Name: Solving Humanity's Biggest Challenges
Uploaded: 2019-12-31
Duration: 13 min 53 s
Description: XPRIZE’s Anousheh Ansar explains how.

Solving Humanity's Biggest Challenges

Leadership

we're going to space and back. But we're going to first start in Iran. You are born in Iran. You actually lived through the Iranian Revolution before you, like so many of the Iranian be espera, um, and brilliant brain power moved away. Tell us about Iranian women. Um, I can tell you, um, interacting with Iranian woman in Iran on dhe abroad. I think that Iranian weren't are one of the most powerful women communities in the world. They had to be because they went through Revolution Wars, conflict. And they're the ones that have to keep the family together. They have to push things forward. I know many women when we came here with their family, their husbands went too deep depression because they lost high paying jobs on their careers and their lives in Iran. And they just thought that they will go back on the woman. I thought that well, I need to make ends meet for my family. So they stepped up, and now I think they have a lot of high powered careers here because of that's interesting. And speaking of high powered careers, one of the highlights of your career with 2006 you joined the space crew of the Russian spacecraft Soyuz, and you went to the international space station for 11 days. So you were out in space. Two questions. How did it change your life? And how did you wash your hair? Um, it was a dream off mine since a very young age to go to space. And I got this opportunity that exceeded all my expectations. I had dreamt about going to space. I imagine Hyde would be and how I would feel. And when I was actually there it just transformational for me. So to be able to see our world from, you know, to see Earth from space. Even though I have seen many pictures, it had a different impact. I could feel this energy off life. I could see the world for truly being our only home. And, you know, you grow up in geography classes and everywhere you see, um, I see these lines separating us. And when you see our planet from space, you are empowered in ways that it's beyond words. You feel like you belong to the entire human population on Earth so that the whole your home becomes the planet Earth and every single person on it becomes, you know, part of your clan in that way. And you also realize how small our world is and how unique it is a comfort to the entire universe. You see this dark background and all these stars and each have their own planet systems and you think to yourself, Well, you know, But look at it. This is beautiful, colorful, full of life and energy. And is this thin halo off a blue light, which is our atmosphere, which is the only reason we're alive on this planet on dhe, It makes you realize how important it is on its help. It helped me sort of put things in perspective. It was like I had my eyesight were not good. And I put on a glass for the first time, and everything cleared up on my life became in focus and, um, washing your hair my hair so I would not be the story last night. No showers on the space station on you stay there. I stayed there for 11 days, but some people say six months, so they're no showers. Get some towels. Wet towels every few days to clean yourself, but the hair becomes another issue. So most people actually cut their hair short, but I didn't. So you have water that you drink in this little containers. So what I did is to destroy with squeeze a little bit of water, making little water bubble over very slowly washes on. And I had to be very careful side Don't get the water bubbles flowing all over the station because we're in micro gravity so the water doesn't flow. It floats, right. It becomes a big issue when you return to you. You know, had a lot of photos taken when you look into that they worked on. And I should say that your name on the chez means immortal. So you've gone on, you know, it was so appropriate, I think space journey. But now you've gone on Thio to be CEO of the X Prize, and that is to tell everybody what that is and how it drives innovation. Sure. So I actually got involved with the X Prize Foundation many years ago from the beginning days when Peter Diamandis, the founder, came up with the idea of a prize that would propel the space industry and created commercial space program. And he modeled it after the aortic prize, which did the same thing with Lindbergh on the aviation. So when he started, no one would support the $10 million price on DDE. All the men around said too risky, So he found the only woman who says This is an amazing idea, You can the risk or Andy can actually get everyone to work on your passion on your project without saying anything and you only pay at the end. So that's what the competition doesn't. It was very successful and it created a leverage off the $10 million bringing $100 million in investment and creating a $2 billion industry now. And it brought a policy change and awareness like nothing before. So we took this model and we expanded it into solving humanity's grand challenges, where the lack of awareness, lack of investment lack off breakthrough on. We are in many different domains energy, food, health, environmental issues on. We run these large competitions because we believe the answers are out there. We crowd sourced this in a way. We put the framing off the problem. This is what you need to solve. You can be anyone from anywhere. You don't have to be a scientist or a mathematician or an engineer. You can be a tattoo artist. You tell them about the tattoo artist in the dentist. So one of our prizes, which Wendy Schmidt sponsored and she had a lot of our ocean prizes, this was about oil cleanup. It was right after the accident and the old bill that was taking everyone and, uh on because, like, let's do an X prize on we got together and launch this on Dhe. There was the tattoo artist in Las Vegas on one of his clients. Dentist was there and they were talking about this price. They had heard about it on the news and like, But if we do something and, uh, what do you use to clean the ink? And I have this instrument I use in dentistry. So they made up a team and they actually were one of our finalists. Onda. We hear a lot of stories like that. Just a few months ago, we awarded a junior high school team. $800,000 for winning are the bonus prize for our ocean discovery. Andi love that because we believe if you incentivize people and you give them a target to hit, then you have no idea what kind of innovation can come from where. Andre, we're very proud for a global what give us, like one or two problems that are out there, that there's a contest for that coming up. So right now we're very focused on environmental issues because time is running out for us. So we have an active carbon prize, which is a taking carbon out off a coal plant or a natural gas line and turning it into a product. And it's being tested. Actually one centers in Alberta, Canada, and one centers in Wyoming. We're in the final stages of testing, or 10 finalists were announced that the next year, and we're about to launch our largest ever carbon prize that is going to be about $100 million or more. On. It will be about extracting carbon as a very high rate to get to the gigatons that we need to get to and extracting it from the atmosphere on DDE, either turning it into a product for to create a reacting carbon like you could actually turn around global warming because you yet with distracting and turning it into a product. Because if we use all solar energy and stop putting so much, too in the actress, there's so much accumulation and still we will be producing so much more that we won't hit our target thing below one and 1/2 degrees. So we need to We need to do that. What? We're product be like me An example of the products that the teams are creating. It goes anywhere from, you know, shoes and flip flops to vodka to cement. So we have all sorts of creative ideas anything you polymers. OK, so tell Tell us, Timewise what should we look for when that going to be announced? Um so I think the second quarter next year we will have the testing finished at the Centers on Dhe will be announcing and we hope to actually, we're helping our teams. This is one thing that we were we were starting to doom or off. We want to get the products to the market. So we're starting to make partnerships to create advanced market demand for four teams because thes solutions are getting out there, but they need a little bit off a spotlight lift to get out there. So So before we run out of time, I do want to get your prognosis on space on space exploration. I think it's something that gets short shrift, and in fact, it's going to change our lives dramatically because there's a lot happening. Um, what? What are we gonna see in the next 5 to 10 years? So there's a lot happening boating man, flight operations and non man flights. So a lot off people here may be already aware off all the differences that the satellite technology have made in the way we understand global warming and the changes in our planet. Earth observation and sensing has given A with a I. And machine learning has given these opportunities to insurance companies, to farmers to any financial market, to look at how things are changing and accordingly make decisions. So it's helping decision making at every level on dumb. You know a lot of these technologies because off space and what we've been able to do in reducing the cost of access to space and the shrinking off technologies in sensing and satellite operations. So you have Oops at Nana's now that are put out there. We also if you go a little bit further in time. One of the things I'm excited about it if we could take. Actually, our data centers that all these companies is the clouds. Basically, because everything is in the clouds, massive data centers that are huge energy drain because of the power they need for the computing and also cooling. And if we put them in space, actually orbit on then. But you gotta centers in shooting them up into Yes, not for real world applications. But four stores restore tons of images that consuming so much energy. So putting him in in space will actually reduce the cost. Because nobody pays for the energy of the sun and and it's already cold. There's the cost of just putting him up there. And an entrepreneur that has heard me talk about this came to me a few months ago. I said, I'm going to do it on. He's putting a business model and his fundraising, so I'm hoping that it will happen. Okay. What about Moon and Mars? I think we're going to ah, start building a base on the moon because we need to learn how to live in space before we can go to Mars. Mars. I think it's still another maybe 30 35 years away for humans to step on Mars on. We first will be sending robots to build our happy that three D prints our habitat and create an environment where we can actually live in. And then I think humans will go to Mars. But we will have something on the moon so we can test out all these technologies. Andi learn how to live for a very long time because our body changes. When we're in micro gravity and we lose bone density, we lose muscle mass. Psychologically, it has an impact on us. So getting finding solutions for all these problems will require some time in the one minute we have left. When you look at all these big guys out there doing stuff Elon Musk, Jeff businesses Who do we watch? Well, of course, Ellen has advanced tremendously the whole commercial fits and reusable rocket trees, so the cost has been reduced. But I think Jeff has a lot off his sleeve that he's not talking about on very soon He's going to enter the market and competition is always good because it drives innovation and brings the cost down on Dhe. So I'm excited about both their work. But more importantly, I love the fact that a lot of it had to do with X Prize at the beginning, getting NASA toe actually given opportunities to the commercial space and working partnership sighting where government agencies on private sector can partner, especially early tech. Ah, lot of the environmental issues will require that. So when it comes together than it creates an opportunity that benefit for the government agencies on the public long term Thank you for being at the forefront of our future and bringing innovation to it and bringing broadening the brain power that's going into planning our future. Thank you for much