Roy's argument is that most new technologies tend to be overestimated

in their impact to begin with,

and then they get underestimated in the long term

because we get used to them.

These really are days of miracle and wonder.

You remember that wonderful song by Paul Simon?

There were two lines in it.

So what was it that was considered miraculous back then?

Slowing down things -- slow motion --

and the long-distance call.

Because, of course, you used to get interrupted by operators

who'd tell you, "Long distance calling. Do you want to hang up?"

And now we think nothing of calling all over the world.

Well, something similar may be happening

with reading and programming life.

But before I unpack that,

let's just talk about telescopes.

Telescopes were overestimated originally in their impact.

This is one of Galileo's early models.

People thought it was just going to ruin all religion.

(Laughter)

So we're not paying that much attention to telescopes.

But, of course, telescopes launched 10 years ago, as you just heard,

could take this Volkswagen, fly it to the moon,

and you could see the lights on that Volkswagen light up on the moon.

And that's the kind of resolution power that allowed you to see

little specks of dust floating around distant suns.

Imagine for a second that this was a sun a billion light years away,

and you had a little speck of dust that came in front of it.

That's what detecting an exoplanet is like.

And the cool thing is, the telescopes that are now being launched

would allow you to see a single candle lit on the moon.

And if you separated it by one plate,

you could see two candles separately at that distance.

And that's the kind of resolution that you need

to begin to image that little speck of dust

as it comes around the sun

and see if it has a blue-green signature.

And if it does have a blue-green signature,

it means that life is common in the universe.

The first time you ever see a blue-green signature on a distant planet,

it means there's photosynthesis there,

there's water there,

and the chances that you saw the only other planet with photosynthesis

are about zero.

And that's a calendar-changing event.

There's a before and after we were alone in the universe:

forget about the discovery of whatever continent.

So as you're thinking about this,

we're now beginning to be able to image most of the universe.

And that is a time of miracle and wonder.

And we kind of take that for granted.

Something similar is happening in life.

So we're hearing about life in these little bits and pieces.

We hear about CRISPR, and we hear about this technology,

and we hear about this technology.

But the bottom line on life is that life turns out to be code.

And life as code is a really important concept because it means,

just in the same way as you can write a sentence

in English or in French or Chinese,

just in the same way as you can copy a sentence,

just in the same way as you can edit a sentence,

just in the same way as you can print a sentence,

you're beginning to be able to do that with life.

It means that we're beginning to learn how to read this language.

And this, of course, is the language that is used by this orange.

So how does this orange execute code?

It doesn't do it in ones and zeroes like a computer does.

It sits on a tree, and one day it does:

plop!

And that means: execute.

AATCAAG: make me a little root.

TCGACC: make me a little stem.

GAC: make me some leaves. AGC: make me some flowers.

And then GCAA: make me some more oranges.

If I edit a sentence in English on a word processor,

then what happens is you can go from this word to that word.

If I edit something in this orange

and put in GCAAC, using CRISPR or something else that you've heard of,

then this orange becomes a lemon,

or it becomes a grapefruit,

or it becomes a tangerine.

And if I edit one in a thousand letters,

you become the person sitting next to you today.

Be more careful where you sit.

(Laughter)

What's happening on this stuff is it was really expensive to begin with.

It was like long-distance calls.

But the cost of this is dropping 50 percent faster than Moore's law.

The first $200 full genome was announced yesterday by Veritas.

And so as you're looking at these systems,

it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, and then it does.

So let me just give you the map view of this stuff.

This is a big discovery.

There's 23 chromosomes.

Cool.

Let's now start using a telescope version, but instead of using a telescope,

let's use a microscope to zoom in

on the inferior of those chromosomes,

which is the Y chromosome.

It's a third the size of the X. It's recessive and mutant.

But hey,

just a male.

And as you're looking at this stuff,

here's kind of a country view

at a 400 base pair resolution level,

and then you zoom in to 550, and then you zoom in to 850,

and you can begin to identify more and more genes as you zoom in.

Then you zoom in to the state level,

and you can begin to tell who's got leukemia,

how did they get leukemia, what kind of leukemia do they have,

what shifted from what place to what place.

And then you zoom in to the Google street view level.

So this is what happens if you have colorectal cancer

for a very specific patient on the letter-by-letter resolution.

So what we're doing in this stuff is we're gathering information

and just generating enormous amounts of information.

This is one of the largest databases on the planet

and it's growing faster than we can build computers to store it.

You can create some incredible maps with this stuff.

You want to understand the plague and why one plague is bubonic

and the other one is a different kind of plague

and the other one is a different kind of plague?

Well, here's a map of the plague.

Some are absolutely deadly to humans,

some are not.

And note, by the way, as you go to the bottom of this,

how does it compare to tuberculosis?

So this is the difference between tuberculosis and various kinds of plagues,

and you can play detective with this stuff,

because you can take a very specific kind of cholera

that affected Haiti,

and you can look at which country it came from,

which region it came from,

and probably which soldier took that from that African country to Haiti.

Zoom out.

It's not just zooming in.

This is one of the coolest maps ever done by human beings.

What they've done is taken all the genetic information they have

about all the species,

and they've put a tree of life on a single page

that you can zoom in and out of.

So this is what came first, how did it diversify, how did it branch,

how large is that genome,

on a single page.

It's kind of the universe of life on Earth,

and it's being constantly updated and completed.

And so as you're looking at this stuff,

the really important change is the old biology used to be reactive.

You used to have a lot of biologists that had microscopes,

and they had magnifying glasses and they were out observing animals.

The new biology is proactive.

You don't just observe stuff, you make stuff.

And that's a really big change

because it allows us to do things like this.

And I know you're really excited by this picture.

(Laughter)

It only took us four years and 40 million dollars

to be able to take this picture.

(Laughter)

And what we did

is we took the full gene code out of a cell --

not a gene, not two genes, the full gene code out of a cell --

built a completely new gene code,

inserted it into the cell,

figured out a way to have the cell execute that code

and built a completely new species.

So this is the world's first synthetic life form.

And so what do you do with this stuff?

Well, this stuff is going to change the world.

Let me give you three short-term trends

in terms of how it's going to change the world.

The first is we're going to