Our 21st century life is seemingly warp speed.
Every action, reaction and process
buzzing along at a mad clip.
Rarely do we stop and take notice,
except the odd time an expected event fails.
You're so used to it just being functional.
And as soon as that goes out, we're lost.
Our safety, comfort and sustenance,
indeed our very existence is now
almost entirely digitally managed.
We're developing new technologies to achieve things
that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago.
We've got the best engineers
striving to make the impossible, possible.
The supersonic advancements
that gave rise to our current reality,
were accelerated by a force,
most of us don't even think about.
The space program.
We get these spin-offs that help us, and society.
There's thousands of examples of that.
People have no idea of how much NASA
has impacted their lives.
Innovation and progress were set in motion
by the Industrial Revolution.
But a world without NASA, would be almost unrecognizable.
(upbeat electronic music)
(multiple electronic beeping tones)
(electronic ringing)
Turn left at the next street.
This street, right now, is filled with people
figuring out how they're gonna get their next appointment,
where their parking garage is, where their hotel is.
All these people without GPS, they're lost.
(suspenseful music) (echoing blip)
[Electronic Voice] GPS signal not found.
The technology in their phones,
is the great grandchild of the technology
that was originally built by NASA, to track
a satellite flying around the Earth.
(rhythmic beeping) (upbeat music)
The launch of the world's first satellite
marks the dawn of the space age, and sets the course
for competition between cold war rivals,
to prove dominance in space flight capabilities.
The eagle has landed.
But unknown to us then,
this single event would become critical
to evolving navigation on our own home planet.
1957, Sputnik launches into space.
The Space Race becomes a real thing.
Sputnik shocks the West.
The perceived tech gap, launches a nation into action,
that will forever change our way of life.
I think it would have been extremely difficult
to predict that, that things would change
this much, this fast.
If you look back at science fiction from the '50s and '60s,
they have the idea that you're gonna
be able to travel to other planets.
But the kinds of computing power that they imagined
is nowhere near what you have,
just in a relatively ordinary smart phone.
The pace of technological advance
is largely driven by things for the Space Race.
Immediately, the US government approves
funding for the Explorer Program.
Five, four, three--
That produces the USA's first spacecraft.
(rocket engines blasting)
Within a year,
the National Aeronautics And Space Administration,
NASA, is founded.
NASA and the Space Race are a huge part of
where our lives are today.
That technology is used here, as well as for building
new spacecraft, developing missions to go to Mars.
Doing human physiology research.
All these things come back and impact us,
right here where we are.
But it's the minor achievement
of establishing a mode of tracking Sputnik,
using the satellite audio fingerprint,
that had one of the greatest impacts.
Sputnik is moving at some constant velocity,
and it's sending out a signal.
That signal is coming to us at a certain speed.
We know that the Earth is moving at a certain speed.
So in theory, if you can measure when each
of those signals come in, from a fixed point on the Earth,
we can back compute when it must have left the satellite.
And therefore, roughly, where that satellite is
in space, above Earth, at any given time.
But how would primitive radio tracking
for a lonely satellite, give rise
to our new way of ordering a taxi, or food?
If you can track the location
of a satellite in space, from Earth,
can you do the opposite?
In theory, it's the same thing, just in reverse.
Then you can compute where on Earth you are,
based on when the signal was sent from the satellite.
So let's talk about how my vehicle
currently knows where it is.
So there's a GPS receiver, and that GPS receiver
has line of sight right now, to at least three
or four satellites, probably more.
So all of those satellites have an atomic clock on them,
that's perfectly synchronized to each other.
They beam that signal down to Earth,
and we can triangulate our position, terrestially,
on Earth, based on where those satellites are,
in outer space, and how long it takes for each
of those signals to reach us in our car right here.
And at this very same moment, that same process
is happening to probably 90% of the other cars
that we see on the road right now.
So if, at this very moment, everyone's GPS stopped working,
there'd be an awful lot of confusion on the roads.
You would see a lot of those people
pulling over to the side.
We'd probably see a lot of people scratching heads,
and very confused and maybe going around
asking for directions.
My parents would be laughing at me,
'cause we had to do that for 40 years,
and they seem to have no problem with it.
But at the same time, they've also become dependent
upon GPS, I think everyone really has.
We just take it for granted.
GPS plays a really critical role
in a whole bunch of every day activities.
If you use your phone to navigate from one place
to another, you wanna try a new restaurant,
where you punch it into your phone,
it tells you how to get there.
If you order packages to be delivered to your house,
the tracking will tell you exactly where they are.
You do Ridesharing, it tells you, your driver
is just up the block, and he's turned the wrong direction.
We'd still see the scene behind us, with our GPS.
We'd still see cars moving,
we'd still see people walking around,
we would still see financial transactions happening.
The speed and accuracy with which those things happen,
would be considerably reduced, without GPS.
But this seemingly limitless tracking
wasn't so easy, with the earliest GPS systems.
Navstar was effectively the first global positioning
system, a constellation of 27 satellites.
They're synchronized with atomic clocks
that are extremely accurate.
If any of those atomic clocks is off from each other,
by micro seconds, nano seconds, your computer position
on Earth is going to be off by tens, hundreds of meters
for just a tiny offset.
The 27 Navstar satellites launched
by the US Air Force, weighed three to 4,000 pounds each.
Once in orbit, they circle the Earth twice daily.
But their data isn't available to everyone.
For a long period of time, GPS was being used
by the military mostly, and consumers didn't have access
to it, and even if they did, it wouldn't have been accurate
enough for them to do useful things, like navigating
around a city like this with it.
(glass shattering crash) (beeping)
But one tragic event in history
led to the public use of GPS.
Korean flight, zero, zero, seven, was targeted
for straying into hostile Russian territory.
President Reagan announces the system
should be a common good, available for civilian use.
The civilian units were limited
to about a 100 meters accuracy.
You're trying to meet your Rideshare,
if you can only know within a 100 meters,
that's like trying to find another person
in a football stadium.
As we approach this merge here,
there's gonna be several exits covered up,
that are well within a 100 meters of each other.
You miss one exit here, and now that's 20 minutes
added to your commute.
Nowadays, you can routinely get your position
to within a few meters, but there's a lot
of other complications that come in.
It's a radio signal, that radio signal's gonna travel
at a fixed speed that's defined by the speed of light.
But it's slightly impacted by things,
like going through our atmosphere,
and changes in density in air, and things like that.
In the mid '90s, NASA's Deep Space Network
program, funds a project out of the Jet Propulsion lab,
that calibrates raw GPS data, for signal delays,
by gases in the Earth's atmosphere.
As the system improves, you can get to within inches,
if everything's working absolutely perfectly.
And that's really led to the absolute explosion of GPS.
But now one of the big things is to get
that reliable enough, that you can start to talk
about things like automatically landing planes.
And automatically delivering packages, and all those things,
which is enabled by these GPS satellites.
So right now, at this very moment, this park
filled with hundreds of people, odds are,
every single one of them has at least one smart device
on them, that is actively, currently receiving GPS data,
and telling them exactly where they are,
in Dolores Park, in San Francisco right now.
I've had this scenario, where my phone is dead.
I feel lost because I'm literally lost, I don't have my GPS.
And I go around, and have to ask people for directions.
Let's say I wanna go over to Lafayette Park,
but you can't have your phone, no GPS.
What do you do?
Walk, just start walking in that direction that way.
People take this for granted,
it's just like a daily part of our lives.
So you take all that away, immediately,
and what's gonna happen is, A, a lot of confusion,
and a lot of people maybe making new friends
and asking each other for directions,
how to get to the nearest pizza place.
It's nearly impossible to imagine
our world without this amazing innovation.
But how can we be sure our GPS guided pizza,
or any meal for that matter, is safe for us to eat?
We take it for granted that we can go
into the grocery store, get whatever we need,
and we don't even think about the processing
or where that food came from.
We just assume it's going to be safe.
Well, it wasn't always the case.
The modern day food industry has a lot to thank NASA for.
In the 1960s, NASA developed a complex system
to safeguard the food being sent to space.
The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system,
or HACCP.
So the history of HACCP can be traced back
to the ammunitions factories in World War II,
that had all these accidents.
So what they said, is if we have a standard procedure
for this, there'll be less accidents.
When it came to the space program, obviously
their concern was astronauts getting sick in space.
So what they had to do, is assure food safety.
But first, NASA had to solve
some more basic food problems.
One of the frequent questions we get is,
how do you eat in space?
We do pick our food, we go through different
tasting sessions before the flight,
to pick out exactly what we want.
They always come back and tell you to take more vegetables.
You can't order out for a pizza,
and get it there in 30 minutes, so we have to bring
all our food, which means we have to store it.
We don't take cans of food from a grocery store.
Theoretically you could do that, but cans are really heavy.
In space, it's all to do with weight.
There's a famous statistic that says, every meal
in space costs around $10,000 dollars.
Most of that being obviously, to get the food up there.
To actually make it safe, acceptable, nutritious,
lightweight, took a lot of food scientists a long time
to actually crack what it should be.
When NASA was starting to think
about food for the Space Race, there really wasn't anything.
They had to invent space food.
We didn't know if they'd be able to eat,
first of all, in space.
Can you swallow food?
Would you choke on it, in space?
Because there's no gravity.
So the first flights, they had tubes of food
that they would use like a toothpaste tube.
Where you'd roll it up, and the paste would come out.
So it was some kind of mixture of foods that you're
supposed to know what they are,
but it's kind of this mush that comes out.
And the reason why it comes in a tube, is number one,
it's easy to stow, and second thing is,
it's easy to digest the things.
And you can create these mixtures that have high protein,
high energy content, meet all your dietary needs.
It's just it's really not all that palatable,
to be able to eat that.
And they provided them a tube of nutrition,
and said, here, this is what you need.
But from a human, cultural stand point,
you can't take the fun out of food.
When you do that, you lose part of humanity.
This meal here, could have been found in any household
across the United States, during the the 1960s.
Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy.
Green beans, and even a little chocolate cake.
But this meal here, never would have flown
in space with the astronauts.
This stuff is going to be floating around.
Even the meat, because we're in zero gravity.
When you break this open, all these little crumbs
floating in the capsule, become a contaminant.
And can lead to dangers such as fire,
and contamination of the systems.
What we're really concerned about,
with floating particles, is things floating into your eyes,
like a piece of food.
That can be serious damage in getting it out of your eye.
Again, you use gravity on Earth to clean your eyes out.
We don't have that in space.
So as a physician, when I'm in space,
I'm concerned about the health of the crew.
And one of the obvious potential sources of concern
would be a foodborne infection.
Getting gastroenteritis, due to contamination of food.
The time when someone's sick in space
is really difficult, because, for example, if they get
dehydrated, how do you administer an IV?
If they have to vomit, what do you do?
If they have bathroom problems, what are they gonna do?
The equipment's not really designed for that.
It's all about making sure
that no pathogens get into the food.
So we're talking about things like E. coli,
salmonella and listeria, things that we don't
even wanna get into our system here on Earth.
And you can imagine that if you get
these microbes up into space.
Well, sometimes, those microbes become actually stronger.
So actually took some salmonella, up in space,
and what they found, it became much more virulent,
as in, you need less numbers to cause illness.
Some people suggest the theory, that microbes
did come from space originally, so that's why
they're so good at adapting to it.
They can survive, certainly in capsules with
a nice oxygen atmosphere.
If you're an astronaut, and you're already
stressed out, and then you start eating food
that's gonna make you sick, well that can be disastrous.
How do we make sure that there is no way
our astronauts are gonna get sick?
For microbes to grow, they need three things.
They need moisture, nutrients and they need temperature.
So if we take one of those things away, like moisture.
Bacteria microbes don't grow.
So what they did, is they dehydrated these foods,
using a process called freeze drying.
All the astronauts needed to do,
was rehydrate them and eat them.
We actually have a lot of water in space,
because when we generate electricity,
with hydrogen, oxygen, you get water, H2O.
So that's convenient, if you've got really light,
dehydrated food, we actually have water to reconstitute it.
But there were still some fatal flaws.
Back then, essentially it was test a few units,
and you hope they're gonna be safe.
There was nothing preventative about it.
So NASA developed a new system
of quality control that started with the Gemini mission.
So what they did, is they were gonna figure out
what could go wrong, what are the risks,
and what could happen.
And if we prevent those happening, we should be safe.
Food contractors for this mission
including Pillsbury, were required to follow
strict standards for their food to be allowed on board.
How could you make this space friendly?
You would trace each of these individual items
from the farm to space.
Where was that cow, who owned it?
How was it butchered, how was that meat prepared?
How was it packaged?
How did it end up onto the spacecraft?
Every step of the way needs to be tracked and controlled.
That's the only way it's going to space.
They had sometimes, 17 control points that they monitored.
And some of the foods are actually produced
in clean rooms that we associate electronics with.
In depth, microbial tests, as well as
temperature and humidity controls,
had to be enacted and maintained throughout
the production and transportation process.
They take a small number of samples,
could be at different points in the line,
could be raw material, and they test them for pathogens.
Now some of these tests can be sophisticated,
using molecular methods, based on DNA.
Or there's the more classical,
you just growing the pathogen up.
The Apollo program
took these standards one step further.
NASA decided, all contractors,
not just those dealing with food,
would have to develop prediction models
to determine critical failure areas for their products.
You have to know what are the possible consequences,
if something goes wrong.
And then you have to eliminate those consequences
so nothing goes wrong.
All these elements came together to form HACCP.
NASA developed the HACCP system,
this prevention approach to food safety.
The industry tried to adopt it,
but nobody wanted it, nobody was trained for it.
And just left it alone.
But the industry was really concerned
about food safety, because there was two outbreaks.
One outbreak was linked to botulism,
which isn't nice, because it actually does kill you.
It's lethal, it's a toxin.
And there was enough of an outbreak, due to broken glass.
The Food and Drug Administration's
ineptitude, in responding to these public health crises,
meant the public lost faith in these agencies
to enforce quality standards.
It actually took people getting sick,
for us to think about, hey, maybe what NASA's doing
over there, is something we can apply here,
for regular human beings on Earth.
It's Pillsbury, a NASA contractor
who provided the training for these new standards.
So the way that HACCP works, is that we're gonna predict
how pathogens get into a food system.
So we know E. coli 157, which is a very virulent pathogen.
This one causes kidney failure.
So we know cattle carry this.
So we also know cattle carry salmonella.
So what we have to think about,
is how will that E. coli and salmonella get onto
the final product.
And if we can't prevent them going onto the food,
we can remove them by washing, cooking, irradiating.
And we can apply that to other sectors.
Sometimes a pathogen slips through the system.
When a problem is identified, companies
must work quickly to find the source,
and report the problem to the FDA, who then issues a recall.
UPC codes of recalled items are sent out.
And most grocery stores have contaminated products
off the shelves in under two hours.
So food safety is one of those things,
a bit like aviation safety.
We don't know much about it, which is good,
because that means it's working.
Oh boy, if you took HACCP out of our everyday system now,
I wouldn't wanna eat, I'd be growing my own food.
And butchering my own cows, because I wouldn't trust
anything that's being sent to the grocery store.
But it's not only human lives
that are being saved by NASA tech.
We're looking at a sixth mass extinction
right now, on this planet.
Our job is to help field biologists track
endangered species across the globe,
using machine learning to help them get through
more photos and more data, faster.
Following a model that is built on NASA technology.
The Hubble Telescope, whirling about the Earth
at 17,000 miles per hour, taking pictures of the cosmos.
With it's launch in 1990, the human race starts to gain
visual access to some 10,000 galaxies.
As grand as this may seem, it's just one 13 millionth
of the observable universe.
The Hubble is just one of the most
exquisite instruments, I think, humans have ever made.
The sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope is incredible.
If you were Hubble, and there was no atmosphere,
you could essentially look at a night light,
on the Moon, from Earth.
That's a distance of 400,000 kilometers.
That's an amazing amount of sensitivity
that one telescope can have.
One of my favorite things about astronomy,
is that it's essentially a form of armchair time travel.
Hubble gets to look at something
that's 13.4 billion light years away.
So when you're looking that far away,
you are essentially encountering new stars all the time.
And you have to be able to map where those new stars are,
without any previous references.
You're getting billions more stars
than you've ever had access to.
You have to be able to know how to process that data
in a way to make sense of it.
If you can't make sense of your data,
then it has no value.
To map the heavens, astronomers chart
the start and end points of various star configurations.
Patterns are really useful.
You're essentially finding these patterns of triangles.
These triplets of stars,
and then you'll know points A, B and C.
As long as you know the length of one side,
and then two of your angles, you can figure out
the lengths of those other two sides.
That's a really important feature to be able to have.
Those triangle shapes are distinctive and unique.
That means that even if Hubble is looking slightly
at a different distance, or with a slightly different
rotation, the distinctive properties
of those triangles will remain the same.
So you can very easily match things up
across large datasets, for example.
Or across different kinds of observations.
And now you're able to combine datasets
and see where are these overlapping triangles occurring,
between datasets, so now you can actually create
the map that tells you what you're looking at,
is indeed what you think you're looking at.
A powerful pattern matching algorithm
is created to help with the data.
The Groth algorithm was a really ingenious way
of being able to automate that process,
by creating all of these triangles, and finding
these patterns in way that just made the data
processing step go a 100 times faster.
One human could not look at a massive dataset,
that has millions and millions of stars in it,
and be able to create all these perfect triangles.
And figure out all of these distances in relations
to each other, individually.
It's just not feasible.
It would take way too long.
So you might say to yourself, well this is great.
We can map the stars.
But what does it have to do with me, if I don't
ever plan on going to the stars?
Well, there are actually things on Earth
that have patterns that remind us of the stars.
Animals also have identifiable patterns.
Whiskers, stripes, spots, as distinctive
as a human fingerprint.
Using these identifying features, we can collect data
on an animal's history, lifespan and migration patterns.
One of the challenges of conserving vulnerable,
critically endangered, almost extinct species,
is figuring out a baseline.
How many animals do we actually have.
And over time, is that number getting better,
or is it getting worse?
I'm an avid scuba diver.
I decided to go diving in Djibouti.
We were not supposed to see whale sharks,
but we ended up seeing an eight foot juvenile.
And as I saw it, fell in love, if you will,
with the species itself.
It's beautiful.
And it has this beautiful pattern of spots
all over the body.
And I began to think, well maybe, as an IT person,
my contribution to science can be helping
to individually identify them.
So I sat down and began working on,
and we identified whale sharks, just from photographs.
As I began working on that, I partnered
with a friend of mine, from NASA, Doctor Zaven Arzoumanian.
And we stumbled across a Groth algorithm.
We thought, well that's interesting,
'cause stars in the night sky, white on black,
is very similar to the idea of white spots
on a blue or brown whale shark, swimming through the ocean.
With only a few small modifications,
Jason and his team were able to use the algorithm
to identify individual whale sharks across photographs
taken in different locations, years apart.
What we then did, is built an entire platform
called Wildbook, around that technology.
Because it's not just matching the photographs,
it's making it easy to collect those photographs
from citizens, scientists, snorkelers, divers.
It's putting those photographs into a database,
where researchers all over the world
can log in through the internet, and curate that data,
compare their data, create a research community around it.
With citizen scientists contributing
to the cause, researchers are learning more than ever
about this elusive species.
People are posting selfies on their vacations.
In multiple places across the globe, everyday.
All of those photos and videos often times contain
data that field biologists could use,
if they had access to it.
So what I'd like to do, is identify a new whale shark
that's been reported to us by a citizen scientist.
So when I see a photograph of a whale shark like this.
I'm looking at the white spots on the colored
background of the the whale shark.
And I'm thinking in terms of triangles.
So lets take three spots, this spot,
this spot and this spot.
We create a triangle here, and that fixes
a relationship in the pattern.
What we create, is a list of every possible triangle
that we can make, from the spots of this whale shark.
I'm gonna map those in, and give the computer clues
on which it can run this analysis.
And what I'm telling it, is here are the spots.
Now go match them.
I think it's gonna take two and a half minutes
to compare against 35,426 patterns.
Compare that to about a week of human labor.
I can see that the best match
is to another whale shark, titled, MXA-277.
Multiple photographs of MXA-277 matched.
This whale shark has already gotten the nickname,
Shaahhk.
The very first sighting of this whale shark
goes all the way back to 2009.
Now this long history of sightings,
and the rapid pace at which we can match photographs
of the same whale shark, this is an unprecedented
speed and data processing advantage,
enabled by NASA technology.
Whale sharks are just the beginning.
The model can be used to identify markings on sea turtles,
manta rays, giraffes and zebra.
It can also ID whales, dolphins and sharks,
by the shape of their tails and fins.
And even polar bears, by their whisker spots.
And Wildbook has developed other ways
to make the process go even faster.
And we have the technology that will,
in an automated fashion, every night, wake up
and go and look for whale shark videos on YouTube.
Find the whale sharks in the videos,
and individually identify them.
And when we can't figure out where or when,
that whale shark was seen, this agent
will actually interact with the public,
ask questions and listen for the answer.
People get really excited about their whale sharks.
The most common question we get,
when we tell somebody who's submitted data to us,
which whale shark they swam with,
is can I nickname it?
And it's a great request, because what it does,
is it creates a bond, between that individual animal,
swimming at great depths across the ocean,
and this human being who had that rare opportunity
to actually be in the water at the same time.
And to coexist.
In the early days of NASA,
the computers required to accomplish this task,
would have filled several rooms.
That changed, thanks to the Apollo program.
And the results have had a major effect on our daily lives.
[John. F. Kennedy] I believe that this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon,
and returning him safely to the Earth.
We know about the Moon landing, but did you know
this iconic event had an effect
on the way we make purchases?
If we didn't have that core NASA technology,
we would come to a standstill.
So how did NASA affect your credit card?
The competitive nature of the Space Race,
was inseparable from the incredible
piece of innovation it launched.
The first spacecraft was Mercury, with one person.
The next step was to be able to take more than
one person, so we made the spacecraft bigger.
And it was called Gemini.
But that wasn't gonna get us all the way to the Moon.
The Mercury and Gemini capsules were tiny.
It's hard to believe people would spend time
inside of those, but also the systems were very simple.
Pre-flight check out of the spacecraft
did not take that big of an effort.
You just had hundreds of wires connected to the spacecraft.
To go to the Moon, to go 240,000 miles away,
we get a much more complicated spacecraft, called Apollo.
And there the number of wires and computers, et cetera,
grew into the thousands.
When the space program was in it's infancy,
computers were very new, and they were gigantic.
They were the size of rooms.
So the spacecraft is of course, in one part of the building,
and these giant computers
are in another part of the building.
And these wires are connecting the two,
so that the check out of the spacecraft can occur.
And these check lists are designed to make sure
that you go step by step, system by system,
to make sure that when you put that astronaut
on the rocket, and shoot them into space,
that the spacecraft will work.
The spaceships were much smaller
than the computers, but had in some ways,
been more powerful and more robust.
Eventually, we'd have to make computers smaller
than the spaceships, and so that's that technology path
that America took, towards Apollo.
The space task group,
set to work, dreaming the impossible,
and building it.
The result was the first automated check out station,
and the most complex computer system in the world,
at the time, known in short as A-C-E-S-C.
So now we take a spacecraft that was
as simple as Mercury and Gemini,
and replace it with this massively complicated vehicle,
called Apollo.
Many more systems started to have it's own computers
on that side of the test.
And so the number of cables going back and forth now,
has grown exponentially.
The complication of a machine actually operating
on it's own now, is out of the equation.
It's not just the astronaut just doing things.
It's actually the spacecraft processing
it's own information, and responding and then sending
that information back to the ground check out.
If you were to go to Kennedy Space Center,
before the launch of a Saturn five rocket,
carrying the Apollo spacecraft into space,
you would go into these massive buildings
where room after room, you've had these giant computers.
And then on the other side of the wall,
you had the operators, operating them.
So you'd have row after row, after row of people
working at their consols, to make sure everything was okay.
The computers that NASA developed
for those spacecraft, they are the basis
for the computers we have now, today, for our cell phones.
Where a computer, prior to the Apollo program,
was the size of a room.
They were able to get it down to the size of a toaster.
Now we have these tiny little phones,
so no matter where you are on the face of the Earth,
you're gonna have high speed internet access,
and a high speed phone access.
But just how did this innovation
affect your wallet?
TRW was a company that was a pioneer in systems engineering.
And built a number of spacecraft and systems for NASA.
Including components of the Apollo Lunar Module.
TRW was interested in developing
the credit checking system, so that you could use
a credit card, some remote place, and they'd be able
to check if it was okay to use your credit card.
And that requires transmission
of information over long distances.
So they worked with NASA to develop their own system,
using the Apollo Heritage Technology,
so that we could use credit cards wherever we wanted.
And it was really the precursor to the ability
to have financial transactions occur instantaneously.
At the time, it was conceived,
it meant that a central computer could contain
some 10 million credit records.
Allowing customers to submit credit card
and other non-cash payments.
Clerks verified credit by punching your credit card
number, into a keyboard, resulting in a 75% reduction
in fraud, and a 95% reduction of purchases
made on bad accounts.
Say you're buying your groceries, for example.
The card that you're physically holding
is attached to an account.
When you make that purchase, the computers
would have to check your checking account,
to make sure the funds are there,
so that the transaction goes through
and you can complete your purchasing.
And that should be completed with only two or three seconds.
Americans made almost 70 billion
debit card transactions in 2015 alone.
More than half of credit card holders
use their card for everyday purchases.
And the number of those using it as their sole
method of payment is on the rise.
So what would happen if the system went down?
I think because we expect technology to work
all the time, the time we really notice it,
is when it stops working.
People don't carry much cash anymore.
And the banks are fully integrated into the system.
Before long, we would all have to
go back to primitive methods.
I have my paycheck from my employer,
I would go to the bank and go and see the teller,
I would see every two weeks.
She would give me a portion of that,
let's say a $100 dollars.
We'd go to the grocery store, we'd pay
with a portion of that $100 dollars,
receive the change and keep track of that.
And bring it with me the next time.
Back in the old days, you had to go to your bank,
'cause your money would actually be in that building.
Now of course, you can actually take a card,
stick it in a wall somewhere, type in four numbers,
and money comes out of the wall.
And your money can be 10s of thousand miles away.
It's not in that building.
Even after credit cards were introduced,
things were still complicated.
So in the early days of credit card use,
it was kind of a trust system.
They just make an imprint of it.
And then you'd sign it, so that was
kind of a promise that you would pay.
They used to receive large books
that would come once a month.
That in the book, it had a list
of all the credit cards that had been stolen.
And they would leaf through it to make sure
your credit card number wasn't in that book.
And so clearly, that is not going to work
effectively in the long term.
This development of this financial system
that allows that immediate transaction to occur,
really is the basis of our entire worldwide economy now.
Now we are even using our phones to swipe.
I have no doubt that some day there'll be biometric
data that'll allow you to spend money.
And all that comes from our push to go to the Moon.
Think about how integrated that system is into our lives.
And without that, society comes to a halt.
Because we're so dependent on these systems working.
When they were rushing to answer President Kennedy's call
to go to the Moon, by the end of the decade,
they could never have imagined all the things
that have come out from that, never.
Some of those applications
are literally lifesavers.
One quarter of the American population
is affected by heart disease.
In the early 1980s, the rate of survival
of coronary bypass, was at 58% for a single bypass.
(beeping)
In 1983, three doctors in California
came up with a way to improve that survival rate.
But this story starts a decade and a half earlier,
in 1968, when we went to the Moon.
We went to the Moon on Apollo 8, to make sure
that we could send a crew out there
and go around and come back.
And what we hadn't anticipated
is that we would see the Earth from a distance,
as this blue and green, fragile, island.
The Earth from here is a grand oasis
in the big vastness of space.
And that really changed our perspective on the human race,
and this island that we're living on.
In the early 1970s, NASA's Nimbus satellites
are sent on the first Earth oriented missions.
Collecting data about the atmosphere.
Scientists begin to see imbalances in the ozone layer.
The region of the stratosphere
that absorbs much of the Sun's radiation.
The Sun's quite remarkable, we all love to see
a sunrise and a sunset, and arguably,
the energy from the Sun grows crops,
keeps us alive here on Earth.
But one of the challenges is the radiation from the Sun.
Years ago, before we knew the dangers of the Sun,
we actually go outside to get vitamin D,
according to our parents advice.
Some young people would even use baby oil
to increase the effects.
But we learned eventually that sun was bad for us.
Fortunately on Earth, our atmosphere,
the ozone layer in particular, protects us
from space borne radiation.
And without that, we would see a much greater incidence
in skin cancers and other form of cancer.
So we're very lucky to be able to live on a planet
where we do have an atmosphere that protects us,
here on Earth.
Ozone, crucial for life on Earth,
is a relatively unstable molecule,
made up of three oxygen atoms.
When manmade chemicals, like chlorine ions,
are released into the atmosphere,
they easily corrupt delicate ozone.
A seemingly small reaction actually replicates
like a raging virus.
So on a beautiful day like this, everything
seems in balance, but it's really fragile in many ways.
Just a small change in the amount of ozone
in the air, can really ruin all this.
But if the ozone was literally destroyed,
and then our biggest problem is we'd have significant
increase in radiation in our environment.
And that would have health consequences
for all living organisms on Earth.
We're not talking solely about humans.
This is something that would affect
all living entities on Earth.
The health of the ozone becomes
a national issue, and the US Congress requests
NASA's help in monitoring Earth's delicate shield.
When you see the Earth from space,
you realize there's this one, integrated system.
So it's the oceans, the clouds, and this very thin layer
that goes around us, that's very important.
For me, that was this awareness
that I really needed to contribute
to taking care of the Earth, and teaching
other people to be aware of that.
For many years, NASA's been doing
a lot of really exciting Earth observation research.
Part of the challenge in measuring the ozone layer,
is it's very high up.
So we have to develop technologies,
new instrumentations to be able to measure
very subtle changes in the ozone layer.
Through the use of lasers, which are really magical
instruments, we can actually use them to measure
the constituents and their quantities in the atmosphere.
Then NASA pioneers an ultraviolet excimer laser
to monitor ozone concentrations.
Unlike many of NASA's developments,
this tech doesn't do it's work from space.
It lives at the Table Mountain facility,
in Big Pines, California, where it's data
is used to compliment that being sent to scientists
from ongoing missions like Nimbus.
The idea behind the laser, is that ozone
can be measured by absorption of ultraviolet light.
Which means we can use different UV wavelengths
to calculate ozone levels.
The longer the UV wave, the less it's absorbed.
If we shoot two wave lengths, one long, one short,
up into the atmosphere,
we can watch these waveforms bounce back to towards us
as light, and calculate the amount of ozone,
by comparing these two different signals.
So scientists began to discover
that there were imbalances in the ozone layer,
and that in fact, some of the activities
that we're doing on the planet,
are affecting the ozone layer.
I mean, if you look at CFCs and the utilization
of CFCs, it's a great example of how these chemicals,
over time, begin to accumulate in the atmosphere.
And they, in turn have changes that will affect
how we live on Earth.
And I think that one of the important elements of that,
is an understanding that perhaps the changes
that we're seeing in the ozone layer are due to things
that we're doing today, but we can change
those things to protect the planet, for the future.
So we reacted to that emergency, as a global effort,
and stopped the use of harmful chemicals,
and the ozone recovered.
And because of that, we can now go outside
and not worry about the Sun's effects,
as if the ozone was decreasing.
But NASA's new tech
was about to change your life in a way
no one could have imagined at the time.
One of the greatest applications of space technology
is in the whole area of heart surgery.
'Cause everybody knows somebody that's got heart disease.
Because it's so prevalent.
The typical problem that we're focusing on,
in heart disease, is a heart attack.
Which is caused by the blockage of the arteries
to the heart muscle itself.
So the blood flow decreases over time.
In 1983, doctors at Cedars-Sinai Hospital
hear of the space technology monitoring the ozone,
and reach out to NASA's JPL, Laser Physics Group.
They're interested in what this laser
might do for the heart.
More specifically, could it break apart blockages
without harming the heart's tissues?
Now laser, generally people think of it
as being hot, it produces higher temperatures
when it interacts with whatever it's burning.
'Cause laser actually does destroy tissue that way.
But the development of cold laser,
allowed us to have medical applications that were precise.
And it would reduce the damage to the adjacent tissues.
Partnering with NASA, these surgeons
designed a treatment that involved inserting a tube
through the artery, and using a laser
at the tip of the tube, to send pulsating beams of light,
to vaporize the plaque.
The laser makes precise holes in the arterial plaque,
without burning the area around it.
What used to happen, is we'd stick a big catheter
into the artery, go into the artery itself,
and blow up a balloon.
Essentially to stretch the artery and make it bigger,
and hope that, that would allow
the blood flow to come around it.
Procedures like the balloon method
risked pushing blood clots into the blood stream.
These clots can go to the brain
and cause aneurysms and strokes.
You fast forward to using NASA developed laser technology,
and then all of a sudden you've got the ability
to essentially destroy the obstruction,
and create a smooth path for the blood
to be able to flow in.
So it's really exciting looking at this,
and it's not just how we revolutionized
doing cardiac surgery for patients who have heart disease.
Medicine is looking at new applications
of laser technology in other areas of clinical practice.
Like in orthopedics.
We can use laser technology to be able to do eye surgery.
The application of laser technology and surgery
has totally transformed the way
in which we're able to care for patients.
That's really a good example of NASA technology
being used for a specific purpose, long time ago.
Now it's a normal part of scientific analysis.
And arguably, one of the most important contributions
of the Apollo program, was not just sending humans
to the Moon, it was giving us an opportunity
to understand the world in which we live.
Improving heart surgery is only
one of the ways NASA has enhanced our health.
You probably wouldn't even think
that your average smart phone, or watch
is a biomedical monitor.
That it can monitor your sleep patterns,
your heart rate, to your steps.
All of these things provide information
about your health status, which can be used
by your health practitioner,
but also for yourself, to monitor your own goals.
The roots of today's wearable, medical devices
really comes from the space program.
Back then it was very simple system,
very few parameters.
Now the number of devices that are available
and the future of wearable, medical devices
is blossoming, but it all comes from
those early days of the space program.
Prior to the first manned missions,
scientists wondered if the human body could
even function outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Early in the space program, people understood
that if we're sending humans into space.
We need to monitor what's happening in their body,
because we didn't know how humans were gonna react
to being in space.
We didn't understand what would happen to the heart,
what would happen to breathing in space?
Would your blood pressure become too high or too low?
Could you simply swallow in space?
After the success of Russian cosmonaut,
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
Scientists decided, what they really needed
was the assurance they could support their astronauts
and return them safely back to Earth.
Flying in space is hard on the body.
No gravity, radiation, et cetera.
But it is what it is.
And it really is the limiting system right now,
to go to Mars.
When you're really far from Earth.
You really wanna make sure you stay ahead
of any medical problems, so that's why they're
constantly checking us, how's the person's blood pressure.
How is their heart rate, what's their temperature?
That's why we wear sensors.
We wanna know right away, if something's wrong.
Because there's no hospital nearby.
A lot of the flights have no medical doctors on board.
And so we really need to stay ahead of the curve.
When initial inflight planning began in 1959.
The biomedical equipment that was available,
wasn't capable of transmitting data from space.
NASA brings together the medical staff,
and engineers who develop tech that would.
And back in the '60s, it started off
with fairly large electrodes were stuck on
the astronaut's chest to record
the electrical activity of their heart.
They had to develop signal conditioners
that were gonna go in the suit,
and the spacecraft, to be able to record
these signals, and then ultimately of course,
for Apollo, on the surface of the Moon,
we were able to look at their heart rate
on the surface of the Moon.
So NASA contributed to developing telemetry technology
which of course was used by paramedics for many,
many years, where they would take electrocardiograms
and send it to base hospital physicians like myself,
working in emergency room.
On those early flights, they had
their heart monitors on the entire time.
They also had temperature probes on them,
the entire time.
I'm sure those weren't too comfortable.
And so, until we figured out if the body was okay in space,
those guys had to put up with a lot.
And over the last 50 years
of human space exploration, we've been able to monitor
and understand the adaptation of humans to space.
So today, in fact, when I go to space, I'm generally
uninstrumented, I'm not wearing a lot of sensors today.
Compared to what would have happened 30, 40 years ago.
In the current space fly missions,
the only thing we really monitor,
is the heart rate during space walks.
Otherwise from the launch and the landing,
and the middle of the flight, as a space shuttle astronaut,
I didn't have anything monitored.
These forms of monitoring
not only allowed NASA to identify issues,
but come up with solutions for both current
and future explorers.
On my first space flight, NASA said to us,
we wanna monitor your core body temperature
throughout a 24 hour cycle.
So NASA developed a pill, the size of a big vitamin capsule.
That the pill was actually an AM frequency radio,
hooked up to a thermistor, a temperature sensor,
that we swallowed.
So that opened the door to a whole new area
of using biosensors to understand human physiology.
I think that's so important to have that bio feedback.
That you can monitor someone in space
for a long period of time, and you can see
if their certain vitals and certain internal biomarkers
are changing into a potentially hazardous state.
And so then you can possibly change out,
to address those issues.
The ability to provide support
on dangerous flights, where what the explorer
will encounter is unknown, is essential to future missions.
But when it comes to a person's health.
There are an equal number of unknowns.
I think it's really important
to try to be proactive, or have a pre-habilitation plan,
instead of always being in the rehabilitation.
Here, what we try to do, is we get the bio feedback,
and we try to be preventative, of a potential
over-training issue, or even a health issue
and identify it early, before it causes a problem.
Before this technology, we'd have a symptom,
go into a physician, get a blood pressure, heart rate check.
But now we can do that on a daily basis.
And we have it strapped to us.
So this information allows us to be proactive,
and identifying some issues, before it becomes a problem.
In medicine, we use telemetry quite a bit.
And one of the things we're doing,
is using different sensors on the body.
And now days, of course these sensors
can not only be on the body,
they could actually be in the body.
Ingestible sensors, or sensors that are placed
subcutaneously, to collect important information
on the body, and send that somewhere else.
So in an Intensive Care Unit, for instance,
we have cardiac monitors that are attached
to all the patients, that information
is sent to a central area in the critical care unit,
where the nurses and doctors are able to look
at the heart rate and rhythm of all the patients.
What's exciting about this though, is thinking about
using these new sensors, and connecting new sensors
to medical devices to help
keep patients out of the hospital.
Imagine a spirometer, which patients with asthma
would use, or patients with COPD.
It's a smart spirometer,
that not only collects the information
about the drug being used, but allows us to collect
some aspect of pulmonary function,
and send that to a smart,
artificial intelligence enhanced software package,
that will then say, hey Dave, your asthma's getting
a little bit worse, maybe you need to talk to your doctor.
And that way we can intervene much earlier,
so people are not going to the emergency room
with diseases that are out of control.
We can fine tune and adjust, while patients are at home.
Where I think the technology will go,
is to better calibration.
To ensuring that you have a valid measure
of what the internal environment is like.
And I think that will just improve
as the technology improves.
These technologies could also
be used to help people with dangerous jobs.
Like hazardous material workers, or firefighters.
One of the problems with firefighters
is they get overheated and things, and you could
swallow a thermistor that would measure their core
body temperature, be able to send that signal
to the team outside, monitoring.
Say, hey, Williams is in there, he's getting
overheated, we need to tell him
to get out of the building for a second.
Those early devices that the astronauts wore,
now have really developed into a much broader
range of products we can use.
Where we can monitor various signals from our own body.
So think about people running,
who can monitor their heart rate,
their temperature, et cetera.
We've got telemedicine now, where remote patients
can wear certain devices and the information
can be sent through the computer system,
to doctors that are a 100 miles away.
And in fact, maybe that's how we'll do medicine
when we go to Mars.
When I trained as a doctor,
it was all about health and disease.
Now it's all about wellness.
And optimizing our ability to live
with whatever conditions we might have,
as we age, and using these smart sensors
that are integrated with software packages
that use artificial intelligence,
is the direction of the future.
The extreme challenges NASA had to address,
in order to continue exploring the great unknown,
have pushed our daily life on Earth,
further then we ever imagined.
The Space Race lit the beacon
for the Bezos, Musks and Bransons of the world,
who picked up that torch and are now running further.
The quest to explore space, gave us the very tech,
woven seamlessly and fully into our daily lives.
What tomorrow will bring, it fueled by continuous
inspiration, provided by NASA's push for the stars.
(dramatic instrumental music)