Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Space Waste
Uploaded: 2019-03-20
Duration: 12 min 26 s
Description: Today, nearly 8.1 million kilograms of waste is floating around Earth, creating a layer of man-made debris formed by broken pieces of satellites and rockets.

Brainstorm Design 2019: Space Waste

Design

Today, nearly 8.1 million kilograms of waste is floating around Earth, creating a layer of man-made debris formed by broken pieces of satellites and rockets.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's so funny when I do projects in Europe. Usually my clients ask, Are you sure you have done it before? Risk management liability. But when I do projects in Asia, my clients usually ask, Are you sure this is the first time? Because they want to be the first. So we are now in Asia. So let's talk about being the first the future of the space and the future of designing in space what are sort of the risks and opportunities which are out there. But before we dive into the future, I want to start with history. I want to start with Kennedy Kennedy in 1962 and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why? Some say the why choose this as our and they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain 5, 35 years ago? Fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that's going will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. The other. Yeah, Kennedy not because it's easy, but because it's hard. And that was sort of the the defense. The defense is to go to the moon, and they did that and it brought a lot of prosperity, the GPS, all our telecommunication, the thing you have in your hand right now, it's all based on that. And it was sort of a moment of euphoria. The thing is, 60 years later, in the world of today, we wake up and we see this. This is not an undiscovered Jackson Pollock or a photo of an autumn. Unfortunately, this is the 8.1 million kg, uh of space junk currently floating around the universe. I saw this image two years ago. One of the desktops of my designers and I was shocked. It has sort of this obscene beauty, So apparently we're not sort of satisfied ruining our planet Earth. We just sort of keep on where you just keep on going outside our earth atmosphere, and it all started in 1957 launch of Sputnik Apollo pieces of satellites and missiles started to collide. Creating this sort of layer of junk around our earth and more collisions creates more particles in such a way that the famous space expert Kessler calculated that in 25 to 30 years, there's so much junk around our earth that we cannot launch more new missiles or satellites. That's crazy. Yeah. Can you imagine that in 30 years we have a wallpaper fortune conference here in Singapore and we say, Okay, guys, the good news is we found life outside planet Earth. The bad news is we can't get there. That's mad. No, no. But that is the situation we are in right now. And that is not the world I want to live in. But also more on a short term notice. Uh, this is an example of a simulation. What happens when a tiny particle of space junk hits an existing satellites like a bomb? 27,000 kilometers bomb and more particles creates more collisions, etcetera. So it hex our communications. Our satellites are future five G internet. No more wallpaper. dot com No more Fortune magazine. No more Facebook. No more R B and B. No more Instagram. No more instagram, huh? Like that? Completely scary. So I became fascinated with that. Let's let's let's design our way out of it. Big topic. Asia Naza Smart people have been working on it for 10 years, But maybe design can add a new value or new perspective to it. Why not? Very simple. How do you deal with problems? You have three phases phrase one visualization. Show it make people experience it because otherwise there's no awareness and it doesn't matter. Phase two. You fix it together with the experts, solving the problem and face free you up. Cycle it. You add a new value, a new experience so that we learn from it and progress. And that's what we started to do with the space waste lab putting amateurs and experts in a room with a pizza hope, lying and saying Nobody leaves the room up there. We have a plan, and we started with phase one tracking 29,000 particles larger than 10 centimeters real time above our head and showing them with the huge lines of light to create the awareness of the junk which is above our head. Yeah. Mhm, Right. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, Yeah, Yeah. 8000 people at the opening of the space race lab scanning the universe. And these are points on 220,000 kilometers of heights, wondering, revealing. And inside we did something we've never done before. We did an inside exhibition with an educational program showing a real piece of space junk that we got one of the astronauts from the Hubble Hubble telescope in 1991. Sort of captured it. Um, but also we started phase two and free, and we ask ourselves a question if you would have 8.1 million kg of Lego blocks, so to speak of space Young, what can you build with it? And so we did workshop with students and high school kids, more than two thousands of them asking them that question and at the same time, sort of plugging in the space experts who have been working on it, amateurs and experts working together because the real thing is face to win free. We realize that there are a lot of solutions already, but they're hidden in drawers with dust on it. You know why it took me a couple of months to figure that out? Why? Nobody likes to clean up. Uh huh. When you were a boy or girl and your mother said, Don't clean up your room. You're like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to I want to watch television. Hey, I have popcorn. Eat an ice cream, cleaning up. It's not fun. So we realized that maybe we had to add a new value, a new new meaning, a new yeah, perspective towards it. And so we started the index potentials. In that way, the idea cards is in Dutch, which says, Collect the space waste and put in a black hole. Maybe, Maybe not. Or here we need to build a wall from space waste and make the aliens pay for it. Make space clean again. Mm hmm. No comment, but some more realistic, fueled by the experts became visible. This is a very realistic idea, actually to freely print to capture the space junk and three d print on the moon. This is already on the agenda of NASA had to create habitats on the moon And why are we shipping all precious material from space from Earth all the way to space? Why not just use what is there an up cycle it in a new way? Or here creating a sort of Pac man which protect the earth from incoming space junk to store it, maybe for something later when we know what to do with it or hear one of my personal favorites. What if we would sort of collect it and create a reflector, the sun reflector, to reduce and fight climate change? And you maybe think, Oh, that's a bit far fetched of maybe too far. But in a world where temperatures are changing where agriculture is infected, sooner or later we are to be scared, hiding a room crying and blame somebody else, or we start designing and engineering are way out of it. All these kind of ideas are applied with the Maya principle, uh, invented by an American professor in 1960 1970 not the famous temples in Mexico, but most advanced yet acceptable. Yes, so it's very simple. When you design something, you always try to find the edge of what is possible. If you go too far. Technology dies. Clients go crazy. Your girlfriend dumped you because you're never home. Not good. Not good to be there. But if you stay too safe, it becomes boring or somebody else does it, or nobody cares even worse. So you always have to find the edge of what is and what is not possible that technology, but also what we want from reality. Or here where we sort of collected with a net with this garbage trucks garbage were over to burn it and create plasma fuel finance so we can recharge satellites which ran out of battery. Very fascinating. But if we look out if we zoom out and talk with the experts, they all agree that one is the most feasible in all these trajectories. And the solution lays in this beauty. Okay, this is a satellite, a mini satellite, a cube satellite ready for launch. And this is unimaginable. 10 years ago, they were like huge humanitarian things. Suddenly you become very portable for very small, and if you can connect them with sort of like a net, this is European Space Agency with a net. You can capture it. When we zoomed into death. We thought That's really interesting. So when you have a net and you capture it and it sort of floats with controlled re entry to the Earth when it hits the earth atmosphere, it's guys. I'm not being rhetorical. Yes, what happens when it hits? Fear of atmosphere? It burns. Yes. Ah, so waste is like That's interesting. Can we create artificial shooting stars as a replacement for polluting fireworks? Well, turns out, yes, we can. So this is what we're working on now for World Expo Dubai Tokyo Olympics. Maybe here. Marina Bay, Singapore. Dubai spends €8.1 million on fireworks every year. The Netherlands €70 million per year. People lose their eyes, complete villages are burned to the ground. Let's just, you know, really, let's just take that money. Take that money that you're already spending and do something new with it, clean up the universe and at the same time get a new experience, a new expression. And ladies and gentlemen, this is the way I would like to see the future, you know, trying to find new connections. I'm not smarter than Asia. Let's be very clear because I'm not there really super smart. But what I can do, what you can do. What we can do is design a new link or design a missing link between the fantasy and the science between something so practical, so pushed to the extreme that it becomes new poetry. And why should we do that? Well, that's very simple. Not because it's easy, but because it's hard. All right. Thank you. Yeah.