[Applause]
call me Peter one day some years ago
never mind how long exactly I was
attending to the routine tasks of
spacecraft engineering what I thought I
would look into the question of why is
it that we still don’t have cities in
space now that might seem an odd thing
to do but my mother and my father both
were civil engineers and I watched a lot
of Star Trek so there you go now we do
have the space station the international
space station but this is not a city in
space this is a very sophisticated base
for a small number of six astronauts to
do science in zero-g
what I’m talking about is more like this
it’s large it’s comfortable it’s safe
the whole structure spins so you have
gravity and you could live there for
years decades your entire life if you
wanted to 40 years ago when this was
first proposed the scientists and
engineers reckoned that it could be
built with existing materials and
methods but the cost would be extremely
high much higher than the Apollo program
which had just been cancelled and if you
went to reputable spacecraft engineer
today and you asked they would probably
say that it’s not affordable now not now
not in the next decades maybe never and
that is the cage in which this
particular possibility sits to be built
it would have to be done with radical
innovation and radical innovators are
always few in number and there’s a good
reason for that
rooted in natural selection it’s
absolutely right for the vast majority
of us to like the status quo because
without that that might be risky change
there might be chaos societies might
fall apart
but it’s equally right that there be a
small number of people who dislike the
status quo for no better reason than
that it’s the status quo and Carl Sagan
wrote it this way
long summers mild winters rich harvests
plentiful game
none of them lasts forever your own life
or your bands or even your species might
be out to a restless few drawn by a
craving they can hardly articulate or
understand to undiscovered lands and new
worlds and it’s only after the radical
innovation is done that the rest of us
in the status quo can understand its
advantages and disadvantages and and can
decide how we feel about it and then if
it passes that test we can naturally
weave it into the status quo and we’ve
also seen an enormous concentration of
wealth more concentration than since the
Gilded Age over a hundred years ago and
it’s this astonishing concentration of
both wealth and technical capability
that is empowering radical innovators to
do what 40 years ago was undoable now
I’d like to give you four examples of
the radical and of an innovation that’s
underway already to make cities in space
possible the first one is Rockets today
cost 75 million dollars to launch an
astronaut to the space station now
nothing is too profound but if that was
going to be the cost of getting people
into space there’s not going to be a lot
of people in space the obvious solution
to this well the obvious solution to
this is to look at we do in other fields
so for example if you threw away the
airplane after each flight well we
wouldn’t have much of an airline
industry either so the obvious thing to
do is to reuse the entire launch vehicle
and 40 years ago this was the part
answer to that
to that problem but it didn’t turn out
to save any money at all however with
that experience behind us and in the
system
Elon Musk any Elon Musk fan people here
by the way oh just a few okay
Elon Musk and SpaceX designed this
rocket which can recover its first stage
not the whole rocket but a big chunk of
it and reuse it and Jeff Bezos with Blue
Origin hat is not far behind with
suborbital rockets that are also
reusable so you could see how the
interconnection of concentrated wealth
and radical innovation is making things
possible that weren’t possible before
now this second example is has to do
with materials it’s going to take
somewhere between a hundred metric tons
and a thousand metric tons per person to
build the city in space now that’s like
20 to 200 elephants for those of you who
measure mass and elephants now we could
launch all this from the ground but that
would make that launch problem I just
talked about even more complex and maybe
impossible fortunately we can get all
the material we need from space now
people say that space is empty and well
that’s almost the definition of the word
space but it’s more useful to think of
it as big in fact so big that even big
things can be lost in it so for example
if I if this dot represents the Sun and
if that was the size of the Sun if we
were looking at it then we wouldn’t even
be able to see the planets or most of
the planets but if I put let’s say blue
dots on all the planets and then colored
dots on all the other objects that we
found in the solar system
this is what it would look like now the
red and yellow dots are near-earth
objects that come close to the Earth’s
there’s eighteen thousand discovered so
far and there’s enough material there to
sustain ten billion people and if you
add all the material in green which is
the main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter there’s another million times
more material there and of course
there’s not just material but solar
energy there is vast amounts available
from the Sun and lots of space to put up
solar arrays so we can get most you can
read all the material we need and the
energy that we need to process that
material from space and again there are
small groups of radical innovators deep
space industries is one of them funded
by wealthy individuals that are making
headway in this area
so it’s quite possible that in the next
few years we’ll have both affordable
access to space for people and a large
amount of material available in space
the next example has to do with how do
you build the station now the
International Space Station for example
costs tens of billions of dollars to
build and that’s not even including
launch cost so now albeit that is a very
complex scientific base but how are we
going to build an entire city and again
if you ask a reputable spacecraft
engineer they will tell you something
like space is hard well and they’re not
wrong but designing anything big and
complicated and that’s really new is
hard so designing a ship a car an
airplane tall buildings these are these
are hard to do designing this telephone
is hard but when we built Space
Station’s we design everything from
scratch when we buy a telephone well
they make millions of these per month
that’s what makes them affordable so
designing a space station from scratch
or designing a space city from scratch
would be like before you move into your
apartment instead of just going out to a
shop and buying the the appliances in
the furniture instead you commissioned a
large engineering team and you designed
all new stove and refrigerator and
electrical system and plumbing and all
the rest of it well that would be and
then you did it again if you ever move
to a different apartment you can see how
that could get expensive now this idea
so therefore we need to look at using
machinery and products that were
developed and mass-produced on earth to
build the city in space and that has
deep implications on how you build a
city so one for one thing you have to
start with a construction site that is
earth-like so it has to be spinning to
provide gravity it has to have an
atmosphere and it has to have protection
from radiation but beyond that they also
need people because that’s how the
equipment was designed to be used is by
people and that turns out to be a good
fit because the whole purpose of a city
in space is to have people in it now
when I mentioned this to my status quo
spacecraft engineer friends their heads
figuratively explode so the next
question has to do with how can we
afford to maintain the city in space for
example the International Space Station
cost tens of hundreds of billions of
sorry hundreds of millions of dollars
per year to just maintain with
consumables and and equipment so how are
we going to maintain an entire city and
the answer to this is that we have to
think big not small so let me start with
obviously the more people you have the
bigger this the city has to be and the
more expensive it’s going to be to build
so but there’s going to be an upper
limit to how much money investors would
be actually willing to spend to build
the city so there’s an upper limit to
the number of people that you can have
in the city so that’s easy when we look
at annual cost of running it it’s a
little bit more complex because of the
way that the city is built it’s
different than any other space station
ever built because it is access to
resources it has access to energy it has
people which means it has an internal
economy it has exports and imports it
has local production and consumption
things like you know electricians and
that sort of thing and it’s got savings
so it has its own ability to do things
now if you just extrapolate this and say
well let’s start by having millions of
people in space if we take that case
well they would be completely
independent so they would not need to
buy anything from earth to sustain
themselves now maybe they would want to
but they don’t need to so the effective
annual maintenance would be zero as you
consider smaller and smaller cities they
are less self-sufficient so they need to
import more even though they have got
fewer people and as a result the cost
per person goes up of annual maintenance
at some point the cost is so high that
the person there’s nothing that person
could do to earn the money they need to
pay for the supplies they’re getting
each month and that gives us a lower
limit to the number of people and in
this gap is then where the population of
the firt of the first city in space has
to be and I’ll tell you that that is a
lot more than six people now I talked
about exports I talked about people
earning money to be able to pay for the
the station and so as an aside here’s a
just a summary slide or somebody chart
showing the entire space market as it is
today is just under 300 billion dollars
but in the inset you see that there
people spend 20 billion dollars a year
or so today to manufacture spacecraft to
launch them and to move them around in
space so what better place to build
spacecraft than in space
and what better way to move spacecraft
around in space then to use space tugs
that are manufactured there and that are
fueled with propellants developed from
materials in space so that’s what the
people in the city could do to earn
money to buy things from Earth we’ve
seen how the city could be affordable
but even if it’s theoretically
affordable who would actually ever
invest in it now there’s multiple groups
but one is that as I just said the city
is a business so it will have retained
earnings it will have an ability to make
money and within the business there
there’s the local production and
consumption so there are local
businesses inside the electricians and
the plumbers and the baristas and the
pizza makers so there there will be
interest from the entrepreneurial
investors and also from financial
investors beyond that the city will more
importantly be an extremely large real
estate development or literally land
development and individuals and
businesses will buy property with the
idea that they can use it and then sell
it for more than they bought it for over
time so they’re they can retire back to
earth if they want to nevertheless the
investment won’t appeal to just any
investor those who do invest will do it
because they see the city as important
and here’s its importance everyone on
earth deserves the opportunity at a high
standard of living but to deliver this
high standard of living we will need to
go beyond conservation beyond efficiency
improvements beyond even strong
ecological programs in order to to
deliver a high standard of living to all
in the long term we will need more
material resources and energy than the
earth can give us and space has vast
amounts of both so the city is important
it is technically and financially
feasible and it is a necessary first
step in the long direction so to those
of you who are radical innovators and
those of you financially support radical
innovation now’s the time to get moving
you have an opportunity to change the
course of human history and it’s not
often you get a chance to do that thank you
call me Peter one day some years ago
never mind how long exactly I was
attending to the routine tasks of
spacecraft engineering what I thought I
would look into the question of why is
it that we still don’t have cities in
space now that might seem an odd thing
to do but my mother and my father both
were civil engineers and I watched a lot
of Star Trek so there you go now we do
have the space station the international
space station but this is not a city in
space this is a very sophisticated base
for a small number of six astronauts to
do science in zero-g
what I’m talking about is more like this
it’s large it’s comfortable it’s safe
the whole structure spins so you have
gravity and you could live there for
years decades your entire life if you
wanted to 40 years ago when this was
first proposed the scientists and
engineers reckoned that it could be
built with existing materials and
methods but the cost would be extremely
high much higher than the Apollo program
which had just been cancelled and if you
went to reputable spacecraft engineer
today and you asked they would probably
say that it’s not affordable now not now
not in the next decades maybe never and
that is the cage in which this
particular possibility sits to be built
it would have to be done with radical
innovation and radical innovators are
always few in number and there’s a good
reason for that
rooted in natural selection it’s
absolutely right for the vast majority
of us to like the status quo because
without that that might be risky change
there might be chaos societies might
fall apart
but it’s equally right that there be a
small number of people who dislike the
status quo for no better reason than
that it’s the status quo and Carl Sagan
wrote it this way
long summers mild winters rich harvests
plentiful game
none of them lasts forever your own life
or your bands or even your species might
be out to a restless few drawn by a
craving they can hardly articulate or
understand to undiscovered lands and new
worlds and it’s only after the radical
innovation is done that the rest of us
in the status quo can understand its
advantages and disadvantages and and can
decide how we feel about it and then if
it passes that test we can naturally
weave it into the status quo and we’ve
also seen an enormous concentration of
wealth more concentration than since the
Gilded Age over a hundred years ago and
it’s this astonishing concentration of
both wealth and technical capability
that is empowering radical innovators to
do what 40 years ago was undoable now
I’d like to give you four examples of
the radical and of an innovation that’s
underway already to make cities in space
possible the first one is Rockets today
cost 75 million dollars to launch an
astronaut to the space station now
nothing is too profound but if that was
going to be the cost of getting people
into space there’s not going to be a lot
of people in space the obvious solution
to this well the obvious solution to
this is to look at we do in other fields
so for example if you threw away the
airplane after each flight well we
wouldn’t have much of an airline
industry either so the obvious thing to
do is to reuse the entire launch vehicle
and 40 years ago this was the part
answer to that
to that problem but it didn’t turn out
to save any money at all however with
that experience behind us and in the
system
Elon Musk any Elon Musk fan people here
by the way oh just a few okay
Elon Musk and SpaceX designed this
rocket which can recover its first stage
not the whole rocket but a big chunk of
it and reuse it and Jeff Bezos with Blue
Origin hat is not far behind with
suborbital rockets that are also
reusable so you could see how the
interconnection of concentrated wealth
and radical innovation is making things
possible that weren’t possible before
now this second example is has to do
with materials it’s going to take
somewhere between a hundred metric tons
and a thousand metric tons per person to
build the city in space now that’s like
20 to 200 elephants for those of you who
measure mass and elephants now we could
launch all this from the ground but that
would make that launch problem I just
talked about even more complex and maybe
impossible fortunately we can get all
the material we need from space now
people say that space is empty and well
that’s almost the definition of the word
space but it’s more useful to think of
it as big in fact so big that even big
things can be lost in it so for example
if I if this dot represents the Sun and
if that was the size of the Sun if we
were looking at it then we wouldn’t even
be able to see the planets or most of
the planets but if I put let’s say blue
dots on all the planets and then colored
dots on all the other objects that we
found in the solar system
this is what it would look like now the
red and yellow dots are near-earth
objects that come close to the Earth’s
there’s eighteen thousand discovered so
far and there’s enough material there to
sustain ten billion people and if you
add all the material in green which is
the main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter there’s another million times
more material there and of course
there’s not just material but solar
energy there is vast amounts available
from the Sun and lots of space to put up
solar arrays so we can get most you can
read all the material we need and the
energy that we need to process that
material from space and again there are
small groups of radical innovators deep
space industries is one of them funded
by wealthy individuals that are making
headway in this area
so it’s quite possible that in the next
few years we’ll have both affordable
access to space for people and a large
amount of material available in space
the next example has to do with how do
you build the station now the
International Space Station for example
costs tens of billions of dollars to
build and that’s not even including
launch cost so now albeit that is a very
complex scientific base but how are we
going to build an entire city and again
if you ask a reputable spacecraft
engineer they will tell you something
like space is hard well and they’re not
wrong but designing anything big and
complicated and that’s really new is
hard so designing a ship a car an
airplane tall buildings these are these
are hard to do designing this telephone
is hard but when we built Space
Station’s we design everything from
scratch when we buy a telephone well
they make millions of these per month
that’s what makes them affordable so
designing a space station from scratch
or designing a space city from scratch
would be like before you move into your
apartment instead of just going out to a
shop and buying the the appliances in
the furniture instead you commissioned a
large engineering team and you designed
all new stove and refrigerator and
electrical system and plumbing and all
the rest of it well that would be and
then you did it again if you ever move
to a different apartment you can see how
that could get expensive now this idea
so therefore we need to look at using
machinery and products that were
developed and mass-produced on earth to
build the city in space and that has
deep implications on how you build a
city so one for one thing you have to
start with a construction site that is
earth-like so it has to be spinning to
provide gravity it has to have an
atmosphere and it has to have protection
from radiation but beyond that they also
need people because that’s how the
equipment was designed to be used is by
people and that turns out to be a good
fit because the whole purpose of a city
in space is to have people in it now
when I mentioned this to my status quo
spacecraft engineer friends their heads
figuratively explode so the next
question has to do with how can we
afford to maintain the city in space for
example the International Space Station
cost tens of hundreds of billions of
sorry hundreds of millions of dollars
per year to just maintain with
consumables and and equipment so how are
we going to maintain an entire city and
the answer to this is that we have to
think big not small so let me start with
obviously the more people you have the
bigger this the city has to be and the
more expensive it’s going to be to build
so but there’s going to be an upper
limit to how much money investors would
be actually willing to spend to build
the city so there’s an upper limit to
the number of people that you can have
in the city so that’s easy when we look
at annual cost of running it it’s a
little bit more complex because of the
way that the city is built it’s
different than any other space station
ever built because it is access to
resources it has access to energy it has
people which means it has an internal
economy it has exports and imports it
has local production and consumption
things like you know electricians and
that sort of thing and it’s got savings
so it has its own ability to do things
now if you just extrapolate this and say
well let’s start by having millions of
people in space if we take that case
well they would be completely
independent so they would not need to
buy anything from earth to sustain
themselves now maybe they would want to
but they don’t need to so the effective
annual maintenance would be zero as you
consider smaller and smaller cities they
are less self-sufficient so they need to
import more even though they have got
fewer people and as a result the cost
per person goes up of annual maintenance
at some point the cost is so high that
the person there’s nothing that person
could do to earn the money they need to
pay for the supplies they’re getting
each month and that gives us a lower
limit to the number of people and in
this gap is then where the population of
the firt of the first city in space has
to be and I’ll tell you that that is a
lot more than six people now I talked
about exports I talked about people
earning money to be able to pay for the
the station and so as an aside here’s a
just a summary slide or somebody chart
showing the entire space market as it is
today is just under 300 billion dollars
but in the inset you see that there
people spend 20 billion dollars a year
or so today to manufacture spacecraft to
launch them and to move them around in
space so what better place to build
spacecraft than in space
and what better way to move spacecraft
around in space then to use space tugs
that are manufactured there and that are
fueled with propellants developed from
materials in space so that’s what the
people in the city could do to earn
money to buy things from Earth we’ve
seen how the city could be affordable
but even if it’s theoretically
affordable who would actually ever
invest in it now there’s multiple groups
but one is that as I just said the city
is a business so it will have retained
earnings it will have an ability to make
money and within the business there
there’s the local production and
consumption so there are local
businesses inside the electricians and
the plumbers and the baristas and the
pizza makers so there there will be
interest from the entrepreneurial
investors and also from financial
investors beyond that the city will more
importantly be an extremely large real
estate development or literally land
development and individuals and
businesses will buy property with the
idea that they can use it and then sell
it for more than they bought it for over
time so they’re they can retire back to
earth if they want to nevertheless the
investment won’t appeal to just any
investor those who do invest will do it
because they see the city as important
and here’s its importance everyone on
earth deserves the opportunity at a high
standard of living but to deliver this
high standard of living we will need to
go beyond conservation beyond efficiency
improvements beyond even strong
ecological programs in order to to
deliver a high standard of living to all
in the long term we will need more
material resources and energy than the
earth can give us and space has vast
amounts of both so the city is important
it is technically and financially
feasible and it is a necessary first
step in the long direction so to those
of you who are radical innovators and
those of you financially support radical
innovation now’s the time to get moving
you have an opportunity to change the
course of human history and it’s not
often you get a chance to do that thank you
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