Welcome everybody and thank you for coming to this lecture by Douglas Mallette.

He is the CEO of the Cybernated Farm Systems,

LLC,

and also a former systems engineer on the

NASA Space Shuttle Program.

Let's give him a warm welcome.

[Applause]

All right. Thank you very much.

I appreciate all of you who took time out of your day

to come here and listen to what I'm going to talk about today.

As was mentioned, I am the CEO of Cybernated Farm Systems.

It's a company I just recently started.

We'll talk a little bit about it later as it has some relevance to the topic.

I'm not here really to talk about that so much.

I am a former Space Shuttle Systems Engineer.

I worked with a Boeing subcontractor in Houston, Texas,

and I did that for a little over 3 years

before they decided to start systematically shutting everything down

(so everybody all got laid off at periodic times)

at which point I decided I can go play with missiles, bombs and guns

because that's really what aerospace is starting to move towards

(in my neck-of-the-woods which I'm not interested in),

so I decided to do something a little more humanitarian.

I'm the author of 'Turning Point',

a book that talks about space exploration and development

in a non-technical, user-friendly way.

Unfortunately a lot of people have this mindset,

not due any fault of their own. The media does not do a very good job

of promoting space exploration and what it means to your everyday life,

but they don't find a lot of relevance as to what space exploration means

for mankind and their day-to-day operations.

Throughout the course of today's lecture we're going to touch base on that concept,

and what it means on how we operate on this planet.

We are going to talk about space exploration and sustainability.

What exactly do the two have to do with each other?

Sustainability in space increases sustainability on Earth.

There's nothing that we've ever invented for the space program

that doesn't, in some way, find its way

on to everyday Earth-based operations.

Whether it's the CAT scan machine or MRI's

or advanced materials that go into tires,

advanced systems for brakes, for telecommunications.

There's a gamut of possibilities

of industries that are affected by space exploration.

What we're going to do to start off with

is called a Gedanken experiment, or a thought experiment,

on what would be needed to build a base on Mars

and how it would facilitate the needs of the astronauts. How will they live?

How are we going to provide everything that they need?

On Mars there's no grocery store,

and so we have to think about how an astronaut would be able to live.

There's no grocery store down the street for them to resupply.

You can't just waste and go to the store and pick up a refresh.

Logistically that's near impossible to pull off in a sustainable way,

so what we look at is: Okay, what can we implement onto a Mars-based system?

This is also used on the ISS, so

these concepts actually don't just apply to Mars, but they would apply to the Moon

or a long duration space craft or the International Space Station, the ISS.

All these systems exist, today,

but we don't use those derivative technologies down here very well.

So, what are some of the things that you would need

to maintain a human being's biological requirements,

biological necessities of life? Anybody throw anything out.

[man from audience] - Water and seeds. - Seeds? You mean food, right?

Yes, ok. Food, water, what else? Yes? - Oxygen.

Air, yeah. Clean breathable air.

- Controlling too high/low temperatures.

- Climate control? Right, ok.

Waste reclamation and the proper handling of that, ok.

Now what about quality of life needs?

Things that enhance the quality of life beyond just the biological requirements?

A lot of people don't think about those

because we're immersed in them all the time. Yes?

- Safety?

Social needs, people to talk to, to feel like you're a part of something. - Being connected with other people, ok.

What kind of technical systems might be a quality of life?

- Media. - Media?

Oh, yes, ok. Entertainment and stuff like that. Right, and back there?

Energy? Absolutely. That's a good one. What else?

Transportation? All right! Yes?

- Production. - Production, manufacturing,

things like that, to get the things that they need on a local level.

It's kind of hard to do the resupply so it helps to produce as much as you can.

Now you guys kind of get some of the concepts, all right?

Basic necessities of life.

What are they? In a nutshell: air, food, water,

sleep and medical care.

Sleep and medical care seem to miss people, if you think about it.

You don't think about "You need to sleep!"

If sleep deprivation is a serious biological problem

for people, it can cause you to go crazy or you can get really sick.

In medical care, obviously if you hurt yourself,

if you don't take care of that issue, that infection,

your biological-ness will go 'prrrrrt' and you're done.

So, you've got to make sure those things are covered.

Now you've got your necessities for a high quality of life.

Here are some of the most pedestrian things: shelter,

clothing, education, energy, transportation and communication.

If you think about how you interact with the world today

you're involved with these on a regular basis,

in different ways.

Shelter on Mars, is actually more of a biological requirement

than it is a quality of life enhancer, because

you can't just go for a crisp walk in the Martian air.

It doesn't work that way.

On Earth you could technically live without shelter.

You could exist as a human being; it wouldn't be very comfortable.

In fact, you can exist without all of these, but your quality of life isn't very high.

If you think back to the nomadic, hunter-gatherers,

of 50,000 years ago,

they lived but they didn't live that great.

They moved around a lot. Nature could mess with them pretty easily,

but they survived.

When you're looking at a Mars Base, you will think to yourselves

(or we in the space industry have given a lot of thought to)

"All right, how can we provide those necessities

on a level so that the astronauts

aren't reduced to being just stewards of their environment?"

See, it's one thing to provide these things.

It's something else if you have to use a lot of human labor

to constantly maintain them all the time,

because after all, that's not why we would be sending astronauts to Mars

in the first place, right? The point of them going there is to get out,

go explore, do their science and do their research.

Their job is not to be Farmer John or Farmer Jill.

Their job is not supposed to be the manual labor force

to create their water supply or to do anything like that.

So what you'll want to do is to automate, computerize,

and make technical as much of those processes as possible,

so that the astronauts have the free time

to go do what they're supposed to be doing: to go be astronauts.

When you look at this on a level of "Ok, this is what we have to do on Mars,"

a lot of these problems have been addressed and are already overcome.

The International Space Station operates

in a highly automated fashion.

That way, the astronauts that are on board

don't have to, as much, maintain their environment directly.

Another key thing, especially on Mars,

would be having more than enough to suit their needs,

having an abundance of their requirements.

You can't afford to have a shortage in a place like that,

because if you run out, people die. Same thing on the space shuttle:

you have to make sure that you have more then enough of what you need

so that you can complete the mission.

And likewise on the ISS, on the space station.

If you think about it in terms of Earth,

it's by far the most important word

with respect to mankind's ability to live peacefully.

I draw up the scenario like this: If I took

this group of people in this room right now,

and I put you on a deserted island with nothing but 1 coconut tree,

how long do you think you reasonable people would last

before 'it [the shit] really hit the fan',

before people started going after each other,

started manipulating each other,

started fighting each other to get to that food?

You don't think of yourselves as aggressive, mean, nasty people,

but if you're put in an environment that has that level of scarcity,

you will turn into aggressive, mean, nasty people to survive.

That's how it works.

So conversely, what if we put 500 coconut trees on this island?

[It's] way more than enough to cover everybody's needs for food.

Do you think you're going to exhibit those negative behaviors?

[It's] much less likely. You might quibble over other things,

but you're definitely not going to fight over food,

or at least over the coconuts.

It's an important aspect when people talk about this

human nature versus human nurture argument, I mean.

It's kind of a quasi-combination of both,

but our behaviors are highly modified

by the environment that we're stuck in at the moment.

You put us in a high stress, high scarcity environment,

then we're not going to behave very well.

You put us in a more relaxed, low stress,

more abundant environment for the things that we need,

and we're less likely to exhibit these aberrant behaviors,

these negative behaviors.

Now we move, as far as Mars is concerned, to technical abundance,

being able to create an abundance without the heavy use

of human labor as the primary driver.

Throughout the course of most of human history,

the largest labor force on the planet has been human muscle.

Then we started using animals a little more efficiently,

but then we got to the point where we started developing technologies

and machines to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

Now we're in the 21st century where we can do a whole lot more

with a whole lot less,

and we're seeing some of the ramifications of that

in our socio-economic 'hiccup' if you will;

but on a Mars base it's an absolute necessity,

because as we go back to it, there's only so many astronauts

that can go there at any given time. They don't have a labor force of 100 people.

You're looking at a Martian mission of 5 - 7,

and so if they want to live, work and cooperate together,

there's a different mental structure to those astronauts

as to how to work together. There's also a different environmental structure

that allows them to live and work together in such a place.

What kind of technology do we have today

that can cover biological needs in abundance?

Air, looking at the Earth.

That's readily abundant, as long as we don't pollute it all.

We're not doing a very good job at keeping clean air, but

we are trying to get better at setting up regulations to cover that.

Water: desalinisation plants,

rain collecting systems,

an example of which would be NASA's spin-off

from 2008, a portable nano mesh.

Basically, it's a water bottle with a filter built into it,

and you can go to the nastiest mud hole in Africa,

push through and you'll get clean drinking water on the other end;

and you can drink it right out of the same bottle you just dumped

because the technology involved (and when people think technology

they're only thinking computers and bells and whistles and Star Trek),

it doesn't always have to be that high tech.

It can be as simple as a nano mesh material

that allows you to get clean drinking water relatively easily.

NASA creates these spin-off magazines every single year.

They're online, they're free, and they show

technological progress that either NASA directly invented

to help people out for the consumer market,