All of the resources that we have ever used as a civilization have come from the same place. Everything. All the energy, the fuels, minerals, metals, construction materials. The water, the air that you’re breathing right now. Every resource that we’ve ever used has come from the same place: Earth. Now, this actually presents a severe problem, because when we study biological history, we very quickly see that any time there’s a dominant species in a finite ecosystem, consuming a limited amount of resources, that species will collapse. Now, that collapse usually begins at 50%. When a species has converted 50% of its environment, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it changes. It’s no longer suitable for that particular species. Now, here’s the scary part. There are 7 billion people on this planet. We are the dominant species. And we’ve converted 43% of the available land mass on Earth. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on our planet and we will be well past 50%.
That means most of the people sitting in this auditorium will see this begin. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, we don’t know exactly what the impact is going to be, but the worst case scenario is the end of the human race. Because Earth is no longer suitable for human life. Now, the reason that this problem exists is because it’s in our nature. Human beings consume resources. They alter their environment so they can reproduce. It’s the very definition of biological life. The problem is we’re running out of room, we’re running out of resources and now we’re running out of time. So we need a plan. What if - what if there was a way that we could make our ecosystem bigger? If we expand our view and we look out into space, we see that all the resources we hold of value here at home - energy, fuels, metals, water - are available in nearly infinite quantities in our solar system.
What if there’s a way we could use those resources to prevent the collapse of our civilization? Now, I know, that sounds impossible. It sounds like science fiction. But I have a different viewpoint than you do. I work with some of the smartest people in the world: engineers who have consistently landed robots on other planets; a lot of scientists, rocket scientists, data scientists, planetary scientists, artificial intelligence experts. I’m the head of strategic partnerships for the largest asteroid-mining company in the world. And I believe we can use the resources of space to save our planet. We have proven again and again that we know how to destroy an environment. Now it’s time for us to prove that we can save it. From my vantage point, I see that there’s more computing power in your car’s key fob than we use to send the astronauts to the Moon. That means we can do incredible things in space with cheap, affordable robots.
For the very first time in history we’ve amassed the technological toolkit that we need to dispatch autonomous robotic explorers out into the solar system to find and access these resources and put them to work. Imagine a future where the resources we need do not only come from this planet, a future where we have access to the vast resources of space and we are using them to improve life here on Earth. That’s the future I’m going to show you. It all starts with water. See, today if you want water in space you have to take that resource, you have to load it onto a rocket and launch it into space. Now, that’s a shame because there’s a lot of water in space. There’s water on asteroids, on comets, on the poles of our Moon, and on other planets. Water is everywhere in space. And that’s a good thing because water is one of the most critical resources we will need. You see, this plan involves a lot of robots, but it also involves a lot of people.
People will be living and working in space to make this possible. And those people need water for sustenance, for hygiene, for growing food. But water in space is also fuel. If we pass water through an electrical field, we can produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That’s high-efficiency rocket propellant. So if the source water from space and turn it into rocket propellant, we can set up fuel depots in the solar system, gas stations! And when we do that, for the first time we have access to this new resource base because we’re not trying to launch all our fuel from Earth. And now that we have access, we can turn our sights to the next step: construction. You see, asteroids are also made of pure, high-quality metals: nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum. This is the first object that was created from an asteroid. It was the 3D-printed from a meteorite. It’s very heavy, it’s very strong, you’d never want to launch something like this into space from Earth.
But if you source metals from space and feed them to orbital construction robots - which by the way, that’s already a thing, we already have that - then you can create structures that are no longer limited by size. See, this is the International Space Station. It is the most expensive object humans have ever built. It cost a hundred billion dollars. Why was it so expensive? Well, it was created using the resources of Earth, that were turned into products, loaded onto rockets, launched into space and then assembled by humans. But that’s backwards. It doesn’t make sense anymore. That’s like roughly the equivalent of you living in Europe and saying, “I’m going to move to the United States and build a house there, but I’m going to ship all the materials to build that house across the ocean; all of the wood, the metal, the plumbing, the electrical, the shower heads, I’m going to ship it across the ocean,’’ when all of the resources you need are already there at your destination.
It doesn’t make sense. We can reduce the cost and logistical inefficiencies of building large livable structures in space by a factor of a hundred by simply sourcing what we need from our destination. So we can build things in space! What should we build? Well, energy is the single largest driver of resource consumption in the world. We mine for coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We mine for metals to build our wind plants. We mine for silicon to make our solar panels. We mine for nickel to make batteries so we can store it. One thing remains the same. As the population grows, so does the energy demand, so does the resource consumption that goes with it. We’ve always assumed that our energy production must happen here on Earth because there’s never been an alternative, because we haven’t built one. If we use the resources of space, we can create massive, kilometer-scale solar farms in space.
These huge facilities will capture the energy of the sun, that shines in space 24 hours a day, and beam that energy back to Earth. The technology to do this exists today, but it’s simply too expensive when we try to use the resources of Earth. But if we use the resources in space, we can create planetary-scale macrogrids. You’ve heard of the electricity grid, maybe you’ve heard of the microgrid. This is the opposite. This is a planetary-scale, power-generation system. It’s the energy that we need and the energy is in space. It’s not the resources buried under our feet. So we have water, fuel, construction capabilities, now power, we have all of the utilities we need to build cities in space. Orbital megastructures spun up to produce artificial gravity so they’re livable for large populations. These are emerging today as commercial space stations. They’re research labs for sovereign astronauts from around the world; hotels for adventurous tourists, certainly.
But the primary function of these facilities will be manufacturing. We will build things in space. It starts with satellites and spacecraft. Why would we want to build satellites in space? Today when we build a satellite, it’s constrained by the rocket that takes it to space. It has to be built and designed to fit on top of that rocket. And it has to be designed to survive the violent rocket launch to the atmosphere. (Mimicking a rocket)
But if we remove that constraint, we can build things that are as big as our imagination and vastly more capable. And if we’ve come this far, we can take the final step and we can start to solve our resource crisis. We can move our industrial manufacturing into space, all of it. You see, manufacturing is resource consumption. We use the resources of Earth, we turn them into manufactured products, so we can sell them and do useful things. That is what drives commerce on Earth. But what if we reverse that? What if we gather and harvest all of our raw materials and resources from deep space and import them to an orbital manufacturing ring around the planet, and then return only the finished products to the surface? Let’s use your smartphone as an example. This was created using raw materials from Earth. Yet, every single one of the raw materials in this exists in infinite quantities in space.
The most expensive component of your phone is platinum, and platinum is readily available in near-earth asteroids passing by us all the time. This is created here on Earth using the resources of Earth, in a factory that produces emissions, consumes resources. They use toxic chemicals like benzene to produce this. And that factory produces hazardous waste that’s the byproduct of manufacturing. That’s the bad stuff: poisons, toxins, heavy metals, radiation. The problem is all of the hazardous waste from manufacturing is stuck with us here in the finite ecosystem that we live in. It’s poisoning our air, our water, our fish, our wildlife, our food our kids! Do you know where this should not be made?
(Breathing in) (Breathing out)
In the only breathable atmosphere that we know of anywhere, a resource that we take for granted every minute of every day. So if we do this, we reverse the human supply chain, we push all of our mining and manufacturing outside the atmosphere, what have we done? We’ve now zoned the Earth for residential access only. Imagine if you walked outside one day and there were no factories, no power plants, no refineries, no oil rigs, no pipelines to protest, and instead we simply allowed the planet to return to a more natural state, we intentionally stabilized our environment. We’d have more space here on Earth, more room for the population, because we’re not trying to live on top of our consumable resource base. And to be clear, this is not a vision about scarcity. And yes, we still have to conserve all of the precious resources we have here at home. But this is a vision about abundance. It’s about having access to all of the resources we need to grow as a civilization.
They’re simply coming from a different place. Now, I know, I know this sounds impossible, but it’s happening fast, faster than you could ever imagine, and it’s already started. My kids are two. By the time they’re in high school, they will see operational asteroid mines. They’ll grow up in a world knowing that the resources we need do not simply come from only this planet. As a parent this gives me a lot of hope, because I want to create a world for those kids that gets better and better, not worse and worse. And when someone asks them, “Why we should be exploring space when we have so many problems here at home?”, they will know the answer to that. The resources of space are the solutions to our greatest problems. It is only by exploring space that we safeguard this world, the one that matters the most. This is what I ask of you: believe that this is possible, because for the very first time in human history, it is possible.
When we access the infinite resources of space, we do so so we can protect and preserve the single most important asset that we know of anywhere in the universe, the only place that we know of that can support human life: our home, Earth. Thank you.