I tell stories that involve strange
theories and yet even stranger realities
stories that may be made of both fact
and a little friction and that may be
said in the past or in a world of
futurist predictions but where my story
aims to take all of us here today ladies
and gentlemen is to the crossroads to
the intersection of where the amazing
worlds of science fiction meet our world
of science fact to see how their
connection has shaped the world that we
live in today and how it may shake up
was a dark and stormy night in 1898 and
HG Wells had just written his book the
War of the Worlds where he describes an
alien invasion of planet Earth by
Martians that possess the highly
advanced technology the Martians were
jealous of planet Earth because our
planet was a fertile blue-green Oasis
the jewel in the cosmos while Mars was a
barren and lifeless Rock so they came to
earth to destroy humans using heat rays
and mechanical tripods that work
everything is terrifying to the
characters in the book as a nuclear bomb
would be for Japanese city in 1945 in
the end it wasn’t some miraculous
invention of mankind that defeated the
Martians but it was the laws of
evolution by natural selection you see
unlike us humans that had lived on earth
for thousands of generations the
Martians had not developed an immunity
the billions of microscopic bacteria on
our planet and so after a while the
Martians all got sick and died the earth
was saved and humanity lived happily
ever after what do you think of that
compatible terrifying anything well the
war of the worlds’ alongside other
stories like The Time Machine and
Rossum’s Universal robots and Jules
Verne’s from earth to the moon
represented a new direction in fiction
called science fiction these are stories
that use science as a central element of
the plot and these stories were born
about a hundred years ago at the turn of
the century when our perceptions and
understanding of science were starting
to change and in fact the War of the
Worlds was actually the story here was
inspired by some real-life scientific
discoveries of the time okay it was the
year 1877 and Mars or at a close
approach to each other this close
approach or opposition as it’s called in
astronomy opened a window that allowed
us to see Mars easier to make us allowed
us to make observations easier and this
was the image that we got of Mars using
the best equipment that we had at that
time due to a limitation in the
resolution of the telescope’s which were
clearly not as good as today we found
these streets these lines that
because of an error in translation
because they didn’t have Google back
then these streaks and lines were
thought to be canals or channels built
by an alien civilization one of those
astronomers his name was Percival Lowell
who would later help to discover Pluto
which is totally not a planet by the way
it’s a dwarf planet on a Kuiper belt
object now he fully believed that these
lines were were these canals were built
by an alien civilization trying to save
planet Mars from drying up and dying out
by channeling water flow the key word is
water flowed from the polar ice caps of
Mars to the
the world he was confident he believed
that these lines were evidence of an
intelligent life that was capable of
engineering on a planetary scale sort of
like how human beings are today but we
realized but we know now that he was
wrong and there was no life on Mars but
that did not stop the newspapers the
press at the time from from thinking out
there promoting this idea the world was
swept up by Mars mania everyone was
imagining all sorts of ideas and
conditions of what it was like on Mars
or whether there was any life or none at
a time when we were only starting to
understand our neighbor planet in the
solar system but it turns out that this
whole idea about water flow on Mars
wasn’t so crazy after all
in 2011 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter the
food from Earth to take pictures of Mars
using instruments that first of all
Lowell that Percival Lowell could have
only dreamed up discovered these what is
that this thing that is seasonal water
flow on Mars well water is such a strong
word is form of salty fluid you see
every Martian summer and yes Mars does
have seasons that happen to be much
longer than Earth season the planet Mars
gets warm enough to the point that some
of the ice on the surface starts to melt
and some of this meltwater
slides down the the slopes and hills on
Mars carrying with it a bit of minerals
and soil now that sounds like the canal
idea doesn’t it
we found the water flow but the aliens
have yet to show now our understanding
on planet Mars is still changing to this
day and this evidence has definitely
shaped our opinion of whether there
could be life on Mars but lacking any
concrete evidence for microbes or little
green men the search continues now HG
Wells was among the first
long line of sci-fi halters whose work
would influence the world like this
later on we entered the Golden Age of
sci-fi it’s largely a part by an event
that happened after the Second World War
that is on October 4th 1957 we humans
achieved something incredible we became
a spacefaring civilization for the first
time ever the Stars were no longer the
exclusive domain of fiction but we could
actually begin our own journey to reach
them and just like how Sputnik brought
us into a new age the sci-fi stories
after Sputnik also entered a new age it
wasn’t enough that the characters in
this new era of science fiction had to
reach space but they had to interact and
partake in adventures that were
literally from out of this world and one
of my favorite stories from this era was
written by a man named Arthur see Clark
and it’s called rendezvous with Rama
arthur c clarke was a radio engineer in
World War 2 and similarly I majored in
microwave communications because I
thought that I could aliens seemed like
a good idea at the time now in
rendezvous with Rama and mysterious
cylindrical alien spacecraft enters our
solar system from somewhere up there in
the universe the spacecraft is given a
name Rama after the Hindu god
now after a preliminary reconnaissance
by an unmanned
unmanned probe a team of explorers is
sent to investigate the spacecraft this
is Rama in miniature and inside they
find an incredible artificial world
complete with its own cities and oceans
but there was no sign of any intelligent
life that could have created such a
large spacecraft it was discovered that
Rama had a mind of its own
during its journey through the solar
system it frequently changes course
mysteriously like that and that caused
the oceans inside Rama to
well raged with waves due to the
acceleration forces so I thought that
was a clever application of the laws of
physics within the story now towards the
end of the story the lights inside Rama
start to dim which caused the
temperature to drop to a point where the
human explorers had to leave the ship or
else risk freezing to death in the end
Rama left as mysteriously as it came
leaving with it more questions than
answers really a story right it’s a
sci-fi classic that has inspired
generations of actual scientists after
it this is the sequel to the Rama story
I got this that big bad wolf when I was
still in university anyway three years
after the first rendezvous with Rama
another book comes up which I think was
equally more remarkable and that is the
high frontier by American physicist
Jerrod O’Neill from Houston American
physicist he’s not a member of the
Beatles you might think from Princeton
University and he wrote this book called
the high frontier that details how we
that human beings might create similarly
a cylindrical alien spaceship with its
own artificial world inside that we
could live inside and he posed that
design challenges coursework to his
students and together they did the math
and they did a research on how we might
actually do this and these cylinders
that would be called O’Neil cylinders
would be given an arm of the slight spin
like that to use centrifugal forces to
impart the people inside with some
measure of artificial gravity so you
imagine that you are standing on the
inside of a cylinder like this and it’s
rotating your feet will actually be
pushed upwards like that
so you even though you’re in space you
wouldn’t float you’d actually your feet
will be glued to the ground like that
that’s how
to generate the artificial gravity and
these O’Neill Space cylinders would be
placed in locations in space called
Lagrange points where the mutual gravity
of the Earth Moon and Sun system is
stable enough such that you don’t drift
away because imagine if you had a
relative living there their addresses we
change and you can find them I’m at l2
Lagrange point no.2 somewhere out there
ladies call me and these cylindrical the
proposed design by Gerald O’Neill would
use reflecting mirrors to harvest
sunlight for purposes ranging from bio
hydroponics I’m not a biologist my
little brother is a little brother
hydroponics and water filtration systems
so it’s really an incredible design
really to think that maybe one day your
descendants could wake up to something
like this or this in the morning I’m not
sure if there’s a morning in space but
now all in all there is it much within
the laws of physics that would prevent
us from doing something like this there
are a lot of engineering challenges that
we have to solve along the way such as
how to make access to space easier
already being done by Elon Musk and
SpaceX we’d have to figure out how to
mine asteroids for resources and
minerals there was a TED talk on that by
a Harvard astronomer three years ago and
we’d also have to set up figure out how
to set up a moon base the base of
operations on the moon now that’s a
tricky one but it isn’t something that
we aren’t already trying to figure out
we’re thinking about right now
so really the reality is not too far
from the fiction by the way I just got
this book like last week I haven’t even
opened it yet and this is Artemis by
Andy veer who’s the same one who same
author who wrote the Martian the movie
that was a Matt Damon in it and that’s
all my recommended reading list anyone
out there who’s curious doesn’t matter
if you’re in the sciences maybe you give
this a read now three years after Gerard
O’Neill writes his book the hype
here there was an anime released in
Japan called Mobile Suit Gundam and you
guys wanted yes and in the anime he
actually uses the Japanese used some of
his designs of the O’Neil cylinder as
part of the story
see that’s pulled straight from the
animation right there so it’s really
brilliant how we have science fiction
inspire some real science which in turn
go out to inspire some more real-life
science fiction and the cycle continues
so on and so forth and for that
eventually science fiction does its part
to inspire the next generation of
scientists like me people who work in
the sciences and those scientists go out
to push the boundaries of real-life
science of which science fiction is
based on so that’s it and then when that
happens yesterday’s sci-fi eventually
becomes today’s sign fact but you want
to know the weird thing about the rama
story is that it actually kind of
happened in real life if you remember
the news sometime in October from last
year astronomers announced that they
discovered this
it’s called Oh wah wah wah that’s a
really cute name everyone try saying it
yeah and which in Hawaiian stands for
scout from our distant past the reason
why it has a Hawaiian name is because it
was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii
it’s not an alien ship like Rama but is
that an interstellar comet that had
flown into our solar system from
somewhere out there in the universe and
flown into our solar system and we
managed to see it last October it flew
in to a point close to the Sun I mean
really close this is the trajectory it
came in to within the orbit of mercury
it’s a really close call in his
parabolic orbit right there and it was
flying really fast too too fast to be
caught by the gravity of our Sun and
just like Rama Oh mwah mwah was strange
its shape was
elongated like like a sort of a space
cucumber shape is elongated we saw it
like that and as it was flying it had
this puzzling motion about it like it
was spinning end over end like that and
as I was flying to a solar system it
started to accelerate for some strange
reason and that’s because comets contain
ice and when Omaha Boyle was flying
close to the Sun some of this ice
sublimated into gas and then jettisoned
out into space like a like a space comet
part but you realize that there’s no air
in space so it’s more like there’s no
sound okay so that’s go more more with
the first ever interstellar visitor
we’ve had to come from outside our solar
system and by now this object has
traveled too far in its path for us to
see it anymore and we can’t send a probe
to it because we don’t have that
technology oh yeah podcasting effect see
that that’s where all the carbon parts
of the death this cause the trajectory
comet outgassing now it’s too far away
for us to see and we can’t reach it
anymore but it was the first
interstellar visitor we’ve ever had and
so think about that next time you pick
up the comic book on artificial
intelligence or when you watch the next
Avengers movie that story may be closer
to reality than you might think
and if the stories of yesterday can
influence the realities of today what
are the kind of stories that can take us
for world beyond today my name is
Mohammed engineer explorer wonder thank
you for your time you
theories and yet even stranger realities
stories that may be made of both fact
and a little friction and that may be
said in the past or in a world of
futurist predictions but where my story
aims to take all of us here today ladies
and gentlemen is to the crossroads to
the intersection of where the amazing
worlds of science fiction meet our world
of science fact to see how their
connection has shaped the world that we
live in today and how it may shake up
was a dark and stormy night in 1898 and
HG Wells had just written his book the
War of the Worlds where he describes an
alien invasion of planet Earth by
Martians that possess the highly
advanced technology the Martians were
jealous of planet Earth because our
planet was a fertile blue-green Oasis
the jewel in the cosmos while Mars was a
barren and lifeless Rock so they came to
earth to destroy humans using heat rays
and mechanical tripods that work
everything is terrifying to the
characters in the book as a nuclear bomb
would be for Japanese city in 1945 in
the end it wasn’t some miraculous
invention of mankind that defeated the
Martians but it was the laws of
evolution by natural selection you see
unlike us humans that had lived on earth
for thousands of generations the
Martians had not developed an immunity
the billions of microscopic bacteria on
our planet and so after a while the
Martians all got sick and died the earth
was saved and humanity lived happily
ever after what do you think of that
compatible terrifying anything well the
war of the worlds’ alongside other
stories like The Time Machine and
Rossum’s Universal robots and Jules
Verne’s from earth to the moon
represented a new direction in fiction
called science fiction these are stories
that use science as a central element of
the plot and these stories were born
about a hundred years ago at the turn of
the century when our perceptions and
understanding of science were starting
to change and in fact the War of the
Worlds was actually the story here was
inspired by some real-life scientific
discoveries of the time okay it was the
year 1877 and Mars or at a close
approach to each other this close
approach or opposition as it’s called in
astronomy opened a window that allowed
us to see Mars easier to make us allowed
us to make observations easier and this
was the image that we got of Mars using
the best equipment that we had at that
time due to a limitation in the
resolution of the telescope’s which were
clearly not as good as today we found
these streets these lines that
because of an error in translation
because they didn’t have Google back
then these streaks and lines were
thought to be canals or channels built
by an alien civilization one of those
astronomers his name was Percival Lowell
who would later help to discover Pluto
which is totally not a planet by the way
it’s a dwarf planet on a Kuiper belt
object now he fully believed that these
lines were were these canals were built
by an alien civilization trying to save
planet Mars from drying up and dying out
by channeling water flow the key word is
water flowed from the polar ice caps of
Mars to the
the world he was confident he believed
that these lines were evidence of an
intelligent life that was capable of
engineering on a planetary scale sort of
like how human beings are today but we
realized but we know now that he was
wrong and there was no life on Mars but
that did not stop the newspapers the
press at the time from from thinking out
there promoting this idea the world was
swept up by Mars mania everyone was
imagining all sorts of ideas and
conditions of what it was like on Mars
or whether there was any life or none at
a time when we were only starting to
understand our neighbor planet in the
solar system but it turns out that this
whole idea about water flow on Mars
wasn’t so crazy after all
in 2011 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter the
food from Earth to take pictures of Mars
using instruments that first of all
Lowell that Percival Lowell could have
only dreamed up discovered these what is
that this thing that is seasonal water
flow on Mars well water is such a strong
word is form of salty fluid you see
every Martian summer and yes Mars does
have seasons that happen to be much
longer than Earth season the planet Mars
gets warm enough to the point that some
of the ice on the surface starts to melt
and some of this meltwater
slides down the the slopes and hills on
Mars carrying with it a bit of minerals
and soil now that sounds like the canal
idea doesn’t it
we found the water flow but the aliens
have yet to show now our understanding
on planet Mars is still changing to this
day and this evidence has definitely
shaped our opinion of whether there
could be life on Mars but lacking any
concrete evidence for microbes or little
green men the search continues now HG
Wells was among the first
long line of sci-fi halters whose work
would influence the world like this
later on we entered the Golden Age of
sci-fi it’s largely a part by an event
that happened after the Second World War
that is on October 4th 1957 we humans
achieved something incredible we became
a spacefaring civilization for the first
time ever the Stars were no longer the
exclusive domain of fiction but we could
actually begin our own journey to reach
them and just like how Sputnik brought
us into a new age the sci-fi stories
after Sputnik also entered a new age it
wasn’t enough that the characters in
this new era of science fiction had to
reach space but they had to interact and
partake in adventures that were
literally from out of this world and one
of my favorite stories from this era was
written by a man named Arthur see Clark
and it’s called rendezvous with Rama
arthur c clarke was a radio engineer in
World War 2 and similarly I majored in
microwave communications because I
thought that I could aliens seemed like
a good idea at the time now in
rendezvous with Rama and mysterious
cylindrical alien spacecraft enters our
solar system from somewhere up there in
the universe the spacecraft is given a
name Rama after the Hindu god
now after a preliminary reconnaissance
by an unmanned
unmanned probe a team of explorers is
sent to investigate the spacecraft this
is Rama in miniature and inside they
find an incredible artificial world
complete with its own cities and oceans
but there was no sign of any intelligent
life that could have created such a
large spacecraft it was discovered that
Rama had a mind of its own
during its journey through the solar
system it frequently changes course
mysteriously like that and that caused
the oceans inside Rama to
well raged with waves due to the
acceleration forces so I thought that
was a clever application of the laws of
physics within the story now towards the
end of the story the lights inside Rama
start to dim which caused the
temperature to drop to a point where the
human explorers had to leave the ship or
else risk freezing to death in the end
Rama left as mysteriously as it came
leaving with it more questions than
answers really a story right it’s a
sci-fi classic that has inspired
generations of actual scientists after
it this is the sequel to the Rama story
I got this that big bad wolf when I was
still in university anyway three years
after the first rendezvous with Rama
another book comes up which I think was
equally more remarkable and that is the
high frontier by American physicist
Jerrod O’Neill from Houston American
physicist he’s not a member of the
Beatles you might think from Princeton
University and he wrote this book called
the high frontier that details how we
that human beings might create similarly
a cylindrical alien spaceship with its
own artificial world inside that we
could live inside and he posed that
design challenges coursework to his
students and together they did the math
and they did a research on how we might
actually do this and these cylinders
that would be called O’Neil cylinders
would be given an arm of the slight spin
like that to use centrifugal forces to
impart the people inside with some
measure of artificial gravity so you
imagine that you are standing on the
inside of a cylinder like this and it’s
rotating your feet will actually be
pushed upwards like that
so you even though you’re in space you
wouldn’t float you’d actually your feet
will be glued to the ground like that
that’s how
to generate the artificial gravity and
these O’Neill Space cylinders would be
placed in locations in space called
Lagrange points where the mutual gravity
of the Earth Moon and Sun system is
stable enough such that you don’t drift
away because imagine if you had a
relative living there their addresses we
change and you can find them I’m at l2
Lagrange point no.2 somewhere out there
ladies call me and these cylindrical the
proposed design by Gerald O’Neill would
use reflecting mirrors to harvest
sunlight for purposes ranging from bio
hydroponics I’m not a biologist my
little brother is a little brother
hydroponics and water filtration systems
so it’s really an incredible design
really to think that maybe one day your
descendants could wake up to something
like this or this in the morning I’m not
sure if there’s a morning in space but
now all in all there is it much within
the laws of physics that would prevent
us from doing something like this there
are a lot of engineering challenges that
we have to solve along the way such as
how to make access to space easier
already being done by Elon Musk and
SpaceX we’d have to figure out how to
mine asteroids for resources and
minerals there was a TED talk on that by
a Harvard astronomer three years ago and
we’d also have to set up figure out how
to set up a moon base the base of
operations on the moon now that’s a
tricky one but it isn’t something that
we aren’t already trying to figure out
we’re thinking about right now
so really the reality is not too far
from the fiction by the way I just got
this book like last week I haven’t even
opened it yet and this is Artemis by
Andy veer who’s the same one who same
author who wrote the Martian the movie
that was a Matt Damon in it and that’s
all my recommended reading list anyone
out there who’s curious doesn’t matter
if you’re in the sciences maybe you give
this a read now three years after Gerard
O’Neill writes his book the hype
here there was an anime released in
Japan called Mobile Suit Gundam and you
guys wanted yes and in the anime he
actually uses the Japanese used some of
his designs of the O’Neil cylinder as
part of the story
see that’s pulled straight from the
animation right there so it’s really
brilliant how we have science fiction
inspire some real science which in turn
go out to inspire some more real-life
science fiction and the cycle continues
so on and so forth and for that
eventually science fiction does its part
to inspire the next generation of
scientists like me people who work in
the sciences and those scientists go out
to push the boundaries of real-life
science of which science fiction is
based on so that’s it and then when that
happens yesterday’s sci-fi eventually
becomes today’s sign fact but you want
to know the weird thing about the rama
story is that it actually kind of
happened in real life if you remember
the news sometime in October from last
year astronomers announced that they
discovered this
it’s called Oh wah wah wah that’s a
really cute name everyone try saying it
yeah and which in Hawaiian stands for
scout from our distant past the reason
why it has a Hawaiian name is because it
was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii
it’s not an alien ship like Rama but is
that an interstellar comet that had
flown into our solar system from
somewhere out there in the universe and
flown into our solar system and we
managed to see it last October it flew
in to a point close to the Sun I mean
really close this is the trajectory it
came in to within the orbit of mercury
it’s a really close call in his
parabolic orbit right there and it was
flying really fast too too fast to be
caught by the gravity of our Sun and
just like Rama Oh mwah mwah was strange
its shape was
elongated like like a sort of a space
cucumber shape is elongated we saw it
like that and as it was flying it had
this puzzling motion about it like it
was spinning end over end like that and
as I was flying to a solar system it
started to accelerate for some strange
reason and that’s because comets contain
ice and when Omaha Boyle was flying
close to the Sun some of this ice
sublimated into gas and then jettisoned
out into space like a like a space comet
part but you realize that there’s no air
in space so it’s more like there’s no
sound okay so that’s go more more with
the first ever interstellar visitor
we’ve had to come from outside our solar
system and by now this object has
traveled too far in its path for us to
see it anymore and we can’t send a probe
to it because we don’t have that
technology oh yeah podcasting effect see
that that’s where all the carbon parts
of the death this cause the trajectory
comet outgassing now it’s too far away
for us to see and we can’t reach it
anymore but it was the first
interstellar visitor we’ve ever had and
so think about that next time you pick
up the comic book on artificial
intelligence or when you watch the next
Avengers movie that story may be closer
to reality than you might think
and if the stories of yesterday can
influence the realities of today what
are the kind of stories that can take us
for world beyond today my name is
Mohammed engineer explorer wonder thank
you for your time you
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