(upbeat music)
Our world is undergoing profound change.
Science and technology are transforming
our lives with dizzying speed.
Astonishing innovations are ushering in
a new era of opportunity.
The high-tech revolution is fueling creativity
around the globe, inspiring visionary solutions.
So, open your arms and get ready
for an amazing journey to 2050 to dream the future.
(upbeat music)
(electronic music)
Finding a nest, a cocoon for ourselves and our families,
a place to rest and take shelter,
is a fundamental human need.
And today, we face a growing crisis, runaway overpopulation.
For those dreaming the future,
the home of tomorrow presents daunting challenges.
We have to deal with the energy problem,
we have to deal with the climate change.
The solutions, in many cases, lie in finding a new model.
By 2050, the world population
will surpass nine billion.
Most of us will live in massive cities.
Are we destined to obliterate nature?
Or can we create a new way of living?
We live in a very complex, but very exciting time.
There's a growing number of issues,
but also a growing number of tools to solve them.
By 2050, new technologies
could literally take us out of this world.
Will we ever live on other planets?
It may sound naive, but in the long term
we'll have to figure out if we can live somewhere else.
We'll have to look into it someday.
People keep on saying nonsense, there's no rush,
but someone has to start sometime.
According to science fiction,
the home of the future falls into two categories:
endless skyscrapers and apartments like prison cells,
or beautiful green cities.
What does the future really hold for us?
Dreamers and inventors have the answer.
Their wildest projects include
turning Paris into a tropical forest,
transforming our apartments with smart furniture,
building 3D printed houses,
and living at the bottom of the ocean,
or even on the moon.
These trailblazers follow in the footsteps
of the innovators who, since the dawn of humankind,
have dreamed our future.
When they weren't sleeping under the stars,
our nomadic ancestors took refuge
in improvised shelters and caves.
But they dreamed of something better.
About 500,000 years ago they began building
comfortable huts out of branches and animal hides.
Around 12,000 B.C.,
they devised innovative ways to adapt to their environment.
Their houses were made of stone,
wattle and daub, wood, or brick.
By 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia, villages begat sprawling cities.
Urban planning was born.
In the first century B.C.,
Roman villas boasted comfort and functionality.
They combined the benefits of urban living
with the charm of domesticated nature.
Over the centuries, homes became symbols of power.
Palaces and mansions surpassed one another
in displays of wealth.
In the 15th century, Europe adopted the golden rule
of divine proportion as laid out by Friar Luca Pacioli.
Regularity, symmetry, and ideal proportion.
These rules still influence architects around the world.
In the 19th century, the industrial revolution
made large cities centers of economic activity,
attracting growing numbers of people.
Space had to be optimized,
which is exactly what Baron Haussmann did in Paris.
In 1884 in Chicago, William LeBaron Jenney
built the first skyscraper,
the 10 story high Home Insurance Building.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
running water, gas, and electricity
became standard in urban homes.
Millions flocked to live in modern metropolises.
To accommodate everyone, France came up with
the futuristic concept of public housing.
But by the beginning of the 21st century,
things were falling apart.
Too dense, too polluted, and too expensive.
The city has become the symbol of a society in crisis.
In 2008, for the first time in history,
there were more people living in urban than in rural areas.
Cities have become our primary habitat.
It seems the whole world has turned urban.
By 2050, the number of supersized cities will skyrocket.
Cities like Shanghai, New Delhi, and Cairo
could very well cross the 30 million people mark.
The population of Tokyo alone,
currently the most populated city, could reach 50 million.
It's incredibly exciting right now to be dealing
with the kind of issues that we are dealing with.
Because the planet is going through this period
of just extreme rapid urbanization.
I think it's the great challenge of our era,
so there's endless number of problems.
Cities are the epicenters of society,
hotbeds of art and commerce.
But their spectacular growth comes at a price, pollution.
Although they only cover two percent of the world's surface,
cities are responsible for more than 70 percent
of carbon dioxide emissions,
the gas causing climate change.
Major efforts are being made worldwide,
including in Europe,
to bring agriculture and nature into cities.
A French architect has decided
to completely rethink our models.
His project, turn Paris into the greenest city
in the world by 2050.
I'm often considered a lunatic,
but I've come to realize that people
desperately want to live among lunatics.
My name is Vincent Callebaut,
and my dream is to live in a city
where pollution and waste no longer exist.
My first impression of Paris was a lithograph
hanging over my bed when I was a kid.
It was a gift from my grandmother.
And that day I thought, when I grow up,
I want to live in Paris.
The current urban model is totally obsolete
because it relies on the importation
of raw materials and natural resources,
and on the exportation of pollution and waste.
Contemporary cities have been built mostly
of steel and concrete, two materials
that emit a lot of CO2 during production.
Instead, we could use wood and bamboo,
which capture CO2 during growth.
We would end up reversing the process
and returning to ancient techniques
in order to create an eco-friendly architecture.
Personally, I wanted to fight the trauma,
the constant anxiety of climate change.
Now that we've built cities on top of nature,
couldn't we bring nature back into urban areas
and maybe imagine that tomorrow
Paris could look a bit like the Amazon rainforest?
My dream is that the city of tomorrow
will become a natural ecosystem.
Each neighborhood will turn into a forest,
and each building into an inhabited tree.
I'm very interested in this kind of hyper-hybridization.
Even in cities defined by their history
and heritage, anything is possible.
Anything can be reinvented and re-enchanted.
Will cities look completely different by 2050?
What kinds of buildings will accommodate
and ever-increasing number of people?
How will cities expand?
When you have high value land, you want to go vertical.
The vertical towers are the functional spaces.
You can extrude them up as high as you want.
They can be commercial and residential.
It allows you, parametrically,
as we say, to increase the density,
or to get the density at an optimal rate.
Since Otis invented
the elevator in the 19th century,
architects have been thinking about
housing in three dimensions.
Today more than 9,000 buildings worldwide
are over 30 stories tall.
In recent years, records have been shattered
from Shanghai to Seoul.
But with their glass facades and elegant shapes,
these projects require investments
in the billions of dollars,
and are reserved only for the super rich.
How will we find the space to allow our cities to grow?
What if we stop looking upward for solutions
and changed our perspective?
Capital cities are often by the water,
because their economic power came from maritime trade.
But today, water is considered an obstacle to growth.
A Dutch architect may have found a solution.
He suggests we start building on water.
The next step for our cities will be the water.
It's not longer the border where the city stops,
but it's a new place to go.
My name is Koen Olthuis, and my dream of the future
is that we learn how to start using the water
to make better cities and create a better world.
I'm from Holland, I was born here.
And, if you grew up in this country
you see all these meadows and all this green,
you think it's normal, but it isn't.
It's a very, very strange country,
it's a country below sea level,
we live here like four or five meters under sea.
We think we can conquer nature, we can make dikes,
we can be completely safe, but it's not like that.
Nature is very, very strong.
Then for me there was a click, I said this is not right,
we have to do it different,
we don't have to fight the water,
we just have to see how we can live with the water.
Well floating buildings, of course,
they are on top of the water.
They are almost the safest way
to build and to live in this country.
And then we saw that the problem we have in Holland,
this fighting against the water,
is something that you also see in other cities
like New York, and London, and Tokyo,
you have the same problems,
all these cities, they are in need of space,
the cities have to grow, and yeah, where can you grow?
I see water and I see not to swim in,
but to build upon, and then there is space enough.
What will be the force, now, in this moment, on the pipes?
At this moment, it will be around 50 tons.
So, 50,000 kilograms on this one?
You'll see, if you go to the meter down,
meter 50, then the floor goes.
People ask us how can you build on water,
well, building on water is not that really difficult,
just like a ship you have to a foundation,
you have to have a hull to push the water away,
but that's not all, because if you build on water,
you probably also built on locations
where you can expect to flood,
so where the water can rise up and down,
so then also your house have to go up and down with that.
So, you need some stilts, gliding stilts next to the house
that makes possible to move vertically up and down,
but that the house doesn't move horizontally.
And then, you have to make all your connections,
because you have to have for your sewage
and for your electricity and your gas and your water,
it all has to come in and out in your house.
So, for that, we have the flexible tubes,
we make sure that we can just pump in and pump out
the same as we do with a cruise ship, for instance.
So, it's these kinds of little things,
that little technologies that make it possible
to make a floating house that is
exactly the same as a normal house.
When I started to be an architect
and I was focused on water,
I was looking at cities in general,
and the strange thing is that we built
static cities for dynamic communities,
because constantly things are happening in our communities,
there are more children, or there's people getting more old,
or different kind of jobs.
I think, if you do it differently,
if you start using the water,
we can make dynamic cities for dynamic communities.
It can happen that you have to move
for your job to another city,
and normally, you sell your house,
go to another city, take new house.
But imagine that you just can move your house
from Amsterdam to Barcelona, or from Barcelona to New York,
well, this creates a freedom that we have
never experienced in the evolution of cities til now.
My father once said to me, he said Koen,
why can't you just built on land, you can do so many things.
But what I said is that if I built on land,
almost all the buildings that I will build
will be demolished in 50 years or 70 years,
100 years, because it's not for eternity.
But if I now start to build on water,
then it's not about the building,
it's about the change in mindsets.
And so, if you go to go these cities in 300 years,
you will see an effect of what we started.
It's not that they will remember us,
but the thing we have changed in mindsets,
the same as Mister Otis who made it possible
to grow into the air with his elevator,
now we've make it possible to start
using water as part of your city.
By 2050, thanks to
daring architectural projects,
reinvented cities could become
a hub of creativity and growth.
But first, this idyllic vision must overcome
soaring real estate prices.
Cities are already so expensive
that they exclude whole groups of people.
If you want to increase diversity in a community,
you have to address housing.
The creative lifeblood of the city,
those young people that are starting companies
and involved in the arts,
and staying up all night working,
and exchanging ideas in bars and clubs,
are getting priced out of the market,
they can't live in the creative heart of the city.
So, the mayors are realizing they have to
create affordable housing for these young
so-called creative class.
A new generation of architects and engineers
is rethinking our whole concept of urban apartments.
One planner from Spain
imagines living spaces that multitask.
What's happening nowadays, especially with the spaces,
is that we keep building things the same way
Romans were building things 2,000 years ago.
My name is Hasier Larrea,
and my dream is that the spaces
around us will have superpowers.
And we will have the lights here.
I know there's been a lot of innovations in architecture,
I'm not criticizing that,
what I mean is the basic paradigm that tells us
that if I need a space to sleep, I need a bedroom, a room.
If I need a space to work, I need a work room.
If I need a space to relax, you know, a relax room.
And at the end of the day, what happens is that
I cannot do all the activities at the same time,
so most of the rooms are unused most of the time.
And, if you think about architecture,
if you think about furniture,
if you think of our walls, beds, tables, closets,
we are talking about things that are, number one, static,
and number two, stupid or dummy.
So, what if we could bring robotics
and make those static and dummy objects
in dynamic and intelligent architecture.
One of the examples of how you could use
these robotic components to really tackle challenges
and bring hyper-functionality to spaces is, for instance,
you know, think about a big closet or wall that,
you know, can allow you to have a huge living room.
Now, imagine you wanna go to bed,
so all of a sudden you transform, with just a finger,
or with voice, or with a gesture,
you transform this space and create a bedroom on demand.
So, think about spaces that have no compromises,
think about a small apartment
that could have a king size bed,
dining for eight, full walk in closet,
think about all those spaces
and think about doing those things,
how you can become or how you can make
a very, very tiny space act like
if it was twice or three times bigger.
Another thing that is my dream if you were to ask me
would be the idea how we can democratize these tools,
and with that I mean what if these complex
mechanical electronic components we are developing,
what if it was every designer in the world,
every architect in the world
could have access to those tools?
And all of a sudden, they could create
new systems that we couldn't even imagine.
So, what if we could create more tools for also
the build environment so that architects, designers,
all of a sudden don't need to think about
the complexities of software, mechanics, electronics,
they just have those tools that figure that out for them,
and all of a sudden they can start
creating things like Legos.
Creating new systems that no one could imagine.
Will our future homes truly be smart?
Today, we can control a limited number of objects
with a simple word or gesture.
Say hi, Jibo.
Hi, Jibo.
Will robots invade our lives?
From vacuum cleaners to smart furniture,
they bring us comfort and connectivity,
but where will all this lead us?
Right now, we're witnessing a surge
in the production of connected objects
because every time there's a technological innovation,
it automatically translates
into objects to be bought and consumed.
I don't think anyone wants to live in a smart home,
I'd rather live in someone's arms than in their head.
I personally believe in a technology
that is reactive, and is at my service,
without me controlling it.
I don't wanna live in a house
where I have to control everything from a computer,
I dream of a home capable of sensing
my needs without my giving orders.
The next revolution could come from MIT,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In this hotbed of innovation,
students and researchers are inventing
the technologies of tomorrow.
In the architecture department,
a team is busy designing the materials of the future.
Those technologies don't just
come from incremental development,
they come from radical ideas that fundamentally change
the way we live and the way we develop today.
My name is Skylar Tibbits,
and my vision for the future
is to program material that can adapt
to our needs and our environments.
There's a number of aspects in housing
or the building industry, you could look at construction,
and the amount of energy put in,
the amount of labor, human and machine labor going into it,
it's essentially a brute force process,
so we really try to rethink how materials come together,
and propose new assembly techniques
were components can assemble themselves,
or they can collaborate with us
to assemble better structures.
Every industry is interested in making smarter,
more futuristic, newer things,
but that tends to be robotics,
so we tend to put robots into things,
whether that's furniture or cars or buildings or products,
we tend to try to roboticize them.
And, we're interested in looking at everyday materials
like wood or like metal, foams, plastics,
and making them highly active so they have
completely new properties to change shape,
to transform, to go from flexible to solid,
to morph themselves in different ways.
So, there's three main ingredients
to how we program materials,
the material properties themselves,
you know, how they respond to moisture,
how they respond to temperature or forces.
So, wood responds to moisture,
metal responds to heat, et cetera.
The combination of those materials
and the geometry of it creates different mechanisms,
so you have materials in geometry,
mechanical transformations, and the activation energy.
And, by combining those three,
you get new properties in everyday materials.
It would be interesting testing
different kinds of flexibility and see
the results and the patterns that emerge.
Maybe it would make a bigger circle or a smaller circle.
If you look at tables or chairs or furniture,
for example, there's lots of logistics
that goes into shipping this, so it's a large volume,
you need lots of packaging materials, lots of waste,
lots of assembly when you get it to the other side,
and then it's a static object
that doesn't respond to anything we do.
So, we're more interested in a material
that could be shipped flat, minimize volume,
assemble itself on the other side,
so there's no human labor to assemble it,
and then morph depending on the application you're using.
It could be a standing desk, it could be a lower desk,
it could support a lot of weight, a little bit of weight,
it could respond to the temperature in the room,
or if you're drawing versus building on the table,
you'd have all these different products,
but the material can transform itself.
The element of surprise is super important, you know,
we often and trying to find surprise for ourselves,
you're researching something and developing prototypes,
and the moment you get surprised,
something new happened, it did something unexpected.
And, if you can take advantage of that,
then you'll arrive at results that you
never would've dreamed of in the beginning.
We really try to push for a science reality,
something at the forefront of what's possible
mixed with the kind of shift of our reality,
the shift of our perspective,
or shift of what we know today.
And so, it's totally real, it's fundamental, it's possible,
but it's completely weird and surprising,
in a totally different universe.
Urban planners are tackling huge challenges,
limiting pollution, creating more usable space,
welcoming rich and poor alike.
Thanks to their innovations,
our cities will continue to evolve and grow.
There is never a definitive solution to anything,
and the essence of every single urbanistic
or architectural current is that it's never completed.
But what if the future
proves our predictions wrong?
What if we fled the city and returned to nature?
Could we combine the best of both worlds?
On the one hand,
technology has become increasingly prevalent,
and on the other, there's a kind of primitive desire
to go back to living in caves,
or at least in homes designed and built locally.
I don't think these two dynamics conflict with one another.
The first one is turned towards the future,
and the second one towards an ideal past.
Yet, I think that there is a real opportunity
to combine these models and incorporate
smart features into vernacular buildings.
No one knows what the future holds.
In the New Mexico desert, a small group of seekers
has decided to ensure the survival of humankind
far away from big city infrastructure
by designing self sufficient homes.
So, to me now, a house or a home
is a vessel on this planet,
it's a vessel that encounters the natural phenomena
of the planet to take care of the people.
My name is Michael Reynolds, what I hope for the future
is that we will learn to live in harmony with the Earth.
I starting thinking in this direction over 40 years ago,
I would be looking at the world around me
and seeing problems that just didn't seem right.
And the problem is we live separate from the planet,
we try to do everything with technology
without any connection with the Earth,
and I have nothing against technology,
but we have to use technology
with the phenomena of the planet,
they have to parallel, they have to be connected.
And, we have found that that's not going to happen
with architecture as we know it,
so we have made a profession called biotecture.
We're making these buildings for the entire Earth,
so they have to built of materials
that are indigenous to the entire Earth.
Automobile tires are indigenous to the entire Earth,
glass bottles are indigenous,
every country you go to has them.
Aluminum cans, cardboard,
so we started looking at these materials
in almost a contrived way to use them.
Automobile tires rammed with earth,
that provides thermal mass, it provides resilient structure.
I actually don't know of a better way to build.
An earth ship is shaped by the needs of humanity.
Everybody needs comfortable shelter, everybody needs water,
everybody needs to do something with their sewage,
everybody needs energy, and everybody needs food.
Well, the buildings have to be glazed on the sun side,
they have to be in a line east-west
so that every room gets sun,
so that's why the buildings look long.
In terms of water, normal buildings are made to shed water,
these buildings catch water, they harvest water,
and we run it to a system,
and then that pressurizes and filters the water,
and then you take a shower in that water.
Then, that water goes through planters
that are rubber lined in your living room just like this,
it grows plants, the plant roots oxygenate the water,
and therefore clean it, not to drink,
but clean enough to flush your toilet with.
So, you're using the same 10 gallons of water for four uses.
So, we are making all of these things happen
with simply eighth grade biology and physics.
It is not high tech, it is very simple
eighth grade biology and physics
that gives us a building that will take care of us
no matter happens in the corporate and political world.
I see the potential of this working for individual homes,
villages, towns, and cities.
If, say, a bunch of billionaires
decided to build a city of the future,
they would have to spend the first 10 years
making the infrastructure of utilities for that city.
In this case, every building is its own infrastructure,
so every time you build a building, it takes care of itself.
So, I could start a city myself, tomorrow,
just by building the first building.
In the future,
we'll be able to build houses for next to nothing.
Our homes are increasingly comfortable and well equipped,
and we often forget that nearly
one billion people worldwide live in substandard housing.
The job of architecture is, I think,
to bring quality to as many people as possible,
and not be an ostentatious demonstration of quality
that then ends up being unavailable
to the vast majority of people.
In the coming decades,
housing needs will skyrocket in Asia and Africa.
Meeting that demand won't be easy.
Sheltering your family from the rain and heat
has become too expensive.
It makes no sense, because the way houses
are designed and built is completely archaic.
If you look at the price of a car, I don't like cars,
but they're admirable in terms of
technology, quality, and reliability.
In comparison, a house costs 10 times more than a car.
If we industrialize production on the same scale,
the cost of a house could conceivably
be reduced to 10 or 20,000 dollars.
The answer may come from technology
that is still new, but by 2050,
could enable us to build homes at a much lower cost.
In a small village in Northern Italy,
a team of engineers has drawn inspiration
from animals to build a home of the future.
Billions of people around the world need a house,
and only have a 300 dollar budget to get it.
My name is Massimo Moretti,
and my dream for the future is to
design comfortable, low cost houses.
We're not crazy to the point of thinking we can
save the world, but we are crazy enough to try.
One day, as I was wondering how to make a low cost house,
I saw a wasp building a nest.
It was a mud dauber,
I saw it letting the mud dry in the sun,
building its home out of mud.
I immediately thought this was the perfect approach
to build at zero cost, using whatever materials are on site.
There's mud everywhere, I thought to myself.
This wasp is the ultimate 3D printer.
We wanted to create a printer
that could print houses using local materials.
We had already used cement,
it's a very easy material to print with.
But today, we're focusing on more modern materials,
and paradoxically, mud.
Why do I say that mud is a modern material?
Because cement has catastrophic
consequences for the environment.
One ton of cement produces one ton of CO2.
Mud and straw are very good materials.
Of course, there are many technical challenges,
the biggest one has always been
the change of state of materials.
If the material is too liquid when deposited,
it will tend to collapse.
If it changes state too quickly,
it might harden inside the printer's nozzle.
Controlling the materials has undoubtedly been
the trickiest part of this project.
The 3D printer is a device
that stores data and replicates it.
Shapes, layouts, air flows, light effects,
heating systems, combination of materials, structure.
Everything fits in a document that can be shared.
By 2050, this collective consciousness will be even greater.
Knowledge sharing will become more widespread,
I truly believe in knowledge
at the service of the community.
When knowledge is shared, it's better for everyone.
What if tomorrow,
thanks to the evolution of 3D printing,
we could move to the moon?
Since we started looking at the sky,
we have dreamed of conquering other worlds.
For a long time, that quest was confined to science fiction,
but the 20th century made that dream a reality,
allowing astronauts to venture out in space,
and even set foot on the moon.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
But can we imagine ever living
in such an inhospitable environment?
Not only is the human body incredibly adaptable,
but we also use technology to boost our adaptability.
We shield ourselves from solar radiation,
take food supplements to make up for vitamin D deficiency,
and exercise two hours a day to simulate the pull of gravity
against every part of our body.
Combining human nature and technology,
we're able to go places that
we weren't made for and make them our own,
and that's what's so fascinating about exploration,
that's what I'm passionate about.
A team of architects in London
is ready to return to the moon.
They plan to use a special 3D printer to build a lunar base.
I hope by the end of my career
I will see a moon base or a Mars base,
and be completely involved in designing those.
My name is Xavier de Kestelier, I'm an architect,
and my dream is to 3D print a base on the moon.
So, when I was about 12,
I went with my dad into an exhibition in Brussels,
and it was about space.
And, I still remember to this day,
this was the most amazing thing I've ever seen,
as a young kid.
And, I started making drawings, drawing of space stations,
and I think what I'm doing now is probably
not much different than it was when I was
a 12 year old coming back from that exhibition.
So, that's why, for our projects,
what we looked at is having lightweight structures,
dome structures, and on top of that,
we have a very thick dome structure,
3D printed dome structure made out of regalite,
which is dust, so in the end of the day,
we're making our own cave.
When you see a 3D printer,
the printer's always bigger than the thing
you're gonna build, and with buildings,
that's a bit of a silly thing, you know,
we're gonna make a machine that's gonna print buildings,
and the machine is bigger than the building.
So, we first thought to do this bottom up approach
on our moon project where we have two rovers,
two printing rovers going around
and printing the dome structure.
Every part is made of a certain material,
a building is a big assembly of different parts.
And, if you now start 3D printing,
you might want to completely rethinking that,
so it's not a Lego kit anymore,
you have to think of it as an organism where you add
different materials to the different performances,
more transparent, more shading,
more installation, more structure, and so forth.
So, I think, a reason to look at nature
is probably the first start,
which we did, of course, with our moon projects,
where we looked at bone structures
to start to look at an optimized shell structure.
I wanted to really look at what is
the spaces that these astronauts are gonna be living in,
so we started to design those as well,
and for that, we wanted to look at some precedents,
what kind of precedents are there?
Well, you can think about, you know,
science fiction, starting to look at that,
what do these interiors look like?
But interestingly enough, when you look at them,
one issue with them, with all of them,
is that there seems to be a lot of space in space,
it's full of corridors, big spaces and all that.
One thing you do not have in space
is actually space, it's all very cramped,
look at the International Space Station, right?
But we wanted to go beyond what you see
in the International Space Station,
'cause there you have all these corridors, almost,
you know, the tubes connected to each other,
and they're corridors where they live in,
so we wanted to give it a bit more quality space,
'cause we're architects, that's what we do.
If we lived on a moon base,
could we colonize other planets
and make the movie The Martian a reality?
So, now that NASA can talk to me, they won't shut up.
They want constant updates on every HAB system,
and they've got a room full of people
trying to micromanage my crops, which is awesome.
Look, I mean, I don't mean to sound arrogant or anything,
but I am the greatest botanist on this planet, so.
A manned mission to Mars
poses immense dangers, an unbreathable atmosphere,
temperatures ranging from 77
to minus 229 degrees Fahrenheit,
and deadly solar radiation.
The further we go, the more difficult it'll be.
We'll have to protect ourselves from a harsh environment
and use whatever we have at our disposal.
We'll have to make fuel out of the Martian soil
and atmosphere, we won't have a choice,
we'll have to recycle our atmosphere,
recycle the water, and use as little of it as possible.
It's an interesting interaction,
we'll have to protect ourselves from the environment,
and also exploit it.
We'll have to preserve it and use it to our advantage
at the same time, at least that's how we see it.
What if someday,
every technical hurdle was met
and scientists managed to create a Martian colony?
Would we be willing to call it home?
And to leave our planet for good?
I think there's gonna be a very interesting point
in space exploration when we move from
professional astronauts to the second generation in space.
How will these children who've grown up on Mars see it?
And, I think that we as humans become Martians,
we will start to see beauty in nature in that
in the same way that we see beauty in nature here on Earth.
While some of us dream of leaving Earth,
there is still one largely unexplored
habitat on this world, the ocean.
In the future, will we be able to live underwater like fish?
I think oceans are fundamental spaces.
Today, they're perceived as huge gray zones,
but by 2050, I hope we'll have a more human approach,
and reestablish a positive and a fertile relationship
with these gigantic oceanic spaces.
They truly are the most important spaces on Earth.
Water covers 70 percent of our blue planet.
Some see living underwater as a pipe dream,
but this Australian engineer is conducting
surprising experiments to discover
how we might build underwater homes.
So, for me, the draw of living underwater,
it's about making new discoveries,
the possibility of seeing something new
that no one else has seen before.
My name is Lloyd Godson,
I'm an aquanaut and a marine adventurer from Australia.
So, an aquanaut is someone who's lived beneath
the surface of the sea for 24 hours or more,
and I've spent about 30 days in total
now living beneath the surface of the water.
And, when I was living underwater,
the first night I can remember all these strange sounds.
It took me about three nights before I was able to get
a really solid night's sleep
and become comfortable with living in this new space.
And then, the air quality started to deteriorate,
so I was experimenting with using
algae as a life support system,
and by day 12 it became unsafe for me to remain underwater,
so I actually exited the habitat
two days earlier than intended.
But, you know, I learned a whole lot of things
from that experience, and so now,
I'm working on my third underwater habitat
and have made a whole range of improvements
to my first prototype.
In my current project,
I've spent a lot more energy on the design of the project.
In this particular case,
I've tried to integrate everything into the one capsule,
so rather than having my ballasts separate to the habitat,
it's all inside the one structure.
It's not a lot of space, but what I was thinking to do
was actually adding like shelves, I guess,
where I could try out some of the plants,
grow the plants inside.
There's been a whole range
of undersea habitats that I've built,
and most of them have actually closed
or only operated for a short period of time,
and I think that the main reason for that
is because of this connection to the surface.
For me, that doesn't make sense either,
so something I've been experimenting with
in my projects is trying to remove
that connection completely from the surface,
so having a self sustaining underwater habitat.
We have the technology now that, you know,
we could have renewable energy on the surface,
floating on the ocean's surface supplying us
with all of the energy requirements
that we need to remain underwater.
So yeah, I think it's important to be able
to remain self sufficient in what we do,
and not having that requirement
of having people support it from the surface.
So, for me, the driving force behind these projects
is working with children.
I really love to get these students engaged
in real world projects and innovative projects,
they're going to be the scientists
and engineers and explorers of the future,
and I'm just providing a platform for them
to see that these things are possible,
and then let their imagination and creativity flourish.
And, there's so many lessons to be learned
from building an underwater habitat that can be applied
to how we might be able to improve life on land.
We humans have always colonized
the most remote places, and dwelled wherever we wish.
In 2050, to turn our houses, buildings, and cities
into little pieces of paradise,
we'll need to combine imagination,
innovation, and sustainable development
to preserve our most precious home, the Earth.
(inspiring music)