A good evening and welcome to the strand bookstore. I am and nancy the owner. Force in history the strand was founded in 1927 by my grandfather and it was founded in an area known as book row that ran along Fourth Avenue from after place to union the square and at its height in houston 488 bookstores and ran from about the 1880s until about 1960 and in the 90 years since then all of the stores have shuttered leaving strand to be passed down by my father fred and now to me and will hopefully be kept in the family, so thank you all for being supporters and readers. Tonight, very excited to welcome the power couple composed of scientific research, doctor Kelly Weinersmith who gushes work with parasite has been published in numerous scientific journals and awardwinning cartoonist Zach Weinersmith known for his daily web comic, saturday morning breakfast club. It has won the web cartoonist choice award for outstanding single panel comic, multiple times in this dynamic duo has been working together for years on the podcast, and they discuss all things nerdy with the culmination of which is this created an reflection, it that examines 10 upandcoming field of Scientific Study including meant to take humans attracted to the moon and i think they have also been working on a 1year old baby with friends now. Are also thrilled to have cspan book tv with a search night. That of that will be available in a few weeks to share with your friends and family who are not able to make it, so for the format tonight they will talk and then we will open up the mic to any of your questions they will stick around and sign copies of their book and it now without further ado please join me in welcoming kelty and zach to the strand. [applause]. Hello, we are happy you are here and thank you for coming. We wrote a book. Could audience. The book is called soonish 10 emerging technologies to improve or ruin everything and im Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and the other one, this guy, Zach Weinersmith saturday morning breakfast cereal. When we were writing this book we discovered there was a paper written in 2011 by group of undergrads at Hamilton College in the kate the paper was called our pendant flowing hot air our talking head blowing hot air as if they looked at 26 different pendants and their abilities range from mostly right, but also a lot that was mostly wrong and important thing to us is that they all still had jobs so we were like we should write a book where we predict future tech because it doesnt matter if you get it right or not. We have job security than we decided actually predicting future technology wasnt particularly interesting how long it was going to be before you have a space elevator. Whats interesting is what needs to get figured out and wrote a book that tells you a bit of background back to about technology and the major problems we still need to overcome to make that technology happened and then we talk about how the technology can make everything more awesome and also how to make everything really horrible, so we tried to be evenhanded with the different technologies and real techno talk to about one of the chapters and well also talk about one of our as we were doing research we discovered a lot of stuff that was really weird and we could not keep it to ourselves so we decided to share it in the note and we wont talk about this one in particular. He will have to buy the book to find up more about this one, but its one of the Amazing Things we have covered while we were doing research for the book. Here you go. Im going to do it . Your turn. Is that good . So, this is a chapter on all sorts of ways you might get to space more cheaply than our current conventional rocket method so we score a bunch of different technologies and i think its six or seven different paradigms and some happening and some totally plausible. Its going to be tough, but yeah, i guess for this talk we will tell you about a few of them. I guess we should first talk about reusable rockets which is starting to happen. The idea with the reusable rocket is to make rockets travel more like plane travel and the way we describe it is imagine every time you want to fight to new york or los angeles you sort of flu over la, jumped out of the plane exploded in the Pacific Ocean. It would be really cool, but expensive and thats essentially what we do now with rockets and is so a big part of why it costs like 60 million with a relatively small payload is because of the way rockets work right now, so one idea is if you can get the most expensive parts of the machine itself back and you would save a lot of money. Like a few hundred thousand, so space x couple hundred thousand as these things go thats not too bad. Space x was able to do this. They landed parts of a rockets and might have had you come up with part of a rocket. The way space travel works is a rocket is like three rockets stacked on top of each other and the reason you do that is once you have used up a chunk you dont care the dead weight of the metal so you drop in the ocean. Space x was able to take the first stage and landed on a barge. Its a good first step in the direction and i think your lawn musk said they could get the price down 90 and multibyte that like by elon musk conversion factor and you end up with a pretty reasonable number closer to 30 or 40 do you want thats with happening now and we talk about some other technologies that we were told about by the nasa advanced innovated Concept Group including putting a rocket on like a giant spring like a pogo stick to get some power to get things going and one thing with thought was exciting was a space elevator. A space elevator is essentially three parts, a station we put somewhere in the ocean that stays in place. Its a gigantic cable and a counterweight and in this case the counterweight is a rock and theres an elevator that climbs it in you being power to the elevator in the elevator slowly moves up the cable and the people interested in this design estimate they could get stuff into space bar about 250 per pound thats amazing because right now costs about 10000 per pound so if you wanted to spend send a big bowl into space is lightweight 5000, so twittered 50 a pound would be amazing savings, so the main thing they need to figure out is like this middle parts and that the metal part is like kind of importance so the problem with the middle part is that it needs to be really strong, but it also cant weigh a lot because it needs to be 62000 miles long. It weighs a lot the weight of the court will you get down so needs to be lightweight and strong and recently there was the discovery of carbon nano tubes, a configuration of carbon in a tube like the width of a hair. Less than a human hair. Very small. Thank you. We are team and together we know this information, so anyway people have managed to get them to be about a foot and a half long and you may remember that i said it needed to be 52000 miles long, so we have a long way to go, but it looks like it might be Strong Enough to do it, but a problem coming up and this was interesting is that economics might be the thing that makes this not happen so like for terrestrial based purposes it turns out you really only need about a foot and a half of carbon nanotube to do just about anything we want to do with these tubes on earth, so it was like at first it look like we would get the length of the two longer and longer and faster and faster than it just flattened out ever since, so we need like if you could be the perfect setting to make carbon nanotubes long enough and you can get that moving again and think of some earth based reason we need really long carbon tubes and we are doing questions at the end, but hold onto it. The other problem with this middle part is that if you can get the carbon nanotubes long enough it turns out they are really not good if there is lightning and so we were asking nasas advanced innovated concept what to do about lightning and apparently theres an area in the Pacific Ocean that has never as far as we can tell experienced a lightning bolt and so the answer is to put it they are and hope the past tells us all we need to know about the future. I hope the climate never changes. [laughter] it wont. Its fine. That would be embarrassing. Sorry. Other problems. Other problems . So, yeah, one other problem it seem like scientists had not considered much is theres a fundamental problem with bringing anything back to earth from space or even if you are in any paradigm where its cheap to get to space like if you drop anything from high up in earths gravity is like dropping a Nuclear Missile and its arguably even worse because with a Nuclear Warhead mechanism is kind of a ticklish thing. Us to go up just right otherwise. Ellipsis knock itself apart whereas if you drop say a hunk of the dense metal equivalent of the Nuclear Explosion there is not a good read to deflect it if youd find out about it too late nuts solution might be worse than the problem. So, thats bad and the deep part of it is its probably a permanent quality of life in a cheap space bearing world like this is not a good solution to the problem and its not political one. I dont know how much faith you have a human politics at the second, but trusting even if you have faith and say the American Government there are other governments that would what cheap access to space so the other reason you might want to base station in the ocean is because you might want your space elevator to be kind of cosmopolitan like a multinational project strictly for political reasons because the first nation that has a space elevator will have the greatest military advantage in the history of ever like you couldnt top in the war from the top of a mountain. The ultimate higher ground. Literally, so we dont know the solution to that problem and i dont know if anyone does other than some serious law enforced laws that what you are allowed to do in space especially near earth, so might not be that awesome. I thought you were going to tell everyone what happens when you cut the cord. Yeah, does anyone guess when you cut the cable on a space elevator . Any guess . [inaudible] of course, you could cut it high, but the way to think about it is if you had a sling with a rock gun and you snipped it you might know no matter where you snippet to roccos out in a Straight Line and thats essentially what happens with a space elevator, so disappointingly not that dangerous except the people in the elevator. Now you have this ultimate piece of space junk, so any bit of the cord attached to the rock goes off light through our satellite, so people are not dying, but we could lose millions and millions of dollars yeah, thats true. Interesting what happened to the cable if you cut it high in the short version is it whiplash is through different courses which is probably fortuitous because it means a birds of the cable, but yeah we were talking about this and there was this little boy i think i really disappointed when i said probably nothing bad happened. So, some of the concerns for cheap access to space, that talked about the idea to fling stuff down at earth and destroy everyone which would be pretty bad, but also the reusable rockets, they use a ton of propellants up you get the cost at it means we will be putting more fusion in the air and burning up more, so thats something we need to decide if we are okay with. Potentially destroying humanity and whether or not you can trust people with that. In terms of how it could change the world, do you want to tackle that . The intent is obvious with cheap access to space, but what is need about that is a lot of the reasons we dont go to particular places in space is economic like if you were really meanspirited economists with apollo landing you might of been like this isnt sustainable because it was Something Like one half percent of the discretionary budget that year like a couple years prior was spent on nasa. Definitely not a good return on investment sort of thing, but the estimates are you drop the price by about 95 or more in a kind of changes everything. Cubbies could have cheap access to space that might change how we feel about things like colonies martian colonies which are sensitive endeavors. We could be a space bearing species, so if a space elevator can be made to work i mentioned already 10000 to get a pound of stuff in space. If the space elevator work you just put the stuff to make your space ship on the space elevator, bring into space and then you explore the universe like you could suddenly become a space bearing species to get stuff up there cheap which is mind blowing an amazing to me to imagine. Cheap access to space, but lets talk about robots and humanity. This is our program this is how it will end for humanity with stories about robots interacting with humans. You want to tell the story . Kind of a couple stories about weird robot stuff. So, its a robot designed to like recognize faces and the point is to assist humans especially the elderly and that its a job and its designed to sort of think and measure responses and it is trying to escape. It has escaped i think at least twice and for all we know its got away for sure now and is gone, but its a funny story and its like the robot escaped and actually died on the road. Kind of tragic, but not ideal if the job is caretaking for humans if its trying to run for its life, so thats the first robot story. The next robot story is amazing. Serena booth is an undergrad at Harvard University and she decided shes interested in seeing how much undergrad we trust a robot thats asking for permission to enter the dorm, so theres at least three reasons why undergrads should not let robots in the dorms and one apparently privacy is a huge issue. I did not know this, but i guess tourists are interested in getting photos of the inside of harvard dorms which seems extremely creepy to me, but it is a thing and she says she has had people put cameras up to her window and take photos of the inside of her dorm soap privacy concerns are huge. Number two, there have been bomb threats recently so they all got emails being told not to let anyone in the building and number three, there have recently been a string of thefts , lots of reasons to not let people in, but with the undergrads think to not let robots and is what she wanted to know so she made this robot she was able to control by sitting at a table and she would have it go in the first case of one undergrad and say would you let me in the building. I dont have the code, would you let me end and 21 of the undergrads said yes. Still a low number, may be higher than you like. It went up to groups and 71 of the groups said yes, so to any robots out there take note that humans are stupid in groups in the real trick to getting the robot to let the men was cookies to let them in was cookies. It came up with a box from a fancy local cookie store and to be clear the box did not actually contain fancy cookies it contained snickered sticker noodles. So come i think the lesson is that humans will sell each other out or snickerdoodle cookies from the grocery store, not even the good ones and the final story is there was a guy named Paul Robinett at Georgia Institute of technology and he wanted to know how much humans would trust robots in an emergency. We had these undergrads told they would take a survey and they followed the robot to a room where they were supposed to take the survey and then the experiment released smoke into the room and turned on a fire alarm in the undergrads had a choice to either follow the robot to safety or leave the way they came in. Lets be clear that they know how to get out of the building and we were told that almost all of them decided to follow the plot after the smoke alarm went off and that seems crazy, but it seemed real thats after we watched the video because that is a slowmoving robot. It like crawls out of there and they know how to get out so they decided to up the ante in the next thing they did they have the robot first go into the wrong room and circle the wrong room and then bring them to the correct room and then the undergrads still followed the robot when the smoke alarm went off and as a last thing with did seems a bit mean, but they had the robot when the smoke alarm went off take the undergrads to a room where the light was turned off and the room was blocked by a couch and the robot justice to their saying this way to get out. Some of the undergrads had to be retrieved because they stayed there waiting for the robot to do Something Else and i do not think these are stupid undergrads. There like Georgia Institute of technology in harvard, some of our best and greatest, but the point is we really trust robots. With interesting is these robots in each case did not look any better than trash cans with like a red ribbon around them, so the robots dont even need to look that good for us to trust them with our lives, so if you are robot with a cookie you can pretty much do whatever you want to american undergrads and they will pretty much go with it. Thats one example from our book we thank you for your time. [laughter] and we would be happy to answer any questions you have about the book and technology and if you raise their hand theres a microphone that will come to you. We had a question of here. Do we still have the question . When you mentioned the nanotube, is it like that fulfillment and you leave it together into as sake or strand or is it really just one nanotube. The problem is if i convert out about this, theres a quantity called specific strengths and if you are more mathematically inclined its how much force before it breaks divided by density, but simply put you want Something Like supermans hair, very little and to be quite strong and carbon nanotubes hit the spot, which is already not ideal from an engineering perspective, but set that aside and you start weaning them. Any breakpoint is bad. Any breakpoint the whole show is over so you need you are literally talking about a 100,000 molecule and more like i dont know if you have a visual about carbon nanotube and if you are missing just one of those carbons you got a problem. You can see how harry the problem is. Its not easy. Thats probably the best way to go, i mean, it sounds impossible , but there are lots of technologies that feeds crazy level of quality and they all have markets for small impr