Name: 【TED】Lisa Dyson: A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food (A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food | Lisa Dyson)
Uploaded: 2016-08-28T07:10:23.000Z
Duration: 11 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine you are a part of a crew of astronauts

traveling to Mars or some distant planet.

So you and the crew would have to figure out how to produce food

What if you could bring with you just a few packets of seeds,

And what if those crops would then make more seeds,

with just those few packets of seeds for the duration of the trip?

Well, the scientists at NASA actually figured out a way to do this.

What they came up with was actually quite interesting.

The types of microbes that they used were called hydrogenotrophs,

and with these hydrogenotrophs, you can create a virtuous carbon cycle

that would sustain life onboard a spacecraft.

Astronauts would breathe out carbon dioxide,

that carbon dioxide would then be captured by the microbes

and converted into a nutritious, carbon-rich crop.

The astronauts would then eat that carbon-rich crop

and exhale the carbon out in the form of carbon dioxide,

which would then be captured by the microbes,

which then would be exhaled in the form of carbon dioxide

So in this way, a closed-loop carbon cycle is created.

you simply wouldn't be able to pick up any carbon along the way,

so you'd have to figure out how to recycle it on board.

But the thing is, that research didn't really go anywhere.

We haven't yet gone to Mars. We haven't yet gone to another planet.

And this was actually done in the '60s and '70s.

So a colleague of mine, Dr. John Reed, and I,

were interested, actually, in carbon recycling here on Earth.

We wanted to come up with technical solutions

by reading some papers published in the '60s -- 1967 and later --

And we thought it was a really good idea.

So we said, well, Earth is actually like a spaceship.

We have limited space and limited resources,

and on Earth, we really do need to figure out

can we take some of these NASA-type ideas and apply them

Could we cultivate these NASA-type microbes

in order to make valuable products here on Earth?

And in that company, we discovered that these hydrogenotrophs --

which I'll actually call nature's supercharged carbon recyclers --

we found that they are a powerful class of microbes

that had been largely overlooked and understudied,

and that they could make some really valuable products.

So we began cultivating these products, these microbes, in our lab.

We found that we can make essential amino acids from carbon dioxide

that has an amino acid profile similar to what you might find

Oils are used to manufacture many products.

We made an oil that was similar to a citrus oil,

which can be used for flavoring and for fragrances,

but it also can be used as a biodegradable cleaner

And we made an oil that's similar to palm oil.

a wide range of consumer and industrial goods.

We began working with manufacturers to scale up this technology,

to bring some of these products to market.

We believe this type of technology can indeed help us

profitably recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products --

something that's beneficial for the planet

But tomorrow, this type of technology and using these types of microbes

actually could help us do something even greater

can actually help us address an issue with agriculture

and allow us to create a type of agriculture that's sustainable,

that will allow us to scale to meet the demands of tomorrow.

And why might we need a sustainable agriculture?

that the population will reach about 10 billion by 2050,

and we're projecting that we will need to increase food production

【TED】Lisa Dyson: A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food (A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food | Lisa Dyson)

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【TED】Lisa Dyson: A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food (A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food | Lisa Dyson)

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