
communication systems we use the GPS
satellite system that we depend on to
know where we are
all of those things disappear as our
robot descends beneath the waves and so
as a consequence we have to make our
robots autonomous or they won’t survive
you can kind of think autonomous or Die
we put them into an environment which we
understand very little you can kind of
contrast this to a robot which is
developed maybe a self-driving car where
the roads are designed by people they’re
built by people they’re mapped by people
our robots go into an environment where
the maps if they exist at all might be
completely wrong
when Malaysian airliner flight 370 took
off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and
disappeared and those frantic days
immediately afterwards
searchers figured that it probably had
crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere
off the west coast of Australia it was a
robot built by bluefin robotics be a
company that that I co-founded being
tested off of Hawaii and the operating
team there quickly wrapped up their
operations and deployed to the Indian
Ocean now this is a challenging search
in many ways but not the least
of them is that our maps of the Indian
Ocean are particularly bad so bad that
when the operational team put this
vehicle in the water for the first time
they didn’t realize the water was much
deeper than they thought it would be in
fact a half a mile deeper deeper in fact
than the rated depth of the vehicle
fortunately the vehicle has a lot of
software on board and it recognized that
it was being asked to do something it
shouldn’t it returned to the surface
probably thinking in this little robot
brain what the heck are they doing and
as events transpired the bluefin
engineers decided that their designs
were conservative enough that in fact
they could dive the full depth and so
they continued with the search but the
point is we’re putting these robots into
an environment we don’t understand at
all so let’s talk about failure gene
Krantz was the mission director through
much of the Apollo program as a matter
of fact he’s most famous for leaving the
team that brought the Apollo 13 crew
back to earth against all odds he titled
his autobiography failure is not an
option and the little embarrassed to say
that before I prepared for this talk I
actually thought that was an Arnold
Schwarzenegger quote
but and it is a little funny to me
because in the exploration business
failure is not only an option it happens
all the time and the problem is the
problem you’re confronted with is
preventing little failures from becoming
big failures so when an oceanographer
goes to see as they often do and a part
breaks on the cruise
they’ve got a problem there’s no repair
person who’s gonna fly out on a
helicopter and fix it
there’s no Parts Depot around the corner
that they’re gonna can go to for for
spare parts they have to make do with
whatever they brought with them on the
ship and their own ingenuity in the
business we call this a field safe and
I’ve seen some great field saves one
time we were running a fuel program in
the Arctic and as we were covered our
vehicle through the ice hole we broke a
blade off of one of our main propeller
it was bad news it was a disaster and it
was a disaster because we had a very
difficult time getting all of our
equipment out on the ice and one of the
boxes that hadn’t made it I’m sure you
can guess what’s coming was the box with
our propeller however we did have a lot
of building materials that had made it
and one of my colleagues took the epoxy
that we had and he made a mold using the
remaining propeller blade and then he
cast a new propeller inside of that mold
using if I recall correctly a tie
wrapped as a stiffener it was amazing
and it worked beautifully we used it for
the entire rest of the field deployment
so my point is is that failure happens
it happens a lot when you’re exploring
and what you need to be able to do is
fix things adapt and move on the other
thing that happens when you explore is
that you’re surprised
you’re going into an environment that
you don’t understand very well perhaps
there are things there that you don’t
know exist you’d be surprised how often
we discover new species in the ocean and
the problem is we program our vehicles
to recognize the things that we know to
expect so as a consequence when
something really
surprising happens often our robots are
completely oblivious so I’ll give you a
great example of this a colleague of
mine a Mika kulia likes to use her
little robot to follow sharks what she
does is she takes these tags and she
attaches them to a shark which is an
exciting procedure and this tag emits an
acoustic ping which the robot can follow
all right the robot has a camera on it
so Aimee can see what the shark is doing
I think of this as kind of stalking for
science anyway the first time that she
did this when she pulled the robot out
of the water it had scratches all over
it she had no idea what had happened
until she watched the video it turned
out well Amy’s robot was following shark
a shark B was following Amy’s robot
you know it turns out we’ve gone back
through our data and as surprised as Amy
was at the time it turns out that things
go bump in the dark all the time down
there I once recovered a vehicle which
had been motoring around in Monterey Bay
for several days with great white teeth
sticking out of its fairing apparently
sharks have some sort of robot catch and
release program so the point is though
is this is really the very definition of
oblivious because these robots had no
idea that they were attacked they just
kept motoring right along afterwards
fortunately one of our other colleagues
at Woods Hole yogi gear dar is working
on this
so here’s Yogi’s little robot paddling
around underwater what makes it cool is
it’s actually using a form of
unsupervised machine learning on board
which is so light that it can classify
things on the fly what you see on the
right side of the screen is what the
robot sees and the red dot is an area
which actually doesn’t fit its existing
classification scheme this is an area
which is surprising and the robot reacts
to that surprise by driving towards it
pretty cool so it finds the coral head
interesting it finds the diver that
swims in front of the vehicle
interesting it’s a vehicle
I’m not sure what the diver is saying
something like get it off of me laughs
if if you will but I think this is the
future of robots this is a robot that
can be surprised and what’s more it’s
curious about what it finds surprising
it’s probably the future of exploration
robotics now it turns out that one of
the truly great adventures that is going
on in the ocean today is the attempt to
understand life and probably the
greatest discovery occurred in 1977
entirely by accident there was a group
out there in the Pacific and they
lowered their dope on a rope out there
into the deep Pacific and what their
robot saw was unusual thermal anomaly a
region which is surprisingly warm now
the deep ocean it turns out is pretty
much think 35 or 36 degrees Fahrenheit
it’s kind of pretty much the same
temperature anywhere so if you see a
region which is a little warm this is
something which is worth taking notice
of and so they called over to their
friends who are diving nearby on which
holes Alvin submersible and asked them
to come take a look and in fact they
brought Alvin over and as alvin
descended to the seafloor
they found this incredible environment
there were superheated streams of water
coming out of the seafloor giant
chimneys and spires and perhaps most
exciting surrounding them a very unusual
range of sea life strange giant
tubeworms
large white crabs weird Tramp with what
we now realize our photoreceptors on
their back we don’t know why yet still
and even a purple octopus now the thing
is is this is deep in the ocean where
there is no Sun these creatures are born
in the dark they live in the dark and
died in the dark never knowing that
there’s a song or a sky above them
there’s no photosynthesis there there’s
no energy from the Sun being turned into
chemical energy to sustain these
ecosystem as a scientist peered out of
their little porthole into this unique
and strange environment they were
looking at a form of life that we hadn’t
known existed at all now at the same
time there was another robot adventure
underway the two Voyager probes had been
launched in 1976 the Titan rocket that
hurled them into space threw them past
the moon past Mars past the asteroid
belt out to the outer solar system which
is the realm of the great gas giants
Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune
three-quarters of a billion miles from
the Sun in 1979 the Voyager spacecraft
approached the Jupiter system now I say
the Jupiter system because Jupiter is
big it has a whole collection of moons
and some of these moons are so big and
bright that if you have a pair of
binoculars a decent pair of binoculars
you can actually see them from Earth and
as spectacular as Jupiter is as a planet
in fact the moons are the star of our
story as Voyager 1 flew through the
Jupiter system the discoveries just
rolled in the moon Io looked like a
pizza and as they look back as they
exited the Jupiter system they saw this
strange blemish on the side of the moon
it turned out they were seeing an
eruption that was so violent it was
throwing material hundreds of kilometers
into space
apparently IOT’s orbit around Jupiter
generates these internals tidal stresses
that heat the interior of that little
moon and create a level of volcanism
that’s truly astounding unlike our
geologically dead moon Jupiter’s moon
are very much alive now the second
Voyager that flew through Jupiter system
followed a different path and one of the
moons it flew by was Europa and there
was a collective gasp because Europa was
a ball of ice and it was missing
something it was missing
craters it turns out that objects that
have been around in our solar system for
a while had been knocked about by the
debris left over from the formation of
the planets just look at our moon full
of craters so if there are no craters or
very few craters on the surface of
Europa you have to ask what removed them
they thought to themselves maybe there’s
liquid water under that icy crust that
came up and resurfaced the moon and if
there’s liquid water is it possible
there’s an ocean on Europa now many
years later and after several missions
to the Jupiter system we know there is a
salty ocean on Europa it lies under five
to ten kilometers of ice those tidal
forces that heat the inside of IO keep
the inside of Europa as well and it
doesn’t take a lot of imagination to
think that perhaps there’s volcanism
there too and where that volcanism comes
in contact with sea water
perhaps there’s hydrothermal vents like
we have here on earth and if they’re
hydrothermal vents like we have on earth
maybe there’s life we need to go find
out and we are so it turns out that what
we thought was an ocean was incomplete
Europa has an ocean and if our math is
right that ocean is bigger than all the
oceans on earth put together and
Ganymede has an ocean and Titan has an
ocean and Enceladus has an ocean all
moons of the outer planet so NASA now
has two missions underway to return to
Europa one will repeatedly flyby it and
the second will attempt to land a lander
on it to begin that process of we hope
gradually making our way through that
ice cover in
that ocean on a distant planet but this
is a grand challenge and it’s gonna
require a different kind of space robot
and a different kind of exploration than
we have today for one thing it’s very
hard to have a conversation with a robot
on Europa he lives two hours away it
takes an hour for your signal to get
there in an hour for your to signal to
get back so if that little robot is
descending through that crust into the
ocean and it sends a message asking for
help it’s gonna be 2 hours before it
gets a reply and that’s if we replied
immediately now of course we probably
wouldn’t reply immediately because we
have to look at the data and figure out
what was going on all the while the
clock would be ticking possibly the
robot wouldn’t be there by the time a
reply got there so as a consequence
we’re going to have to make robots that
operate in the unexplored unexpected
world of these oceans they’ll have to be
able to adapt the other problem is is
the way we cycle space missions what
happens as we send one mission out which
teaches us something new about the
environment we take that information
back again and then we construct the
next mission design that spacecraft and
send it out to space to follow up and
make the next set of discoveries and
that iteration cycle takes a long time
it might be 10 years it might be longer
it’s a very long time and it’s very
expensive so you have to ask as you go
to the outer solar system is there a
better way to do this maybe maybe we’re
building our robots in the wrong place
maybe what we should do is we should
send a factory out there and we’ll send
a bunch of parts and maybe some 3d
printers and some assembly robots and
that way when the next little robot
lands on the surface of Europa and sends
its lessons back what we’ll end up doing
is designing a new robot here on earth
but we’ll send the plans back to Jupiter
and that little factory will manufacture
that robot maybe a Burling robot up
there in space in orbit around Jupiter
it’s kind of an amazing thought but you
can see the pieces are all around us
maybe that’s how we find life we send
robots out to explore and then to build
so maybe years in the future our
grandchildren will be in a living room
listening perhaps with their children
breathless to the news from Europa as
the little robot makes its way into that
alien ocean that robot will be able to
adapt that little robot will be equipped
with an onboard sense of wonder and so
when we first encounter life that arose
on another world
perhaps the way we’ll encounter it will
be through the eyes of our robots
perhaps as we explore these distant
worlds we’ll see them in a new way and
if we do discover life out there it will
shape the world because if life arose
twice in our tiny solar system as we
look to the Stars it must be everywhere
thank you
you
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