Daniel S. Goldin
NASA Administrator
"A Vision of Space"
November 17, 2000

Daniel Goldin: I want to talk about your future. By the time you reach middle age, in about 20 or 25 years, the changes you will see will swamp anything that happened up until today. The technology is there. The changes are going to be breathtaking. In the next 25 years, we have it within our grasp to virtually wipe out disease. We have it within our grasp to solve some of the environmental problems that exist --the greenhouse gases, the pollutants, the contamination of the ocean. We will be able to make transportation so safe that you won’t have second thoughts. Airplane travel will be 10 times safer than it is today. You will be able to fly day, night, all weather. At least these are all potentials. I am not predicting they will happen. There will be a but…Day, night, all weather and not have all this gridlock and hub lock. You will able to communicate and it will be geography independent. You will be able to sit in a room like this and you will not know whether the person next to you is real, or they are being projected in a hologram. Everything will change. You will not sit at a little keyboard, punching at the computer and calling it high tech. You will have natural languages exchange with the machines. Nanosensors, nanocommunicators, nanotherapists will be in your body assuring that disease could be sensed early and diagnosed. Materials will be very strong and multifunctional and we will talk about some of this. This is the potential.

When I was born in 1940, many, many years ago, there was one-third the number of people on the planet. So in my lifetime, the population on this planet has tripled. Tripled. In your lifetime, it will probably double yet again. And with all this great technology we have the opportunity for economic growth. We have the opportunity to bring everybody along. The question is, "Will you do it, because you are going to lead this country?" I will be sitting by sipping a nice drink and writing my memoirs, watching you, but you will be leading this country.

Now there are a few little bity problems that we have. We take a lot for granted. I just saw a statistic yesterday and it showed that as the enrollment in engineering, which is the furnace for all these schools, is going down, the number of degrees in recreation are rising. In fact, I think that the number of degrees in recreation was half or a third that of engineering 15 or 20 years ago and in the year 2000 we reached a cross-over point. The number of degrees in physics and chemistry and the hard sciences is going down. I think over the four year period from ‘93-’97, it went down 6%. If you take a look at where occupations will be in ten years, it says that we need to increase the work force by 14%. But in science and technology, we need to increase it by four times that amount. In order for America…let me confine myself to America now, because that’s our primary focus, being a representative of the people America, it’s going down. It’s wonderful that people are getting law degrees. It is wonderful that people are getting degrees in recreation, but in the end we are in a world that’s very complex. Proportionately, if you take a look at the degrees in China versus degrees in America, I think they have a ratio of 5 to 1 or 6 to 1 of their college graduates in sciences versus non-sciences. It used to take billions of dollars to build these incredible factories. It used to take billions of dollars to build facilities. The chip factory cost five billion dollars so catching up is pretty tough, but in the new world of technology, where you work with nanotechnology and nano-robots and information technology, three or four people could start a company. The momentum model is not going to perpetuate the unbelievable robust ability of America. And then clearly there are the whole issues of democracy and assuring that the nation moves forward. So while technology in and of itself offers promise, it is the execution of democracy, it is the execution of the will of the people to do the right thing. And you are the leaders.

What I would like to do is to lay out a little bit for you some of the things that are happening in technology and what NASA is doing in this domain. We operate in four basic enterprises. One area is human spaceflight. This is what’s visible. And most people, when they think about NASA, they think about the space shuttle taking off and coming back down and now we are building a space station. And that consumes a good portion of our budget. Tomorrow morning at about 7:25, if you look to the Southeast sky, you will see the red planet Mars, which beckons us. In no less than 10 and in no more than 20 years, we are going to have astronauts walking on Mars, no doubt about it. We will also probably have astronauts back on the moon and in research stations on asteroids. Asteroids are rich in carbonaceous materials. They are rich in minerals. They may be the ultimate resource that we could figure out how to have mining operations and bring materials back. Mars is exciting because we are pretty sure water flowed there and in fact we have evidence that there might be existing water maybe a few hundred meters below the surface. If you go to our website, you can see the evidence. We just found that out some months ago. If there is water there, every place on Earth we find water we find life. Now we may not find little green men but it could be little bacteria. Even if we just find fossilized bacteria on Mars, what is the implication? If that bacteria started in an independent process on Mars, it has enormous implications to who we are and how we think about ourselves. In the immediate vicinity of Earth, let’s call it 100 light years. Now a light year is the distance a light travels in one year going 186,000 miles a second. That’s 6 trillion miles if you work it out. That’s 6000 billion miles. That’s a long distance. And inside that volume, something on the order of some thousands of stars, many like our own sun, many with the same energy levels, and with lifetimes measured in billions of years. Our Sun is 5 billion years old. I remember, if you want to talk about optimism, I gave a lecture to my daughters class when she was in the third grade and I talked to the children about our Sun and how old it was and that I mentioned it was probably going to burn out. The little girls were okay, but the little boys were running in circles screaming, worrying about their future. Now you want to talk about optimism -- that’s optimism.

Many of these suns are just like our own Sun with the same kind of light, same kind of energy. And up until now we haven’t been able to directly detect planets that are Earth-size. When you read in the newspaper that we have detected about 36 planets, what we do is we look at the wobble of the star. As the planets go around them, they pull a star back and forth, so we look at the wobble of the star. What we want to do is directly detect planets inside this volume of a hundred light years where there are thousands of suns. And that’s a little difficult because if we just look at our own solar system and we look at Earth, in the visible light which our eyes can see, the amount of light coming from the Earth is one - ten billionth of the light coming from our Sun. So if we wanted to see Earth and we were 100 light years away, we would be washing out the light from Earth. If we go into the infrared, which is longer wavelengths than our eye can detect, it’s one — ten millionth. So that’s a pretty tough problem and you have to build huge telescopes. And in order to do this job these telescopes might have to be maybe 30 feet in diameter. That’s about four times bigger than the Hubble and we might have to have half a dozen of these telescopes spaced some dozens of miles apart and we’d have to know their relative separation to a billionth of a meter at all times. And we’d have to physically place them within a half inch of the spot that we want to hold it. And they would have to be about a million miles from Earth.

But we are working on that right now. Everyone can go to sleep and rest easy, and in about 12 to 15 years we will launch these telescopes. With these telescopes we should be able to detect Earth-size planets that if they exist we could see them. We will even be able to do preliminary analysis if they have atmospheres, if there are constituents in their atmosphere. And if we find water vapor, if we find carbon dioxide…look for a whole variety of gases and look for that carbon dioxide to be out of chemical equilibrium, we could at least infer that there might be a life force driving it. It could be microbial. It could be other than that.

Within about 20 years we will build telescopes even bigger and with maybe 25 telescopes that are 50-75 feet in diameter spaced about 500 miles apart to the same tolerance as I talked about, added about the same distance. Or perhaps even about 5 billion miles from Earth at about the orbit of Jupiter. With those we could image these planets, if they exist. And if these planets exist, and they have mountain ranges, oceans, continents, and clouds, we will have pictures of them. We will have pictures of them. So when you are actually older than Ed is right now, those pictures should exist if those planets exist if we’re successful. And this is kind of breathtaking. By that time we will have completed a census of our own solar system and understood a lot of things, because we have the planets that we know about out to the orbit of Jupiter, which is about four billion miles or 40 times the distance of Earth to the Sun. But out behind Jupiter is the primordial mass from which our solar system originated. It’s called the Corpa Belta Nior Cloud and it goes out for 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. That’s called astronomical units if I wanted to be technical. And out there is material that exists in the coldness of space, like it existed at the formation of our solar system. So we have the history written out there and certainly within 25 years we will have spacecraft routinely out in that space, sampling and sending information back to Earth. And hopefully by that time we will figure out how to bring spacecraft up to a good fraction of the speed of light, because in 25 years if we discover planets, we want to send something there. But right now we don’t know how to do it so we are also working on a variety of techniques, one of which is called antimatter.

Who is "trekkie" here? Anyone? Only a few "trekkie’s"…my God. I am a "trekkie." Well on Star Trek it is postulated that the Enterprise is powered by antimatter, right? Antimatter is just the opposite of matter. If it is a proton with a positive charge, it’s negative. It’s spin is in the opposite direction. When you bring matter and antimatter together, you get a reaction about a billion or 10 billion times more energetic than the shuttle combustion. So we are trying to figure out how do you get antimatter and not have it interact with matter. So we are building a bottle that can hold antimatter for about a week or two. Then we will go to a month or two, then a year of two, then a decade or two. Then we’ve got to figure out how to make antimatter or how to collect it out in the cosmos. And nature wasn’t kind to us, but maybe it was kind, that in the original Big Bang it produced more matter than antimatter and as a result we don’t know that there is much antimatter. So the question is: how do you get antimatter catcher and then hold the antimatter here and the matter here? But we are working on it and maybe in 25 years it will exist and then all of a sudden you don’t have to worry about chemical burning. But this is a little dreaming. We work on a lot of these things.

We are sending robots to the other planets. Right now we have a robot in orbit about Jupiter. We have another robot that’s on it’s way to Saturn and it’s moon Titan. And in 2004, if we are successful, we are going to drop a probe right onto Titan, the moon of Saturn, and we think it may have a sea of carbon dioxide methane. And it’s very cold and again primordial and is in the state it was about 4 billion years ago when our solar system was forming. Around Jupiter we found a moon, Europa, which we believe has an ice crust which may be 1-2 miles thick. Under that there may be an ocean dozens of miles thick. We are now designing an aqua-bot that will go to Europa, melt through the ice, swim in the ocean, turn on its lights and then operate. We have a little problem…at the speed of light it’s 6 or 8 hours away round trip, so you can’t use mission control. How do you operate something where you can’t have mission control? Because if it bumps into something, by the time you know it bumped into something it will take 3 hours, then it will take another 3 hours to tell it what to do, and it’s dead. So we now have to get into the realm of autonomous systems, which have a capacity to sense their states, to adapt, to fix, and to change. We can’t, at the present time, send astronauts to Europa. We can’t even send them to Mars quite yet, which is much closer. So we need to put the intelligence of many scientists in a capsule so it will know what to look for. The other problem is that we need power to melt through the ice. We need power to operate all these information systems. But it’s all problematic…we can’t take a cord and carry it out 5 billion miles, which is the distance to Europa, and sometimes a little bit longer.

We have to find new ways of being much more conservative with energy. So we are looking to a field called biomimetics — mimicking biology. You say, "What does that mean?" Well, I’ll give you an example. Your brain operates 1000 to 1 million times faster than the fastest computer in the world. The fastest computer in the world is about 1 trillion operations per second. Is everyone what a trillion is? Do I have to explain it? It is 10 to the 12^th power. It is 1000 billion. It is a million million. That’s a lot. A trillion operations per second, maybe a little more. But it takes hundreds of kilowatts. This is the kind of computational power that we will need on the spacecraft, but I don’t think we can take a power cord for that type of power. But your brain takes about a billionth the energy it does to operate that computer. So if we could understand how the brain works and mimic the brain, all of a sudden we could make computers that are unbelievable.

We have this, what it’s called, technical revolution. And this gets to what I opened up with. The technical revolution we have says, "God, we’ll have this great technology, but it wastes so much power." R. P. Fineman, a professor at Cal-Tech, speculated about this many, many years ago. If we could mimic the brain, all of a sudden we are in business and we could have the systems we need without the power consumption, and then we could take little small power sources with us. But there are some other things that we need. Do you have my cell phone? The company that made this cell phone has millions of lines of code. Now I am sure that when you all operate your cell phones, you never have problems, right? You dial a number in, then you press "send" and you never get disconnected. No, right? Is that true? And we are willing to tolerate all these errors because the software… the more lines of code you have, the more lines of errors you have. But with NASA, one strike and you’re out. We had one little bitty error when we sent a probe to Mars and we lost it. That’s because the software we have is not biomimetic, it doesn’t mimic biology. You know your brain has all those lines of code. It doesn’t have a whole bunch of software coders in your brain, in spite of ‘fantastic voyage’. It has the basic rules of how you operate. It knows what the rules are and within those rules it’s able to learn and rewrite its code. And if we could write software that could operate a basic set of rules, work itself out, and learn, it has no errors in it. The body is proof that you could have no errors.

Windows has 35 million lines of code. It takes 10’s of thousands of people…Microsoft had to go to India and Pakistan to get enough coders to do it. And in 10 years, there is going to be 10 times the number of lines of code. NASA used to have a few thousand lines of code so we could have people write it out and check it. For NASA software you have to write it and check it 5 times. It’s very expensive. With 5000 lines of code you could do it. Now a space station has 2 million. What happens in 10 years when we have 20 million lines of code? So another example of biomimetics is to mimic how the brain works. And you say, "Oh, Dan, this is science fiction." Well we have now built a neural network with some 20,000 lines of code. And we said, "learn how to fly a plane." We put it on a simulator for an F-15 aircraft and we moved in virtual space, all the aerodynamic spaces little small distances, until the neural net figured out how the plane was working and said, "okay, we’re ready." Slapped it in the F-15. It operated the plane. That F-15 had a million lines of code. One million lines of code that were written by God knows how many people for how many billion dollars. And then we said let’s take advantage of how the body works because when the body works, it learns and adapts. Let’s teach the neural net what to do in case a wing falls off the plane, or you lose a partial aerodynamic surface. We trained it on the simulator and we simulated partial lose of wing and in two seconds it corrected that plane. That’s the power of biomimetics. That is why I am so optimistic. Technically, that will achieve the things I stated before. That is why NASA has to go develop these things.

That’s one technology. Another technology we are working on that’s a combination of biology and information technology is nanotechnology. We’ve made some findings lately in the last decade that you could assemble things an atom at a time. When this phone was made, there was an unbelievable amount of waste with machine things you have waste materials. You take chemicals; you have waste products. What if I could build things an atom at a time with atomic robots and build it up and build it up and all of a sudden I have no waste. I could have perfect machines. We are now developing them. And what if I combine biology with nano-devices? Now a nano-device is so strong without imperfections, it’d 100 times stronger than steel. It has 100,000 times more electrical conduction than copper. All of a sudden we are a new world and we can start combining these things and make multifunctional materials. Wings that have distributed intelligence and have actuators all across the wings and you get rid of air lorans and flaps and you have morphing wings on airplanes and you don’t have crashes anymore. That’s kind of nice. It will be fun to get in a plane and not worry about a crash.

Ed is hitting his watch. We do other things at NASA. Those are a few things to get your minds circulating a little bit. Let me just conclude by saying the following: Anything could happen with an individual or a collection of individuals or a population or a society if they have a vision, they have the will to do it, they are not afraid of failing (because when you fail, you learn and you correct), and they have a collective spirit to make things happen. I believe in the spirit of America. I believe these technologies, in spite of some of the recent writings about people worrying about (like the Ludites) that the technology will cause problems, this technology is going to be successful because in spite of the problems that I talked about in the beginning, America is going to rise to the occasion. And you are going to have the healthiest, most productive, most well-balanced, most sound population on the face of the earth 25 years from now. Thank you very much.