(rapid drumming)
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 eyes and get ready for an amazing journey
to 2050 to Dream the Future.
(bright warm music)
(mysterious music)
(energetic music)
Whether for work, to move goods, or just for fun,
we are always on the move.
Transportation rules our lives.
(airplane whirring overhead)
How we feel about transportation, how long it takes,
how angry it makes us, how happy it makes us
really makes your life good or bad.
Today, the situation is critical.
CO2 emissions are skyrocketing.
Climate change, a reality.
Our existing modes of transport have reached their limits,
so what will happen in 2050,
with more than nine billion people,
most of them in urban areas?
Think about how different New York,
or Paris, or Milan, or Singapore, for that matter,
would be if we were to remove eight cars out of 10,
and still take everybody to destination
exactly when they need to be there.
Traveling faster, further, for less money,
is this fantasy?
Has science fiction got it right?
(screaming)
(whirring)
In the third millennium, we must reinvent our transportation
to meet new demographic, economic,
and above all, environmental challenges.
(bright music)
The future you're about to discover is astonishing.
Inventors around the world are writing the tale
of tomorrow's transportation.
[Didier's Translator] I wanted to disrupt things
and change the way we fly.
(Didier speaking in foreign language)
If I close my eyes, then I'll see ships
that are not only propelled by diesel engines,
but are using the natural powers of the wind, sun,
and any other power that we can come up with.
I think, in many ways, we will be going back to the values
that you found in cities before the car,
but will take advantage of all these new systems,
and all these new technologies.
These visionaries follow in the footsteps
of innovators who, since the dawn of humankind,
have dreamed the future.
By standing up four million years ago,
one of our ancestors triggered
the first revolution in transportation.
Since then, we humans have never stopped inventing
new ways to get around.
(bright playful music)
We've built canoes,
then added sails more than 5,000 years ago.
On land, the invention of the wheel
was the ultimate game changer.
Chariots and carriages have become
increasingly sophisticated over the centuries.
(horses trotting)
Going new and distant places,
this dream continues to fuel innovation and ingenuity,
whatever the chosen path.
In the 11th century, the Chinese compass
revolutionized ocean navigation.
Now we could conquer the world without getting lost.
Achieving this took countless dreamers and curious minds
encountering other curious minds on their journeys.
Travel really is broadening.
In 1769, Nicolas Cugnot invented
the first steam-powered vehicle.
Other inventors dreamed of leaving
the Earth behind entirely.
In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was underway.
Everything accelerated.
Passenger trains lept to the front of the line.
Etienne Lenoir gave us the internal combustion engine,
Gustave Trouve , the electric vehicle,
and Karl Benz put a gasoline engine into an automobile.
For his part, Clement Ader took to the sky.
Throughout the 20th century, ever-increasing numbers
of passengers and goods traveled around the world.
(horns blaring)
Traffic flows have become so extensive
that we might need to get back
to something a little quieter.
(speaking in foreign language)
Quieter, but how?
How can we reduce congestion in mega cities
that keep growing?
(horn honking)
Urban travel often causes stress and worry.
Moving more and more people around,
creating a complex infrastructure,
managing accidents and pollution, none of it is easy.
Science fiction has promised us flying cars.
Are they a realistic solution?
(flying cars whooshing)
(screaming)
(horn honking)
What the hell was that?
Taxi cab.
What do you mean a taxi cab?
I thought we were flying.
Precisely!
(bright music)
Prototypes already exist,
but none have taken off in the public imagination.
(speaking in foreign language)
When they see the prototype,
people might think it's not necessarily a good car,
let alone a good plane.
The pitfall is that it's kind of a crossover,
a hybrid that functions in theory, but also in fact,
since flying car projects have existed for a while.
But in order to roll them out,
you end up with regulation and infrastructure issues
that border on the absurd.
If flying cars aren't the future,
what else could reduce traffic congestion?
We really need to move off of this system
that we have today because we were promised
that cars brought independence,
and that probably was true in the '30s, '40s, and '50s,
but we all know that most of us,
our driving is in very dense traffic.
It's not a pleasure, it's very expensive and time-consuming.
Could it be that the automobile,
as a symbol of freedom, has been replaced
by communication systems?
I'm referring to all the little devices we carry around,
smartphones, tablets, laptops, et cetera.
If travel time could become spare time,
or leisure time with sufficient comfort, why minimize it?
This is one of the issues currently facing the automobile.
Travel by car is still, by and large, a waste of time.
Yesterday's symbol of success,
the car around which we designed our cities,
is no longer the stuff of dreams.
To stay relevant, manufacturers have promised a revolution
with ultra smart cars.
(upbeat music)
This Mercedes prototype drives itself.
Soon, you'll travel without touching the wheel
in an autonomous and connected car.
(upbeat music)
New vehicles packed with sensors.
Please go ahead.
We are told they will be faster, safer,
and more interactive than ever before.
But the urban vehicle of 2050
could look completely different.
(warm guitar music)
Boston is home to more than its fair share
of groundbreaking inventions,
including the radar that helped win World War II.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the philosophy is to tear down walls between disciplines.
In his lab, Kent Larson and his team
are inventing the urban transportation of tomorrow.
In many cities, something over 50% of the land
is devoted to streets and parking, and driveways,
and infrastructure related to machines, not people.
(soft bright music)
We started thinking about these issues over 10 years ago,
and at that point, there was just beginning
to be this notion of the shared economy,
this idea that you could go to a bike sharing hub,
or where a shared vehicle is parked.
They would, by definition, need to be in high value
parts of the city, 'cause that's where the people are,
that's where the demand is.
We quickly realized that when they park,
they occupy way too much space,
so we developed the city car,
which would fold to a very tiny package.
(bright music)
Tremendous advantage because then,
then you can provide much more service
without using up more land in the city.
(bright music)
Once you then can
deploy very low-cost autonomy,
and the vehicle can come to you wherever you are,
you no longer need to fold the vehicle,
because it is never stationary.
It's never stored in a high-value part of the city.
So our research focus shifted
from folding to occupy less space
to low-cost autonomy to move people and goods,
such that you never needed to store the vehicle
in a high-value part of the city.
(bright music)
The PEV is a persuasive electric vehicle
because we were designing a vehicle to persuade people
to adopt more sustainable modes for the city,
on the one hand, and also persuade people
to get more physical exercise.
The PEV is an ultra-light tricycle,
peddle-powered or electric.
It will always be on the move.
At night, it will go charge itself.
During the day, it will switch between handling passengers
and goods, depending on demand.
Picks me up wherever I am,
drops me off where I want to go.
I don't have to think about locking it, parking spaces,
empty slots, insurance, maintenance.
It's kind of the ultimate personal mobility.
The PEV's electronics
are derived from smartphone technology,
and they're affordable to the general public.
Besides its low cost, the vehicle will travel at low speeds,
so it won't have to be equipped with a powerful,
but extremely expensive, detection and analysis systems
found in other autonomous cars.
(bright music)
One of the reasons why we are interested
in this low speed persuasive electric vehicle, the PEV,
'cause it's capable of operating at the speed
that is now the average speed of automobiles
within the city.
So we have vehicles capable of high speeds
that goes, in many cases in the city,
very quickly between intersections,
and then you stop at the intersection.
If all of those vehicles traveled at 12, 15 miles an hour,
you would just have this fluid safe motion,
the vehicles could share the space with pedestrians
and with bicycles, but the traffic would flow just as well.
Tomorrow, MIT's odd tricycle
will be part of a vastly different city.
Thousands of connected objects will feed sprawling networks
and transform cities into self-organizing systems.
The way of moving, the way of working,
the way of meeting people, the way of shopping,
all that is different than what it was 10 or 15 years ago,
but all of this technology is now entering physical space.
It's what people call the beginning of ubiquitous computing,
where computing enters everywhere.
Another way to put it is to call about the internet,
but not the internet as we knew it in the past,
but the internet of things,
the internet of everything around ourselves.
Now, when that happens, this allows you to run and operate
your cities in a different way,
and this is what people usually refer to
as smart or sensible cities.
This smart city will analyze and adapt
in real time to the flow of humans and machines
to maximize their efficiency.
To successfully merge the physical and digital worlds,
cities and vehicles must be designed together.
Larson's team has built interactive platforms
using LEGO bricks and augmented reality.
Human activities and transportation flow
are projected onto scale model communities.
Simply by moving the blocks,
the team can observe changes in real time.
When you combine better urban planning
with shared use systems using advanced technologies,
then I think we can get to an entirely new,
and even disruptive, pattern that will make life much better
and dramatically reduce resource consumption.
Enhancing quality of life,
promoting green spaces, providing access to various modes
of transport to reach any destination all the time,
all without a car,
that dream is already underway.
(warm guitar music)
Larson's project is part of a trend
seen in most Western capitols, sustainable mobility.
(warm guitar music)
(upbeat music)
To make cities breathable again,
public spaces are reclaimed from polluting vehicles.
Residents rediscover the joy of urban strolling.
Their transportation is self-powered and fun.
Alongside rollerblades, scooters, and skateboards,
new light electric vehicles are emerging,
some stranger than others.
They all serve the same mission, creating a car-free city.
The goal is to eliminate big engines,
speed, noise, all the negative aspects of mobility.
Sustainable mobility is a very nice idea.
When we travel only by car in between places,
we only see a very small set of people,
and so, living in places where you have this slow movement,
that, as I say, it's very pleasant, right?
We like to see people and bump into them.
The Netherlands have long shown
what a car-free city would look like.
Bicycles are an integral part
of the Dutch lifestyle and culture.
People cycle more than 500 miles per year here.
(bright music)
Bikes are so popular, they've changed the way cities look.
Around big transportation hubs, movement is constant.
Floating facilities can accommodate
several thousand bikes per day.
Some designers are combining their passion
for bicycles and sustainability.
To stay close to nature,
it's always the best solution there is.
Our rules are in nature and we are nature.
(soft bright music)
I'm Jan Gunneweg, and I'm 33 years old.
I designed a sustainable wooden bike.
(sanding wood)
At the first time, when I thought about a wooden bike,
I was actually thinking about the whole process
of a steel bike.
With a lot of power and energy, you create steel,
and then you have, like how you make a wooden bike,
just a tree, a nice forest.
You know, wood is only using sunlight, water, and CO2,
and that's it.
On this way, it's so wonderful
to grow your own bike, you know?
Well, I love wood because it's so warm, strong,
and flexible too, and don't gotta make a lot of noise.
It's very quiet, so that's what I like.
Made of 95% wood,
the Bough Bike is completely recyclable.
The parts fit together like the pieces of a puzzle
and can easily be replaced.
The Bough Bike is not just a bike.
It's the whole mindset behind it.
(bright music)
What if the future of urban mobility
was a radical attitude and a clear statement,
everybody walk, everybody cycle?
It used to be, at this moment, to go as fast as possible
from home to work, and don't think about anything.
That's also very important that you relax on your bike,
have a nice ride, and have a nice time.
(mellow pensive music)
It's very, very quiet because the wood is absorbing
all the vibrations, so you can hear the birds.
(mellow pensive music)
Well, for me, it's very interesting
what will be the next step in the bike world.
Maybe I can think about something,
but maybe also a lot of other people who like cycling
will invite some new things.
(speaking in foreign language)
Who would have thought, 15 years ago,
that cycling would be on the rise,
and that walking would, once again,
account for 30 to 40% of urban trips?
No one would have bet on it.
It shows that nothing is set in stone.
Mentalities can change quicker than we think
and differently than we imagined.
And up in the sky,
what about the planes of tomorrow?
Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg
had a wonderful dream when they set out to fly
around the world in a solar powered plane.
Will this exciting quest impact air transport in 2050?
Will it be possible to fly 700 passengers
using solar energy alone?
The sun can power a glider,
but a jumbo jet is a different story.
(bright music)
In 2050, there will be a lot of people to move.
Since the 1950s, neither wars nor energy crises
could halt the irresistible rise of the airplane.
But the price of oil hangs over our heads.
(bright music)
The plane is the only means of mass transportation
with no alternative to oil.
Air transport is an absolute paradox
because it's booming.
It's totally dependent on oil,
and it's not taken into consideration
for climate agreements.
Because of that, everything looks fine.
Aircraft emissions aren't taken into account,
as far as greenhouse gas reduction is concerned.
Air transport is taken out of the equation.
Well, that way, it can exist
in some kind of a parallel universe.
Is it possible to use other sources of energy
to propel aircraft?
No.
It seems like air transport exists on borrowed time.
(speaking in foreign language)
(upbeat music)
The E-Fan is a prototype aircraft
designed for 100% electric propulsion.
Equipped with two mini turbines,
it's the first of a new generation of zero emission planes.
Packed with technology, this flying laboratory
is an attempt to open up the aviation sector
to electric propulsion.
(mysterious pensive music)
The project is led by pilot Didier Esteyne
His colleague, Francis Deborde, is in charge of building it.
[Didier's Translator] I wanted the plane to be as silent
and as clean as possible,
but I also wanted it to be dynamic.
(soft bright music)
When I started to design it,
I immediately thought about batteries.
(speaking in foreign language)
We're going to lift it while you screw it on.
Go ahead, turn the table.
In aviation, weight is our worst enemy.
It makes our job harder.
The ratio between the energy supplied by a battery
and the energy supplied by one kilo of fossil fuel
is one to 20.
That is, for every kilo of fossil fuel,
you need 20 to 25 kilos of batteries.
[Francis's Translator] The total battery weight
is 167 kilos.
We could add more, but we're limited
by the mass of the plane.
At some point, if you add batteries to increase range,
you increase the mass proportionately,
which affects the plane's performance.
(bright music)
The team worked for months
to strike that delicate balance.
Now the E-Fan has a 50-minute range.
(bright music)
[Francis's Translator] In order to minimize weight,
we used exclusively composite materials and carbon fibers.
There's not a single piece of metal in the whole structure.
The other challenge was to integrate the batteries
and insulators inside the structure,
and insulate all of the electric circuits.
(Francis speaking in foreign language)
(bright music)
(Didier speaking in foreign language)
[Didier's Translator] Aviation, above all,
is an extraordinary human adventure.
When you work in aviation,
it usually means you're passionate about it.
And when you're passionate and your project succeeds,
you develop a certain philosophy.
It builds character and helps foster team spirit.
[Francis's Translator] Remember that our 10-person team
started from scratch to build
a very innovative electric aircraft.
[Didier's Translator] I love building and inventing stuff.
It was already the case when I was playing
with LEGO and Meccano.
I don't think that'll change.
Maybe some day, I'll get tired of it, but not yet.
Aviation has always been a passion of mine.
The idea of designing, creating, and flying airplanes,
whether made of paper, cardboard, wood, balsa, or aluminum,
it's always been there.
(whirring)
(buckle clicks)
(whirring)
(upbeat music)
It's very gratifying, exhilarating, even,
to fly a plane that you designed and built with your team.
Besides, this one is extremely quiet,
so it feels like you're flying a motor glider,
rather than a traditional plane.
(upbeat music)
[Francis's Translator] E-Fan, can you indicate
wind speed, please?
[Didier's Translator] Okay, 160, 161.
I'm speeding up.
During the flight, my co-workers,
who are just as passionate as I am,
use telemetry to monitor every little thing.
Because of that, to date, we've safely completed 112 flights
and flown over 50 hours.
(speaking in foreign language)
(warm pensive music)
Light, energy efficient, and quiet,
the E-Fan is a success.
In July 2015, the small twin engine aircraft
crossed the English Channel,
a feat worthy of the greatest aviation pioneers.
[Didier's Translator] People keep telling me
I'm the modern day Bleriot, but I'm not.
Back in 1909, you needed tremendous courage and willpower
to cross the English Channel in such a tiny plane.
He didn't have a team like I did.
He crossed the Channel, landed in a field
where a journalist was waving a French flag,
and ended up damaging his plane
because the field was in terrible shape.
(audience applauding)
(yells excitedly)
We did it!
We did it.
The E-Fan of today is still a prototype.
It's a learning machine.
The electrical data allows us to conduct
an in-depth analysis, which will be very helpful
for future projects.
Everything we learned today is extremely important.
Two and four-seater E-Fans
will be mass produced for pilot training.
Ultimately, Airbus plans to design hybrid planes
with 100 seats for regional airlines.
Aviation manufacturers experiment regularly
to improve design and minimize fuel consumption.
Hybrid propulsion is just one of the possibilities.
Another alternative to oil could come from the sea,
thanks to a new family of algae-based biofuels
produced in offshore farms.
The very concept of the plane could be rethought.
The idea behind Clip-Air is to maximize flexibility.
This modular aircraft has a flying wing
capable of hauling up to three capsules
carrying cargo or passengers.
It could move as many passengers
as three medium-range airplanes.
It's a new approach
to the land-air interface.
These capsules could be attached to a flying wing,
but also to a freight train.
It's a very interesting project.
The keywords are flexibility, modularity,
and multi-modality.
In the meantime,
air travel remains expensive and could become elitist.
So, what other form might transportation take?
(tense pensive music)
Will we break free of vehicles, time, and distance,
and teleport like characters from Star Trek?
(whirring)
I don't know how it works exactly,
but it has to do with some sort of gravitational lens deal,
bendin' the light, or some damn thing,
but you can move from place to place,
world to world if you want to.
You see, the whole thing, it works like one big airport.
We are very, very far
from knowing how to do what we see in Star Trek.
I would like to point out that technological progress
always raises ethical questions.
(speaking in foreign language)
Imagine you had a teleportation machine.
The implication is that you kill people where they are
and replicate them where they want to go.
If teleportation isn't the answer,
then what is?
In 2050, mobility could be much more about objects,
ideas, and capital than about people.
People would be connected,
but wouldn't travel around as much as objects.
That means drones.
Coming in all shapes and sizes,
they will fly above our cities and countryside.
These military aircraft now have new missions,
monitoring crowds and crops,
assessing infrastructure and communication networks.
Their potential is vast, and sometimes unexpected.
(phone beeping)
(phone ringing)
One, one, two, operator.
What is your emergency?
It's my dad!
I think he had a heart attack!
The ambulance drone,
developed in the Netherlands,
races a defibrillator to the scene of a cardiac arrest.
It's equipped with a webcam and loud speaker,
allowing medics to give instructions remotely.
Okay, pull the green lid.
This drone will save precious time
and greatly increase the odds of survival.
Soon, these weird creatures will become omnipresent,
buzzing around us like a swarm of giant bees.
How will we cope with thousands of flying robots?
What does it mean,
in terms of urban infrastructure,
for a city to use drones?
What does it mean for us as individuals?
One thing is sure, a laissez faire approach
is not an option.
There will be collisions, there will be problems.
Studies like this one
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
explore how to manage drone traffic.
Researchers are trying to develop systems
that operate without a central computer.
Whether there are 10 or 1,000 drones in the sky,
each one learns to avoid the others
by studying the environment and communicating
with the rest of the swarm.
(soft pensive music)
Today, most drones can fly only in open spaces,
but the Swiss startup, Flyability,
is giving these robotic creatures new powers.
(soft pensive music)
[Adrien's Translator] What's really fascinating
about insects is their ability to fly absolutely anywhere.
(soft bright music)
That's what we wanted to imitate.
We realized that it had to do with their ability
to survive collisions.
[Patrick's Translator] When we tried to replicate
their abilities, we came to the conclusion
that we had to build a collision-tolerant flying robot.
(soft bright music)
(drone buzzing)
(Patrick speaking in foreign language)
The way we did this was essentially to build a cage
around the robot, decoupled from what's inside.
In a collision, only the exterior cage will be affected,
and will turn separately.
The robot itself will remain perfectly stable
and won't feel a thing.
(Patrick speaking in foreign language)
(mellow pensive music)
[Adrien's Translator] The goal is to create a drone
that can go where no other robot can
for exploration or inspection purposes.
Today, drones are perfectly able to fly outdoors,
as long as there's a GPS network and not too many obstacles.
The robot that we built can move through confined spaces.
It can fly indoors, sneak into a pipe or a tank,
fly along a wall, or even roll on the ground.
This makes it very easy to use
because pilot errors have no serious consequences.
(Adrien speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic tense music)
[Patrick's Translator] The Fukushima disaster
really shook up the robotics community.
People realized that they didn't yet have the tools
to deal with such extreme situations.
[Adrien's Translator] The flying robots used at Fukushima
couldn't provide the kind of detailed images
of the situation that were needed at the time
because they couldn't get any closer.
If they had, they could not have avoided collisions.
(drone buzzing)
[Patrick's Translator] In just a few decades,
drones will do things we can't even imagine today.
We won't call them drones anymore.
We'll find new names for them.
Just look at their growing popularity.
They obviously have tremendous potential.
(Patrick speaking in foreign language)
(drone buzzing)
(jazzy pensive music)
Drones are on the rise.
Transport and e-commerce giants understand their potential.
They see drones as the future of delivery
and spend millions of dollars on projects
that seem ready for takeoff.
(jazzy pensive music)
The promise is breathtaking,
delivering anything in record time, anywhere,
even in the Australian Outback
by tracking the signal from your mobile phone.
But current drones can only transport small objects.
Your clothes, your TV and sofa, the coffee you're drinking,
the gas in your car, 90% of materials and goods
are shipped from around the world by sea.
(upbeat music with clapping)
Sea freight anchors the world's economy.
More than 100,000 cargo ships travel the world at any time.
These giants burn thousands of tons
of highly polluting heavy oil.
To move toward green shipping,
the maritime industry needs to develop new types of ships.
(upbeat music with clapping)
We have to come up with new designs
so that ships can glide through the water more easily,
or, I'm convinced, rise into the air,
and just glide across the water.
It's already the case for many racing boats
and passenger ships.
We'll obviously try to design ships
that sit as little as possible in the water,
and then we'll try to come up
with the most efficient propulsion solutions.
(speaking in foreign language)
Researchers are coming up with vessels
that combine innovative shapes with new propulsion systems.
This ship circled the globe on solar power,
and the SkySails project uses a large kite
to take advantage of high altitude winds.
(bright music)
Whatever happens with climate change,
all scenarios considered,
we're pretty certain that wind will always exist,
so we might as well use it.
The fascinating stuff about using wind
as power for propulsion is that it's for free.
I'm Thys Nikkels and I'm 49 years old.
I know that I wanted to be a naval arch
before I could walk or speak.
Our normal business is designing super yachts
powered by the wind, sailing yachts,
and we came upon a study,
back in the '60s from the last century and done in Germany,
and that was a study for cargo ships, never built,
and we now use that concept again
to design future cargo vessels.
It's called the WASP,
short for wind assisted ship propulsion.
The system relies on a set of rotating masts.
In a fully automated process, the sails furl and unfurl
entirely inside the masts.
(upbeat music)
It's a hybrid in the sense that both the wind
and normal propulsion is used as a combination,
and by using that combination,
we can reduce fuel consumption
and still adhere to the time frame
that these cargo ships have to match.
(warm pensive music)
The rigging is already working on a sailing yacht
called Maltese Falcon.
There, the yacht's masts are made of carbon fiber,
and it has been sailing around for almost 10 years now.
And luckily, no problems,
and a lot of data are coming back from the ship
that we can use in the design of the WASP.
If you combine sail-assisted propulsion
with new technology in routing software,
you have the perfect match.
That means that you do not go in a straight line,
from A to B, but you take the route
that is the most effective for the reduced fuel consumption.
We calculated on the route of the Atlantic.
We get to saving of about 35% of fuel.
You need to understand
that ships are going to get faster and faster,
and the faster you go, the stronger the headwind.
It goes without saying that we'll have to work
on aerodynamics to improve energy efficiency.
With its unique shape,
the Norwegian vessel, Wind Ship, goes even further.
This hybrid ship will haul over 6,000 cars
using its hull as a giant sail.
Depending on the wind's angle,
it will flow faster on one side than on the other.
This difference in speed creates an atmospheric depression
which, in turn, propels the ship forward.
This revolutionary project is already being tested
in a water tank in Norway,
and computer simulations show great promise.
On a 23-day trip between Japan and Chile,
Wind Ship would use three times less fossil fuel
than a regular cargo ship.
(glass shattering)
(ship splashing)
We not only have to design ships,
but must also have a system-based approach.
Let's say I have a fleet of X vessels
which have to meet various mobility needs
and transport Y containers from some part of the world
to another, how do I optimize itineraries
according to the weather?
There's a great potential
when it comes to operational innovation.
It's more about software, optimization algorithms,
mathematical models, which will all have to complement
technological innovations regarding materials,
aerodynamics, and engine efficiency.
You often need a mix of innovations
in order to overcome big challenges.
Safer, cheaper, and less polluting
than current vessels, cargo ships of the future
will integrate the latest innovations
and provide environmentally-friendly sea transport.
Every type of transportation we've invented
has overtaken the previous one,
and the world is always shrinking.
(tense pensive music)
So what is left to discover?
Well, we barely touched space.
(muffled speaking) (tense pensive music)
Discovery Houston, you are go at throttle level.
(energetic music)
Exploring outer space
is one of mankind's greatest dreams.
Space stirs the imagination,
but is it really the next frontier of transportation?
(energetic music)
For us humans,
there's nothing more hostile than space.
It's empty, it's cold, there's nothing there,
nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing.
You have to bring everything with you,
and I mean everything.
Every kilo costs $20,000 to send into orbit.
One kilo of shielding, $20,0000.
One kilo of computer hardware, $20,000.
One kilo of human, a lot more,
because you also need to bring water, air, food,
clothes, all the things we need to survive.
In short, going into space is hard, tough, and difficult.
(speaking in foreign language)
(rocket blasting)
The first obstacle is breaking free
from gravity without breaking the bank.
(dramatic tense music)
Despite the huge costs,
we've always dreamed of exploring Mars.
The Mars One project seeks to land humans
on the Red Planet by 2027,
and to establish a permanent colony there.
(dramatic tense music)
The movie Total Recall depicted one vision
of a full-on human society on Mars.
(tense music)
Welcome to the Mars Federal Colony.
For your safety and comfort,
domes have been installed to protect you
from the vacuum outside.
Please do not touch exterior windows or airlocks.
Once Mars is colonized,
will we conquer the stars, as in interstellar?
Next!
Thank you and enjoy your stay on Mars.
Right now, interstellar travel
isn't on the agenda, if only because of the travel time.
(speaking in foreign language)
The speeds required far exceed what our methods
of space craft propulsion can provide.
(tense music)
Considering the current speed
of the New Horizons space probe,
one of the fastest objects ever built,
which took nine years to reach Pluto,
it would take it tens of thousands of years
to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri,
4.4 light-years away.
(bright pensive music)
We'll have to settle for our neighborhood
for a while longer.
Space flight will be a means
to make traveling on Earth faster.
Before we can fly from Sydney to London
in a matter of hours,
sub-orbital flights will create
a new breed of space tourists,
but at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars,
those few minutes of zero gravity
will be off-limits to all but a privileged few.
(bright pensive music)
What I would like is for people,
especially the super-rich,
because they serve as a standard
for what the average person wants,
to understand that it's just not reasonable
to demand to go wherever you want
whenever you want at the speed that you want.
(speaking in foreign language)
I think the future of mobility
lies more in reducing the need to travel
and increasing connectivity
than in pipe dreams like traveling to Mars,
or God knows where.
For now, we can only count
on our small planet.
There are ways to protect it, even as we travel,
solutions that foster a global vision of transportation
in a world with new energy models,
a world where humans will feel at home again.
I think we are moving a lot today.
I think we'll move less tomorrow,
but it will definitely not go to zero
because the world is large, and there are beautiful places
to see, and people to be with, and places to go,
so I think we will always enjoy traveling and going out.
(warm pensive music)
(warm orchestral music)