VICE (2013) s06e08 Episode Script
Printing tomorrow & Are we alone?
1 SHANE SMITH: This week on Vice the next industrial revolution.
(HISSES) (MATTHEW VARKEY SPEAKS) Wow.
KRISHNA ANDAVOLU: So you're 3D printing rockets to send a 3D printer to Mars to 3D print more rockets? - To come back to Earth, yeah.
- (LAUGHS) SHANE: And then the search for extraterrestrial life.
TAYLOR WILSON: Is it your opinion that if all the conditions for life are present that life will arise? It'll arise.
It's inevitable.
TAYLOR: What will that moment mean, when we make first contact? Everything is going to change.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING) Rapid advancements in 3D printing are changing the manufacturing world as we know it, from customized machine parts to weapons to full-scale houses and even human body parts.
The potential for what can be 3D printed seems limitless.
So, we sent Krishna Andavolu to check in with the researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are changing the future of how our world is made.
(HISSING) In the 3D bio-printing rooms, we like to keep everything sterile.
When you're using cells, you don't want to contaminate anything.
So, gloves and then your lab coat.
And so, basically, you're just printing body parts? - Is that what's going on? - Right.
- JOSH: You wanna do the honors? - KRISHNA: Sure.
So, I'm about to 3D print a human ear.
KRISHNA: The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is developing methods to manufacture human tissue, using specialized 3D printers to fabricate a range of functioning, viable body parts.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
(HISSING) We have a couple of demos set up here.
The first one here is a artificial heart valve, and it's forcing fluid back and forth.
And that is an artificial blood vessel.
It's actually meant to be a carotid artery, - like in the neck.
- Mm-hmm.
DAVID: And so the idea is, you could take out that part that isn't working and then put this in.
How different is this from 3D printing a trinket? It's the exact same concept.
You take a 3D CAD file, and then you convert that into your printing code, and then you can print it.
The only difference here is that we've got all the biomaterials and your cellular components too.
KRISHNA: And where do the cells come from? DAVID: Depending on the patient, you can take a postage-size stamp of cells and then turn it into all the different cell types of the body.
KRISHNA: And then, how do you implant it? Do you just sew it on? - Exactly.
Suture it on - That's it? - cover it up, and you're good to go.
- Amazing.
One of the major challenges in medicine, of course, is not having a sufficient number of tissues and organs that you can use to replace in patients.
And so the concept here is, why not just create them.
How long do you think it is until you can print a whole body? Well, I remember watching the very first Westworld movie.
It came out in the movie theaters - many years ago.
- KRISHNA: Sure.
ANTHONY: Is that possible in the future? You never know.
Science has few boundaries.
KRISHNA: In 2009, the patent behind the key method of 3D printing expired, and as more followed, so did a new revolution in desktop 3D printing.
Printers got smaller and cheaper, allowing anyone to print models, parts, and tools on demand.
And nerdy hobbyists turned their printing passions into a multi-billion dollar industry.
KRISHNA: So, we're at the worldwide headquarters of Formlabs, one of the biggest 3D printing manufacturers in the world.
And like any respectable startup, they've got a ping-pong table.
And this is Max.
He's the founder and CEO.
The first 3D printing technologies were invented in the early '80s, but it was still really inaccessible to most people who could benefit from it, because the machines were so expensive and also really difficult to use, and they didn't necessarily see the potential for a 3D printer that would be a lot lower cost and would be more like, say, an office 2D printer.
- Here we go.
- Yeah.
KRISHNA: Ooh, it's in the goo.
MAX: There was a lot of excitement at the beginning of this kind of desktop 3D printing wave that 3D printers will be in all of our homes, but it's proven to be a lot further off than everyone hoped for.
KRISHNA: Cool! So if there was a sort of a 3D printing hype cycle, now that we're kind of past it, what does the future look like? MAX: 3D printing is used in pretty much every product development process.
What's coming soon with 3D printing is going into production, and so it has the potential to take years of product development and moving into manufacturing - and turn that into weeks even.
- KRISHNA: Wow.
- That's so that's huge.
- That's huge.
KRISHNA: We're in Boston, going to a company called Desktop Metal that has innovated 3D printing metal for mass production.
That's a lot of printers.
Yes.
So this is our print farm.
We are now inside of it.
And what you see is the printer in action, and they're printing parts like you see here on the table.
And the geometry can be very simple, - like a gear.
- Right.
And it can get very complicated, like this, which is a pneumatic distribution housing.
Wow.
Looks kind of steampunk.
RIC FULOP: In 3D printing, the first 20 years was used for prototyping, and now we're going into a new phase of 3D printing where we go from prototyping into mass production, and that has huge implications.
So, whereas, before you had a factory that make one engine component in the US, and then another component overseas, and then they ship this stuff around, that set up the whole trade system that we've basically architected the world around.
Now you can print parts anywhere as you need them to produce a product.
- So we're right at the beginning of - Of a revolution.
Yeah, this is a fourth industrial revolution in the making.
KRISHNA: In addition to fundamentally altering world-wide economic supply chains, now mass-produced 3D printed metal might also upend the way parts are designed from the ground up.
ANDY ROBERTS: Tools are fairly difficult to use to create very, very complex shapes.
But with additive manufacturing of metal, we can create crazy shapes.
So what we're doing is we're sort of subjecting these parts to this washing machine effect of dynamic transitional forces.
So what we have is the ability to very quickly create shapes that are very strong and lightweight where basically the cell mass is distributed only where it's needed.
KRISHNA: So, like, because of machine learning, manufactured goods or industrial design - will likely mimic biological design? - Absolutely.
It's not like you tell a computer, "Make it a bio-inspired shape.
" It's that you tell a computer, "Give me the most efficient shape," and the shape that you're getting looks bio.
KRISHNA: While Desktop Metal is spearheading this new global industrial revolution, researchers at MIT are thinking outside the printer entirely.
We visited two labs pushing the limits of material science and challenging the way we think of materials themselves.
SKYLAR TIBBITS: Essentially, printing is a material science chamber.
It got us more and more focused in understanding like what can materials do, how far can we push our products to behave in new ways.
This is a cellulose-based material.
You'll see that it'll morph just with the moisture of my skin.
- Mm-hmm.
- So, same thing, but it only transforms by sunlight.
You can apply it to windows, like glass facades or skylights.
The last category of research that we study is self-assembly.
They'll come together slowly over time.
They'll make these kind of cubic lattice structures.
What we're interested in in this scenario is like, "What's the far futures of fabrication?" Like, can we give more and more agency where the materials can make decisions, learn, adapt, perform in ways we've never even imagined? KRISHNA: Whether aided by self-assembly or artificial intelligence, turning digital processes into tangible objects is a key factor in how we envision the future of fabrication.
How would you characterize the work that you do at the Center for Bits and Atoms? We try to understand how digital things become physical things and physical things become digital things.
Now, interestingly, the founders of computer science, von Neumann and Turing, the last thing in their life they studied is exactly this question about how computation becomes physical.
How to design a machine that communicates a computation for its own construction.
The core research project here is now to actually make that.
You can think of it as the Star Trek replicator, 'cause that's really what this is.
This is the future that you're envisioning? It's the future that's on the table in front of us.
KRISHNA: Oh, hello.
BEN JENETT: So these are what we call relative robots.
And relative robots are designed to operate specifically within this lattice environment.
But what we're working on now is we have robots that can crawl on the structure.
The next step is to give bolting end-effectors to them, so that they can build the structure and have an army of these things - building a big structure in space.
- I see what you're saying.
BEN: When you have armies of these robots building high-performance structures for you, the possibilities are gonna be endless.
It's gonna help us get to Mars.
It's gonna help us get to other galaxies.
It's gonna help us explore the universe.
I'm in.
KRISHNA: It might sound far-fetched, but all the technologies we've seen are converging in pursuit of building a civilization on Mars.
And NASA's manufacturing wing is revolutionizing how we'll use 3D printing to get there.
So, this is the laboratory training complex.
It's pretty much a one-to-one mock-up of the US lab on Space Station right now.
This is actually our backup for the first 3D printer that we ever launched in space.
NIKI: The Space Station is an amazing vehicle.
We're still somewhat Earth-dependent with our Space Station model.
For Mars, we want to be Earth-independent.
Space does really drive home how important it is to conserve.
You know, what are we really gonna need for in-space manufacturing to make these parts? What you really have to do is have sustainability.
This is the refabricator, so it's the first-ever integrated 3D printer and recycler all in one.
We want to be able to, in one machine, 3D print the part, and then when you're done with it, you just feed it back in, it creates new filament, and you can make a whole new part.
What excites me the most is that closed-loop life cycle.
It may seem like a long time before we're going to Mars It's really not, and we have to work on these technologies today to be ready.
Is a 3D printer gonna help us get to Mars? Absolutely, 1,000 percent.
KRISHNA: Back on Earth, a startup in Los Angeles is reimagining how we could rapidly automate the production of orbital rockets.
So, that's a 3D printer? Yes, this is Stargate, which we developed and built ourselves, and it's the largest metal 3D printer in the world.
KRISHNA: Why did you call it Stargate? There's a video game called StarCraft, and Stargate is what you build to warp in spaceships.
- (LAUGHING) - So we named it after that, because we're warping in spaceships.
KRISHNA: This thing is massive.
TIM: Fundamentally, what we're doing is feeding in aluminum wire and then melting it with a very high-power, 11-kilowatt laser.
So it's like a big soldering arm? With a laser.
Yeah, with a laser.
This is the first large part that we made, which was a fuel tank.
(KNOCKS ECHOING) Normally, getting a tank of this size in like aerospace or rocket quality would take you well over 12 months.
How long did it take you to make this? Like seven days of print time.
- Seven days? - Now that it's developed, yeah.
Seven days, yeah.
KRISHNA: If you think about 10 years from now, - If your company starts making - Yeah.
more and more rockets, what does that mean? Well, our long-term mission was we want to be the first company to 3D print a rocket on Mars.
So you're 3D printing rockets to send a 3D printer to Mars to 3D print more rockets? - To come back to Earth, yeah.
Yeah.
- (LAUGHS) With limited time to do something in your life, like, why not just do something very ambitious? The idea is it could inspire other people to go after their dreams, much like I was inspired - By StarCraft.
- By StarCraft.
- Yeah, yeah, by StarCraft.
- (LAUGHS) MAX: Since the beginning of time, the act of making something using tools is one of the most defining traits of humans.
RIC: When people look back on the fourth industrial revolution, what was the enabling technology? It's gonna be manufacturing.
And it's gonna be manufacturing with total freedom.
(HISSES) ANTHONY: You know it's interesting, right? 'Cause science fiction really does predict, many times, real science.
In a way, that's what you're seeing right now, coming full circle Science fiction becoming science fact.
(ROARING) These revolutions in 3D printing are helping fuel exponential growth in the field of space exploration, and furthering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe.
As these technologies expand, scientists across the globe feel that we are closer than ever to making contact.
So we sent nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson to find out just how close we are to answering the ultimate question: "Are we alone?" (CHURCH ORGAN PLAYING) JOHN FLUTH: Genesis 1:1 describes God as the creator of all things in the universe, not just Earth.
If we make contact with intelligent aliens, how will religion respond? (MUSIC ENDS) I have performed about 124 quintillion quintillion floating-point operations analyzing signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
TAYLOR: Reverend John Fluth is a member of SETI@home, a distributed computing network that processes transmissions from the world's largest radio telescopes.
These signals are relayed to the group's hundred-thousand-plus users and analyzed on their personal computers.
For Fluth, SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is happening in the back of his church.
Really, the whole maintenance I have is just making sure it's online and using Dust-Off.
Okay.
So, I've got two here, I've got three at home.
I really enjoy working on computers.
TAYLOR: How do they actually distribute the data? JOHN: The information comes cut up into little sections.
Each little section goes to three computers.
If all three computers have the same results, it's accepted.
TAYLOR: SETI@home is listening for the unique transmissions of life, so when data separately analyzed by four users confirms the location of a distinct signal, scientists can better pinpoint where there might be signs of intelligence.
Why did SETI choose to go this route of crowdsourcing citizen scientists to analyze the data? Time on a supercomputer is very expensive, with distributed computing, it's free.
What do you think the odds of us discovering extraterrestrial intelligence are? It seems very high, and as more and more we look, we're finding more and more planets that could support life.
TAYLOR: Given the vastness of the universe, it seems illogical to say that we're alone.
In fact, mathematically, it's almost impossible.
The Drake Equation, created in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake, calculates the odds of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.
It uses factors like the rate of star formation, the number of planets, and the fraction of those in the habitable zone.
We met the man widely considered to be the father of this scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Frank Drake.
What was the motivation for setting out to develop this equation? The equation was designed to give us an idea of how many detectable civilizations there are in the universe.
And it's based on what we know And we know a lot about the history of life on Earth.
And so, we simply quantify that history.
How many civilizations are there? Well, how many stars are there? What would you say is the greatest uncertainty in that equation? And how has that certainty changed for the different variables over time? When we first started searching, we didn't really have an idea of how many planets there were in space, how many Earth-like civilizations there might be.
We were guessing in the dark.
When the equation was first written, there was only one which we actually knew, which was the rate of formation of stars in our galaxy.
Since then, we have learned through observation the real values of most of the other factors.
We've learned from recent studies this wonderful thing That almost every star has a planetary system, and a large fraction of those, probably more than a quarter, have a planet situated at such a distance from the star that the temperature in particular is suitable for life.
And thus, there may be many more inhabited planets than we ever imagined.
And of course, that's very encouraging.
So I guess, kind of in a way, we're just getting started in this search.
Yes, we're the beginners.
We're the new kids on the block.
We may have to search a million stars before we will hit on one that's transmitting a detectable signal.
And it's hard, but it's sure worth doing, because the eventual discovery will be the biggest payoff of anything you've ever done in the history of the world.
TAYLOR: Although there's no definitive solution for the Drake Equation, the more planets we discover, the better our odds of finding life.
Just last year, astronomers found a system of seven Earth-sized planets and NASA can now identify more than 3,500 exoplanets, many that could be habitable.
In less than a decade, we've leapt exponentially closer to finding life beyond Earth, and we may find the first evidence of it within our own solar system.
(SNOWMOBILE ENGINE REVVING) Ellen Stofan served as NASA's chief scientist and is one of the foremost experts on the alien worlds of our outer solar system.
She says the more we know about how life began here the greater our shot of finding it out there.
ELLEN: There are theories that life actually originated in a hot spring, maybe not too different from this one, right here on Earth.
Now, to get life, you need organic molecules which are actually pretty abundant throughout the solar system.
But you also need, we think, water in our hot spring, and you also need a source of energy.
So, a spring really has all the critical ingredients that allow us to get to life.
TAYLOR: I mean, this is probably one of the more alien places on planet Earth.
Elsewhere in our solar system, there are systems just like this, right? That's right.
MAN: Liftoff of the Cassini spacecraft on a billion-mile trek to Saturn.
ELLEN: Saturn has this moon called Enceladus.
It's got a thick, icy crust, underneath that icy crust is a subsurface water ocean.
The amazing thing about Enceladus is, it's got these giant cracks across the surface, and out of those cracks that subsurface liquid water ocean is actually erupting into space not that dissimilarly from Old Faithful.
So, we actually took the Cassini spacecraft, and we flew it right through those eruption plumes.
In fact, at the lowest, we were about 26 miles above the surface.
And so we actually got to sample the material coming out of Enceladus.
Incredibly exciting.
We measured water, and we measured silica.
We also found organic molecules.
So, probably means there are - hydrothermal volcanic vents - Absolutely.
erupting at the bottom of that ocean.
That makes me optimistic that this time of finding life beyond Earth is actually much closer than we think.
TAYLOR: For more than 50 years, one of NASA's prime directives has been exploring the possibility of life beyond Earth From missions like the Voyager program carrying the golden record A disc bearing sounds and images of Earth to tell humanity's story to anyone who might find it floating through the cosmos To the last decade's series of surface rovers and planetary probes.
And at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, astrobiologists, like Mike Russell, are honing in on precisely where we might find life.
TAYLOR: Oh wow.
(TAYLOR SPEAKS) - (MIKE SPEAKS) - (TAYLOR SPEAKS) - (MIKE SPEAKS) - (TAYLOR SPEAKS) TAYLOR: And to put all that flight hardware to work, NASA is stacking missions to the outer planets and moons, spending billions of dollars on planetary science related to the genesis of life.
Most people would be surprised that NASA is devoting so many resources to the question of, "Is there life outside of Earth?" So what are some of those missions that are coming up on the slate? So, Mars 2020, we'll be drilling into part of the crust of Mars.
The big thing is to get some rocks back that aren't just the rubbish from meteorites that have been smashed into - TAYLOR: Burned up.
- MIKE: Yes.
The second one is ELF, and that's the Enceladus Life Finder.
We know there's hydrogen there.
We know there's carbon dioxide there.
They're the two almost-magic ingredients.
And finally, Europa.
And that's going to be doing some spectroscopic work to see how many oxidants there that life could use.
Is it your opinion that if all the conditions for life are present that life will arise, or is there something missing in our understanding, something necessary for it to arise? - No, it'll arise.
It's inevitable.
- Okay.
As soon as all of the materials are available and the right amount of disequilibrium is available, it never doesn't happen.
But consciousness is That's hard to get, I think.
Yeah.
But but there will be.
Right, it's just a game of numbers.
- It's a game of numbers, yes.
- There's so many worlds out there.
And they're a long way away.
TAYLOR: To reach these far-off worlds, a radical new way of thinking about space travel is being boosted by private philanthropists.
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has pledged $100 million and enlisted the support of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking on a quest to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our sun.
(COMPUTER VOICE SPEAKS) TAYLOR: This NASA-backed effort, called Breakthrough Starshot, is developing a propulsion system for spacecraft to travel at what essentially amounts to warp speed.
If we ever want to explore interstellar distances, there's nothing that we're currently using that will do that.
TAYLOR: Philip Lubin, a professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara, who is part of the Breathrough Starshot team, has invented a way for humanity to finally travel these vast distances of space and time.
Everything that goes into space today uses chemical propulsion.
Chemical propulsion has literally not changed very much in terms of the energy extraction from the materials in more than a thousand years.
So what we're looking at is sort of a radically different solution.
It basically means that whatever propellant you're using has to come out of the spacecraft at pretty close to the speed of light.
This system is a demonstration and a test system.
Each lens has its own laser, and they're all synchronized.
You can see the individual beams, and then they converge on the target.
If they're not synchronized, the light just spreads out and it's not effective.
When they are synchronized, the spot stays on target for much longer, and we go much faster.
Having that phased array basically allows you to hit the spacecraft longer, which allows you to accelerate to higher velocities.
Yes, exactly.
TAYLOR: Like early sailing ships propelled by the force of the wind, Lubin's design propels spacecraft using light.
Lasers fire as a coherent beam of light from the ground.
Propelling light cells on the vessels into deep space.
Breakthrough's goal is to make these nanocraft 600 times faster than any other spacecraft in history.
If we look at very simple spacecraft, something like that could achieve roughly 20 to 40 percent the speed of light.
We're talking about a radical change in the way that you send any spacecraft out.
TAYLOR: But if human beings are going to travel at the speed of light, we also need to know if our bodies can survive the journey, which is pushing scientists to breed tiny cosmic explorers for a whole new kind of interstellar adventure.
So, within these liquid nitrogen freezers, we have stacks of worms millions of worms, basically, in this whole freezer, that have been frozen away.
These are in suspended animation.
They will not develop.
They'll just stay in that condition indefinitely.
We can then taken them out, thaw them out any time we want, and within two days, they're adults, and they're producing eggs and producing the next generation.
TAYLOR: These worms, known as C.
elegans, have a simple anatomy, yet exhibit physiology common to much more sophisticated animals, making them ideal for biological research.
JOEL: C.
elegans is one of the most intensely studied animals on the planet.
But most importantly, it can be put in suspended animation.
So we can freeze them away and then thaw them any way along the way as we take a trip across the cosmos.
TAYLOR: C.
elegans aren't the only hardy little critters being recruited for extra-solar travel.
Tardigrades can survive everything, from freezing temperatures to intense radiation, and scientists consider them some of the most resilient creatures on the planet.
JOEL: They have very high radiation resistance, about a thousand more times than humans do, so they can handle a kind of a tough trip.
Now, if we're going to ever leave the solar system as humans, we have to know if life can even make it, any kind of life.
That's kind of like sending a canary into a coal mine.
That's exactly right.
These are our little canaries.
So we can guarantee, if this project works, that there will be extraterrestrial life, because we will create it.
DRAKE: Many people want to know "Are there other creatures in space? Are we the only ones? If we are not the only ones, what are those other creatures like? What do they know that we don't know?" And we appreciate that many of them, if they exist, most of them will be older than we are.
They can tell us things we don't know.
And what will that moment mean, when we make first contact with an intelligent species outside of Earth? What will that moment mean for humanity, for our species? Twice I've actually thought I found 'em, and I'll tell you, when that happens, you feel a very special emotion that you never feel otherwise.
This emotion is best described as "Everything is going to change.
" (THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
(HISSES) (MATTHEW VARKEY SPEAKS) Wow.
KRISHNA ANDAVOLU: So you're 3D printing rockets to send a 3D printer to Mars to 3D print more rockets? - To come back to Earth, yeah.
- (LAUGHS) SHANE: And then the search for extraterrestrial life.
TAYLOR WILSON: Is it your opinion that if all the conditions for life are present that life will arise? It'll arise.
It's inevitable.
TAYLOR: What will that moment mean, when we make first contact? Everything is going to change.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING) Rapid advancements in 3D printing are changing the manufacturing world as we know it, from customized machine parts to weapons to full-scale houses and even human body parts.
The potential for what can be 3D printed seems limitless.
So, we sent Krishna Andavolu to check in with the researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are changing the future of how our world is made.
(HISSING) In the 3D bio-printing rooms, we like to keep everything sterile.
When you're using cells, you don't want to contaminate anything.
So, gloves and then your lab coat.
And so, basically, you're just printing body parts? - Is that what's going on? - Right.
- JOSH: You wanna do the honors? - KRISHNA: Sure.
So, I'm about to 3D print a human ear.
KRISHNA: The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is developing methods to manufacture human tissue, using specialized 3D printers to fabricate a range of functioning, viable body parts.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
(HISSING) We have a couple of demos set up here.
The first one here is a artificial heart valve, and it's forcing fluid back and forth.
And that is an artificial blood vessel.
It's actually meant to be a carotid artery, - like in the neck.
- Mm-hmm.
DAVID: And so the idea is, you could take out that part that isn't working and then put this in.
How different is this from 3D printing a trinket? It's the exact same concept.
You take a 3D CAD file, and then you convert that into your printing code, and then you can print it.
The only difference here is that we've got all the biomaterials and your cellular components too.
KRISHNA: And where do the cells come from? DAVID: Depending on the patient, you can take a postage-size stamp of cells and then turn it into all the different cell types of the body.
KRISHNA: And then, how do you implant it? Do you just sew it on? - Exactly.
Suture it on - That's it? - cover it up, and you're good to go.
- Amazing.
One of the major challenges in medicine, of course, is not having a sufficient number of tissues and organs that you can use to replace in patients.
And so the concept here is, why not just create them.
How long do you think it is until you can print a whole body? Well, I remember watching the very first Westworld movie.
It came out in the movie theaters - many years ago.
- KRISHNA: Sure.
ANTHONY: Is that possible in the future? You never know.
Science has few boundaries.
KRISHNA: In 2009, the patent behind the key method of 3D printing expired, and as more followed, so did a new revolution in desktop 3D printing.
Printers got smaller and cheaper, allowing anyone to print models, parts, and tools on demand.
And nerdy hobbyists turned their printing passions into a multi-billion dollar industry.
KRISHNA: So, we're at the worldwide headquarters of Formlabs, one of the biggest 3D printing manufacturers in the world.
And like any respectable startup, they've got a ping-pong table.
And this is Max.
He's the founder and CEO.
The first 3D printing technologies were invented in the early '80s, but it was still really inaccessible to most people who could benefit from it, because the machines were so expensive and also really difficult to use, and they didn't necessarily see the potential for a 3D printer that would be a lot lower cost and would be more like, say, an office 2D printer.
- Here we go.
- Yeah.
KRISHNA: Ooh, it's in the goo.
MAX: There was a lot of excitement at the beginning of this kind of desktop 3D printing wave that 3D printers will be in all of our homes, but it's proven to be a lot further off than everyone hoped for.
KRISHNA: Cool! So if there was a sort of a 3D printing hype cycle, now that we're kind of past it, what does the future look like? MAX: 3D printing is used in pretty much every product development process.
What's coming soon with 3D printing is going into production, and so it has the potential to take years of product development and moving into manufacturing - and turn that into weeks even.
- KRISHNA: Wow.
- That's so that's huge.
- That's huge.
KRISHNA: We're in Boston, going to a company called Desktop Metal that has innovated 3D printing metal for mass production.
That's a lot of printers.
Yes.
So this is our print farm.
We are now inside of it.
And what you see is the printer in action, and they're printing parts like you see here on the table.
And the geometry can be very simple, - like a gear.
- Right.
And it can get very complicated, like this, which is a pneumatic distribution housing.
Wow.
Looks kind of steampunk.
RIC FULOP: In 3D printing, the first 20 years was used for prototyping, and now we're going into a new phase of 3D printing where we go from prototyping into mass production, and that has huge implications.
So, whereas, before you had a factory that make one engine component in the US, and then another component overseas, and then they ship this stuff around, that set up the whole trade system that we've basically architected the world around.
Now you can print parts anywhere as you need them to produce a product.
- So we're right at the beginning of - Of a revolution.
Yeah, this is a fourth industrial revolution in the making.
KRISHNA: In addition to fundamentally altering world-wide economic supply chains, now mass-produced 3D printed metal might also upend the way parts are designed from the ground up.
ANDY ROBERTS: Tools are fairly difficult to use to create very, very complex shapes.
But with additive manufacturing of metal, we can create crazy shapes.
So what we're doing is we're sort of subjecting these parts to this washing machine effect of dynamic transitional forces.
So what we have is the ability to very quickly create shapes that are very strong and lightweight where basically the cell mass is distributed only where it's needed.
KRISHNA: So, like, because of machine learning, manufactured goods or industrial design - will likely mimic biological design? - Absolutely.
It's not like you tell a computer, "Make it a bio-inspired shape.
" It's that you tell a computer, "Give me the most efficient shape," and the shape that you're getting looks bio.
KRISHNA: While Desktop Metal is spearheading this new global industrial revolution, researchers at MIT are thinking outside the printer entirely.
We visited two labs pushing the limits of material science and challenging the way we think of materials themselves.
SKYLAR TIBBITS: Essentially, printing is a material science chamber.
It got us more and more focused in understanding like what can materials do, how far can we push our products to behave in new ways.
This is a cellulose-based material.
You'll see that it'll morph just with the moisture of my skin.
- Mm-hmm.
- So, same thing, but it only transforms by sunlight.
You can apply it to windows, like glass facades or skylights.
The last category of research that we study is self-assembly.
They'll come together slowly over time.
They'll make these kind of cubic lattice structures.
What we're interested in in this scenario is like, "What's the far futures of fabrication?" Like, can we give more and more agency where the materials can make decisions, learn, adapt, perform in ways we've never even imagined? KRISHNA: Whether aided by self-assembly or artificial intelligence, turning digital processes into tangible objects is a key factor in how we envision the future of fabrication.
How would you characterize the work that you do at the Center for Bits and Atoms? We try to understand how digital things become physical things and physical things become digital things.
Now, interestingly, the founders of computer science, von Neumann and Turing, the last thing in their life they studied is exactly this question about how computation becomes physical.
How to design a machine that communicates a computation for its own construction.
The core research project here is now to actually make that.
You can think of it as the Star Trek replicator, 'cause that's really what this is.
This is the future that you're envisioning? It's the future that's on the table in front of us.
KRISHNA: Oh, hello.
BEN JENETT: So these are what we call relative robots.
And relative robots are designed to operate specifically within this lattice environment.
But what we're working on now is we have robots that can crawl on the structure.
The next step is to give bolting end-effectors to them, so that they can build the structure and have an army of these things - building a big structure in space.
- I see what you're saying.
BEN: When you have armies of these robots building high-performance structures for you, the possibilities are gonna be endless.
It's gonna help us get to Mars.
It's gonna help us get to other galaxies.
It's gonna help us explore the universe.
I'm in.
KRISHNA: It might sound far-fetched, but all the technologies we've seen are converging in pursuit of building a civilization on Mars.
And NASA's manufacturing wing is revolutionizing how we'll use 3D printing to get there.
So, this is the laboratory training complex.
It's pretty much a one-to-one mock-up of the US lab on Space Station right now.
This is actually our backup for the first 3D printer that we ever launched in space.
NIKI: The Space Station is an amazing vehicle.
We're still somewhat Earth-dependent with our Space Station model.
For Mars, we want to be Earth-independent.
Space does really drive home how important it is to conserve.
You know, what are we really gonna need for in-space manufacturing to make these parts? What you really have to do is have sustainability.
This is the refabricator, so it's the first-ever integrated 3D printer and recycler all in one.
We want to be able to, in one machine, 3D print the part, and then when you're done with it, you just feed it back in, it creates new filament, and you can make a whole new part.
What excites me the most is that closed-loop life cycle.
It may seem like a long time before we're going to Mars It's really not, and we have to work on these technologies today to be ready.
Is a 3D printer gonna help us get to Mars? Absolutely, 1,000 percent.
KRISHNA: Back on Earth, a startup in Los Angeles is reimagining how we could rapidly automate the production of orbital rockets.
So, that's a 3D printer? Yes, this is Stargate, which we developed and built ourselves, and it's the largest metal 3D printer in the world.
KRISHNA: Why did you call it Stargate? There's a video game called StarCraft, and Stargate is what you build to warp in spaceships.
- (LAUGHING) - So we named it after that, because we're warping in spaceships.
KRISHNA: This thing is massive.
TIM: Fundamentally, what we're doing is feeding in aluminum wire and then melting it with a very high-power, 11-kilowatt laser.
So it's like a big soldering arm? With a laser.
Yeah, with a laser.
This is the first large part that we made, which was a fuel tank.
(KNOCKS ECHOING) Normally, getting a tank of this size in like aerospace or rocket quality would take you well over 12 months.
How long did it take you to make this? Like seven days of print time.
- Seven days? - Now that it's developed, yeah.
Seven days, yeah.
KRISHNA: If you think about 10 years from now, - If your company starts making - Yeah.
more and more rockets, what does that mean? Well, our long-term mission was we want to be the first company to 3D print a rocket on Mars.
So you're 3D printing rockets to send a 3D printer to Mars to 3D print more rockets? - To come back to Earth, yeah.
Yeah.
- (LAUGHS) With limited time to do something in your life, like, why not just do something very ambitious? The idea is it could inspire other people to go after their dreams, much like I was inspired - By StarCraft.
- By StarCraft.
- Yeah, yeah, by StarCraft.
- (LAUGHS) MAX: Since the beginning of time, the act of making something using tools is one of the most defining traits of humans.
RIC: When people look back on the fourth industrial revolution, what was the enabling technology? It's gonna be manufacturing.
And it's gonna be manufacturing with total freedom.
(HISSES) ANTHONY: You know it's interesting, right? 'Cause science fiction really does predict, many times, real science.
In a way, that's what you're seeing right now, coming full circle Science fiction becoming science fact.
(ROARING) These revolutions in 3D printing are helping fuel exponential growth in the field of space exploration, and furthering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe.
As these technologies expand, scientists across the globe feel that we are closer than ever to making contact.
So we sent nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson to find out just how close we are to answering the ultimate question: "Are we alone?" (CHURCH ORGAN PLAYING) JOHN FLUTH: Genesis 1:1 describes God as the creator of all things in the universe, not just Earth.
If we make contact with intelligent aliens, how will religion respond? (MUSIC ENDS) I have performed about 124 quintillion quintillion floating-point operations analyzing signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
TAYLOR: Reverend John Fluth is a member of SETI@home, a distributed computing network that processes transmissions from the world's largest radio telescopes.
These signals are relayed to the group's hundred-thousand-plus users and analyzed on their personal computers.
For Fluth, SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is happening in the back of his church.
Really, the whole maintenance I have is just making sure it's online and using Dust-Off.
Okay.
So, I've got two here, I've got three at home.
I really enjoy working on computers.
TAYLOR: How do they actually distribute the data? JOHN: The information comes cut up into little sections.
Each little section goes to three computers.
If all three computers have the same results, it's accepted.
TAYLOR: SETI@home is listening for the unique transmissions of life, so when data separately analyzed by four users confirms the location of a distinct signal, scientists can better pinpoint where there might be signs of intelligence.
Why did SETI choose to go this route of crowdsourcing citizen scientists to analyze the data? Time on a supercomputer is very expensive, with distributed computing, it's free.
What do you think the odds of us discovering extraterrestrial intelligence are? It seems very high, and as more and more we look, we're finding more and more planets that could support life.
TAYLOR: Given the vastness of the universe, it seems illogical to say that we're alone.
In fact, mathematically, it's almost impossible.
The Drake Equation, created in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake, calculates the odds of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.
It uses factors like the rate of star formation, the number of planets, and the fraction of those in the habitable zone.
We met the man widely considered to be the father of this scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Frank Drake.
What was the motivation for setting out to develop this equation? The equation was designed to give us an idea of how many detectable civilizations there are in the universe.
And it's based on what we know And we know a lot about the history of life on Earth.
And so, we simply quantify that history.
How many civilizations are there? Well, how many stars are there? What would you say is the greatest uncertainty in that equation? And how has that certainty changed for the different variables over time? When we first started searching, we didn't really have an idea of how many planets there were in space, how many Earth-like civilizations there might be.
We were guessing in the dark.
When the equation was first written, there was only one which we actually knew, which was the rate of formation of stars in our galaxy.
Since then, we have learned through observation the real values of most of the other factors.
We've learned from recent studies this wonderful thing That almost every star has a planetary system, and a large fraction of those, probably more than a quarter, have a planet situated at such a distance from the star that the temperature in particular is suitable for life.
And thus, there may be many more inhabited planets than we ever imagined.
And of course, that's very encouraging.
So I guess, kind of in a way, we're just getting started in this search.
Yes, we're the beginners.
We're the new kids on the block.
We may have to search a million stars before we will hit on one that's transmitting a detectable signal.
And it's hard, but it's sure worth doing, because the eventual discovery will be the biggest payoff of anything you've ever done in the history of the world.
TAYLOR: Although there's no definitive solution for the Drake Equation, the more planets we discover, the better our odds of finding life.
Just last year, astronomers found a system of seven Earth-sized planets and NASA can now identify more than 3,500 exoplanets, many that could be habitable.
In less than a decade, we've leapt exponentially closer to finding life beyond Earth, and we may find the first evidence of it within our own solar system.
(SNOWMOBILE ENGINE REVVING) Ellen Stofan served as NASA's chief scientist and is one of the foremost experts on the alien worlds of our outer solar system.
She says the more we know about how life began here the greater our shot of finding it out there.
ELLEN: There are theories that life actually originated in a hot spring, maybe not too different from this one, right here on Earth.
Now, to get life, you need organic molecules which are actually pretty abundant throughout the solar system.
But you also need, we think, water in our hot spring, and you also need a source of energy.
So, a spring really has all the critical ingredients that allow us to get to life.
TAYLOR: I mean, this is probably one of the more alien places on planet Earth.
Elsewhere in our solar system, there are systems just like this, right? That's right.
MAN: Liftoff of the Cassini spacecraft on a billion-mile trek to Saturn.
ELLEN: Saturn has this moon called Enceladus.
It's got a thick, icy crust, underneath that icy crust is a subsurface water ocean.
The amazing thing about Enceladus is, it's got these giant cracks across the surface, and out of those cracks that subsurface liquid water ocean is actually erupting into space not that dissimilarly from Old Faithful.
So, we actually took the Cassini spacecraft, and we flew it right through those eruption plumes.
In fact, at the lowest, we were about 26 miles above the surface.
And so we actually got to sample the material coming out of Enceladus.
Incredibly exciting.
We measured water, and we measured silica.
We also found organic molecules.
So, probably means there are - hydrothermal volcanic vents - Absolutely.
erupting at the bottom of that ocean.
That makes me optimistic that this time of finding life beyond Earth is actually much closer than we think.
TAYLOR: For more than 50 years, one of NASA's prime directives has been exploring the possibility of life beyond Earth From missions like the Voyager program carrying the golden record A disc bearing sounds and images of Earth to tell humanity's story to anyone who might find it floating through the cosmos To the last decade's series of surface rovers and planetary probes.
And at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, astrobiologists, like Mike Russell, are honing in on precisely where we might find life.
TAYLOR: Oh wow.
(TAYLOR SPEAKS) - (MIKE SPEAKS) - (TAYLOR SPEAKS) - (MIKE SPEAKS) - (TAYLOR SPEAKS) TAYLOR: And to put all that flight hardware to work, NASA is stacking missions to the outer planets and moons, spending billions of dollars on planetary science related to the genesis of life.
Most people would be surprised that NASA is devoting so many resources to the question of, "Is there life outside of Earth?" So what are some of those missions that are coming up on the slate? So, Mars 2020, we'll be drilling into part of the crust of Mars.
The big thing is to get some rocks back that aren't just the rubbish from meteorites that have been smashed into - TAYLOR: Burned up.
- MIKE: Yes.
The second one is ELF, and that's the Enceladus Life Finder.
We know there's hydrogen there.
We know there's carbon dioxide there.
They're the two almost-magic ingredients.
And finally, Europa.
And that's going to be doing some spectroscopic work to see how many oxidants there that life could use.
Is it your opinion that if all the conditions for life are present that life will arise, or is there something missing in our understanding, something necessary for it to arise? - No, it'll arise.
It's inevitable.
- Okay.
As soon as all of the materials are available and the right amount of disequilibrium is available, it never doesn't happen.
But consciousness is That's hard to get, I think.
Yeah.
But but there will be.
Right, it's just a game of numbers.
- It's a game of numbers, yes.
- There's so many worlds out there.
And they're a long way away.
TAYLOR: To reach these far-off worlds, a radical new way of thinking about space travel is being boosted by private philanthropists.
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has pledged $100 million and enlisted the support of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking on a quest to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our sun.
(COMPUTER VOICE SPEAKS) TAYLOR: This NASA-backed effort, called Breakthrough Starshot, is developing a propulsion system for spacecraft to travel at what essentially amounts to warp speed.
If we ever want to explore interstellar distances, there's nothing that we're currently using that will do that.
TAYLOR: Philip Lubin, a professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara, who is part of the Breathrough Starshot team, has invented a way for humanity to finally travel these vast distances of space and time.
Everything that goes into space today uses chemical propulsion.
Chemical propulsion has literally not changed very much in terms of the energy extraction from the materials in more than a thousand years.
So what we're looking at is sort of a radically different solution.
It basically means that whatever propellant you're using has to come out of the spacecraft at pretty close to the speed of light.
This system is a demonstration and a test system.
Each lens has its own laser, and they're all synchronized.
You can see the individual beams, and then they converge on the target.
If they're not synchronized, the light just spreads out and it's not effective.
When they are synchronized, the spot stays on target for much longer, and we go much faster.
Having that phased array basically allows you to hit the spacecraft longer, which allows you to accelerate to higher velocities.
Yes, exactly.
TAYLOR: Like early sailing ships propelled by the force of the wind, Lubin's design propels spacecraft using light.
Lasers fire as a coherent beam of light from the ground.
Propelling light cells on the vessels into deep space.
Breakthrough's goal is to make these nanocraft 600 times faster than any other spacecraft in history.
If we look at very simple spacecraft, something like that could achieve roughly 20 to 40 percent the speed of light.
We're talking about a radical change in the way that you send any spacecraft out.
TAYLOR: But if human beings are going to travel at the speed of light, we also need to know if our bodies can survive the journey, which is pushing scientists to breed tiny cosmic explorers for a whole new kind of interstellar adventure.
So, within these liquid nitrogen freezers, we have stacks of worms millions of worms, basically, in this whole freezer, that have been frozen away.
These are in suspended animation.
They will not develop.
They'll just stay in that condition indefinitely.
We can then taken them out, thaw them out any time we want, and within two days, they're adults, and they're producing eggs and producing the next generation.
TAYLOR: These worms, known as C.
elegans, have a simple anatomy, yet exhibit physiology common to much more sophisticated animals, making them ideal for biological research.
JOEL: C.
elegans is one of the most intensely studied animals on the planet.
But most importantly, it can be put in suspended animation.
So we can freeze them away and then thaw them any way along the way as we take a trip across the cosmos.
TAYLOR: C.
elegans aren't the only hardy little critters being recruited for extra-solar travel.
Tardigrades can survive everything, from freezing temperatures to intense radiation, and scientists consider them some of the most resilient creatures on the planet.
JOEL: They have very high radiation resistance, about a thousand more times than humans do, so they can handle a kind of a tough trip.
Now, if we're going to ever leave the solar system as humans, we have to know if life can even make it, any kind of life.
That's kind of like sending a canary into a coal mine.
That's exactly right.
These are our little canaries.
So we can guarantee, if this project works, that there will be extraterrestrial life, because we will create it.
DRAKE: Many people want to know "Are there other creatures in space? Are we the only ones? If we are not the only ones, what are those other creatures like? What do they know that we don't know?" And we appreciate that many of them, if they exist, most of them will be older than we are.
They can tell us things we don't know.
And what will that moment mean, when we make first contact with an intelligent species outside of Earth? What will that moment mean for humanity, for our species? Twice I've actually thought I found 'em, and I'll tell you, when that happens, you feel a very special emotion that you never feel otherwise.
This emotion is best described as "Everything is going to change.
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