Future Fantastic Dara O Briain's Science Club

Hello, I'm Dara O Briain. Welcome to the show which seeks out

the very latest ground-breaking ideas in science

and attempts to answer some of the most fundamental

questions in the cosmos.

Tonight, we're travelling into the future and seeing

what exactly it holds for us in the next five, ten or 50 years time.

This is the place where we find out how great ideas

are changing the world we live in.

Welcome to Science Club.

Yes, good evening. Welcome to the show,

and a great show tonight - some very eminent guests, later on.

We'll be joined by most of the usual suspects,

including resident experimentalist Professor Mark Miodownik.

Mark, what have you got for us tonight?

I'm showcasing some of the technologies of the future,

and, hopefully, not breaking them.

Because we have broken them repeatedly during the rehearsals.

On the show tonight, we are looking at the future.

Of course, to some extent, we're always looking at the future

on this show - but just how will our lives change over the next few years and decades?

What are we going to be using in our houses?

What are we going to be eating or wearing?

Our special guest - physicist and futurologist Professor Michio Kaku -

will be helping us with that later. Also on the show...

Alok investigates the most revolutionary brain imaging

techniques that promise to unlock the mysteries of our minds.

Do you think this is the beginnings

of a consciousness-detecting machine?

In the studio, we delve into cryonics -

freezing ourselves after death.

Imagine that is your cell...

'And discover a link to ice cream.'

Microscopically smooth!

And we come face to face with a robot that can finally ape

that most human of skills - touch.

ROBOT: Squishy, compressible and soft.

First to cities. Over the last couple of thousand years,

we humans seem to have decided that living together in cities was

the best way to organise ourselves.

Over half of us worldwide now live this way.

We've become an urban species.

So, how will we run our super cities as they get bigger and bigger?

Dr Helen Czerski has been to Brazil to investigate.

Rio de Janeiro - home to 6.3 million people.

That number will explode when the city hosts both the World Cup

and the Olympics in the next three years.

Its infrastructure will be pushed to breaking point,

so, here, they're already tackling challenges that we're all

going to face, as our cities grow faster than ever.

This is Rio's Command Operations Centre.

An extraordinary control room for the city.

You'd think that things like this might be hidden away

in lots of cities, but, actually,

nothing quite like this exists anywhere else in the world.

Essentially, what they've done is give the city a brain.

Any time, anywhere, if something happens in central Rio,

they'll know about it here.

This mission control is radically changing the way the city can

respond to any incident, however big or small.

-So, this is an incident going on in the city now.

-Yes, a bus broke down.

-The red circle is where the bus...?

-The red circle is the problem,

and the bigger red circle is the impact area.

Today, it's just a broken-down bus,

but it shows how comprehensive the system is.

The overlaid satellite image immediately shows exactly what might

be affected within the impact area, like schools or businesses.

But, crucially, it has live information about what resources

are available nearby, as every one of them is tracked through GPS.

We have two tow trucks near that place, and we have guards there too.

We call the tow trucks, we call the guards,

and our crew here, they work together to solve this

as fast as possible.

-And you can see details about who the guard is.

-We have his name.

He works from 7am till 7pm.

LAUGHING: Do you know everything about him?

We know his battery level, for example.

SPEAKS PORTUGUESE

-75%.

-So, you can tell that he's probably OK to talk to,

cos his battery isn't about to die.

We have his cellphone, we can call him.

But the system isn't just about responding to what's happening today.

They're also collecting data and analysing it.

They're learning how their city works.

We have discovered, for example, that every Friday, at 5.30pm,

we have most of the motorcycle accidents.

So, you can see patterns...

Like, you always have a motorcycle accident at 5.30 on a Friday,

and start to try and work out why that is, and maybe prevent it.

Prevent it, put a campaign, work with the information that we have.

It's that ability to learn that gives this system so much potential.

Rio can monitor itself to such a remarkable degree,

and it can adapt and predict.

It has the potential, more than any other city,

to respond to change,

and, as more and more of us choose to live in cities the world over,

and they became ever more complex, I think this has universal application.

APPLAUSE

-It's essentially treating a city like a giant organism.

-Yeah.

And this is the brain, the central nervous system.

And we're these little ants who inhabit it. I mean, I like it.

-It's really impressive.

-It is.

We're asking about cities, the future and how we live.

What we build with seems like...

Well, we've been building with the same stuff for a long time now,

in our cities. Concrete, for example.

Yeah, but the concrete of the future may be very different.

I want to show you a very special new type of concrete.

AUDIENCE: Ooh! MARK: Yeah!

DARA LAUGHS

How great is that? It doesn't even need to be that close to it.

-No, and look. If I sort of walk past...

-How mad is that?

And it's not like there's glass fibres in it or woven through it...

There's optical fibres. These are the things that carry our telephone

conversations at the moment, these optical fibres,

and they're threaded through this material,

so they're conveying, instead of information,

our telephone conversations, light from one side of the building

to the other. You can imagine the cities of the future,

where we haven't just got glass walls or opaque walls,

we've got all these variations in between.

I think it would be great to have a bathroom wall of this stuff,

because every... LAUGHTER

No, Imagine! Every shower you take will be a bit like

the opening of a Bond film.

-You'll be like this, and it'll just make it more fun.

-Sexy all the time.

-Constantly.

-Cos no-one can really see what you actually look like.

No, of course not, but people of the future will be constantly sexy.

Thank you, Mark Miodownik.

APPLAUSE

I believe it was Whitney Houston who once said that children are

our future, but some children step further into the future than others.

Take Taylor Wilson, for example, who, at the age of 14,

built a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage.

Or Jack Andraka, who invented a diagnostic tool to detect

pancreatic cancer when he was 15.

Our special guest tonight was one of those children.

In fact, he built a particle accelerator in his garage

when he was 17 years old.

Now, he's Professor of Physics at City University of New York,

and, of course, an expert in all things futuristic.

-Michio Kaku, pleasure to have you here.

-Glad to be on the show.

Good stuff.

Tell me about this...particle accelerator in your garage.

That's right. I was 17.

I assembled 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire,

and, in my mum's garage, I assembled a six kilowatt atom smasher.

Every time I turned it on,

I blew out every single circuit breaker in the house.

My mum would wonder, "Why can't my son play baseball?"

LAUGHTER

-What were you looking to create with this?

-I wanted to create antimatter.

-In your garage?

-That's right. LAUGHTER

With a particle accelerator, whizzing around like that.

And we do it now, outside Geneva, Switzerland.

It's called the Large Hadron Collider.

It's a very big version of what I built when I was 17 years of age.

-Did you find an antimatter with this?

-Unfortunately not.

-I didn't look hard enough.

-But this is what got you...

You took it to a science fair, which I presume you won.

I can't imagine anyone's project on volcanoes beating that.

Then it got you into Harvard, and from then, and from then...

That's right. I was a kid coming from a very poor background,

but I had big dreams. However, the meal ticket was a scholarship to

Harvard University, cos that's what set me off in the direction

of working in theoretical physics and working on string theory,

which is what I do for a living. That's my day job.

You are an expert on the future, as well.

Tell me what we can expect to change.

Well, within ten years, computer chips will cost about a penny,

so the internet will be everywhere and nowhere,

including your contact lens.

I will see you with my contact lens, I will see your biography.

If you speak to me in Chinese, I will see subtitles beneath you.

And who are the first people to buy internet contact lenses?

College students studying for final examinations.

LAUGHTER

Even wallpaper is going to be intelligent.

You simply go to the wall, say, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall",

and then Robo Doc appears -

an animated, artificially intelligent doctor

answering any medical questions.

And, if you want a few laughs, Robo Stand Up Comic will appear right

in your wallpaper, almost for free, because of artificial intelligence.

No, we don't work for free.

LAUGHTER

I don't know where you're getting that from.

Will we all be living on Earth? Do you see that?

Are we going to overcome the difficulties of interplanetary

transport? The radiation, the time taken?

I think, in the long term, as Stephen Hawking has also emphasised,

my colleague, we should become a two-planet species,

because look at the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs didn't have a space programme.

And look what happened to them. LAUGHTER

Is this basically, long term,

we're going to get wiped out by a comet or an asteroid at some stage?

The earth is in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery.

Look at Chelyabinsk, Russia.

That city was hit with an asteroid that blew up overhead.

If that had stayed intact for a few more seconds, it would

have hit the earth with the force of about 20 Hiroshima bombs.

And it just missed the earth by seconds.

That's how close we came to a disaster just a few months ago.

Do you see this as being a brighter future that we have ahead of us?

I think it's going to be a brighter future,

because science is the engine of prosperity.

All the wealth we see around us is due to science,

and science is going to continue to generate jobs, new industries,

make life easier, extend the human life span,

but there's always a price, and the price is privacy.

We'll probably have less privacy in the future, but we'll have

more abundance of wealth and we'll have a more convenient life.

OK, now, we have many questions to get through.

We're going to keep you here, but, for the time being,

-thank you very much, Dr Michio Kaku. We'll be talking to you later.

-APPLAUSE

What are we going to look like as the future comes?

This is a genuine proposal that, if we conquer other planets,

because we're further away from the sun, we'll have to evolve

larger eyes to look like a meerkat or some sort of freaky creature.

One thing's for sure, however,

our brains will continue to mark us out as different from other animals,

and knowing more about how they work will be crucial.

Alok has been to the US to see the latest incredible leap forward

in our understanding of that most complex of structures.

When it comes to the brain,

it's fair to say we have almost no idea how it works.

We've been studying our brains for hundreds of years, but we still

don't know what a thought is, we don't really know what

memories are, never mind autism or schizophrenia.

That's because we don't understand enough about the anatomy

of our brains - how our brain cells communicate

and connect with each other, but that might be about to change.

I've come to Washington DC to meet

one of the world's most talented neuroscientists.

Karl Deisseroth and his team have just unveiled an incredible

new technology to reveal the wiring of the brain.

So, what I'm showing you here is an intact mouse brain.

We can see the structure from top to bottom, side to side,

without taking it apart.

This is incredible, it's like a Hollywood movie.

These dots, they're individual brain cells.

Those are individual brain cells.

And the lines between them are the connections between them.

Those are the wires,

those are the connections that send information back and forth.

His revolutionary technique reveals every brain cell,

every connection, in detail we never thought possible.

Deisseroth's technique will transform our understanding

of detailed brain structure.

To see inside a living brain at this level is years away.

But, in Boston, they have a scanner that's taking those first steps.

It's still experimental,

so I'm only slightly worried about going in there.

'Because I volunteered to have my brain scanned by it.'

-Hello, I'm Alok.

-Great to meet you.

-Lovely to meet you.

'It's been developed by Dr Van Wedeen,

'who's going to map my brain's wiring.'

OK, are we ready to go?

This scanner has the ability to detect neurons.

But, rather than the usual clumps of millions,

it can pick up bunches of around a thousand at a time.

It creates so much data that I won't be able to see

my wiring map for weeks.

Instead, I get a sneak preview of other people's brains.

-Here's what the diffusion image looks like.

-Oh, wow.

It's just fibres everywhere.

These are the highest-resolution images of living neurons

we've ever had.

Each single coloured line represents thousands of brain cells, bundled in

pathways that connect the different regions of the brain to each other.

So, tell me, why is it important that we need a living wiring map of the brain?

Well, when you can look at living subjects, you can see changes over time.

You can see how the brain adapts following an injury or

increases in size following a learning process.

Learning a foreign language or learning a new skill.

It's a really unique window on how the brain works

in humans in general and also in you as an individual.

Dr Wedeen is also hopeful that it will lead us

to answer some of the most profound questions of all.

We've never trapped consciousness in a bottle.

There are many ideas for what it looks like. What its scale is.

Is it in one place or everywhere? Is it fast or slow or both?

That's the kind of question that we may see the answer to

-in a decade or so.

-Are we seeing the beginnings

-of a consciousness-detecting machine here?

-Yes, I think so.

I think there is a growing excitement

that the pieces of the puzzle are starting to appear.

With these two amazing new technologies,

we are seeing brain structure with unprecedented clarity.

We've never had such detailed wiring maps of the brain before.

They're going to revolutionise neuroscience and give us

our best chance yet at trying to understand things like

mental health, personality and even consciousness.

APPLAUSE

We have with us

in the studio Dr Molly Crockett from University College London

who's a cognitive neuroscientist. What do you make of this, Molly?

I think what's exciting about these techniques is that they really

complement what fMRI allows us to do, which is

to observe the brain as it's functioning in real-time.

How the brain is responding to decisions that people are making,

to stimuli, pictures, words, whatever you throw at people.

Would a parallel be we know the G's the A's,

the T's and the C's of the genome.

But we have to zoom out from that a bit to see how the genes

-interact and what they do?

-Exactly.

Or another analogy would be like a computer program.

So at the top level an email program and you want to send

a message and that's sort of what the program is for.

Then one level down you have the algorithms,

the software that helps that message get sent.

And then at the lowest level you have the hardware, the transistors,

the silicon chips.

And what these techniques like CLARITY are doing

is letting us see the transistors.

But it's important also to keep in mind that we have to have

all the levels going at the same time, that psychology

and cognitive science are also really important in this endeavour.

It's worth saying also these techniques are going to get better

and what we need more of is actually reference brains

and then you can compare when someone gets ill or someone

has a particular condition or someone's learned something.

And you can start to do that fine-grained analysis.

That's what I think is quite interesting

when you get to things like learning, memory.

You can actually see these structural things in the brain.

We said you're part of a very select group.

You may be one of the reference brains yourself.

There's fewer than 50 people have had it done and you haven't seen it yet.

I haven't seen it yet.

I would love for my brain to be a reference brain for anything.

That would be hilarious.

-It would be so wrong.

-It might well be. This is Alok's brain.

This is a Connectum of Alok's brain. You've got quite a curly brain.

What is striking is how little brain you have on one side of your head.

That's the left-hand side of my brain.

That means my logical side is very deficient,

whereas my creative side is through the roof.

I don't know why you're doing a science programme,

-you belong in the arts.

-Why did I do a physics degree? I had no idea.

-We think there's stuff there.

-It's probably true.

But they may have just put the resources into that.

Have you ever felt that absence on one side of your head?

I feel the emptiness most days.

There is a condition where you're born with only half a brain

-and actually you can develop quite normally.

-What!

-It's amazing.

-How amazing to have found that out on this show.

You were born with half a brain.

I feel like I should have had some counselling.

We're going to go another level up again

which is some of the work you do

would be the addition of hormones and chemicals into the brain.

-I know you do work with serotonin, for example.

-Yes.

Serotonin is one of many chemicals in the brain that helps transmit

certain signals and we've done some work looking at how manipulating

serotonin levels and serotonin function in healthy volunteers

influences peoples' decision making.

So serotonin, does it mean you make better decisions

or more generous decisions or less spiteful?

You're more spiteful when your serotonin is low.

It's a complicated system.

So we don't have a really good grip on this but we do know that

if you're chronically stressed, this will, over time,

tend to deplete your serotonin levels.

Which could shift you towards a more spiteful or retaliatory strategy

over time.

That work has been done in primates so we don't know for sure

if this corresponds to humans, as well.

But there's good reason to suspect that it would.

Is serotonin created in the left side of the brain?

It's very, very interesting.

Alok, if people want to know more about the future,

we often ask you to find things for us to read.

There's a website here called worldometer.

It's full of data about the world right now

and the kinds of things you can find out are things like

current world population, number of births this year.

-You can see it going up bit by bit.

-Number of births today.

-Even as we speak.

-Deaths, of course.

There's more bicycles produced every year than cars which is good,

I suppose. Number of books published is a million or so this year.

And all of this information is actually updated

from genuine sources of information.

The United Nations and other reports like that.

-It's actually quite mesmerising.

-Lovely stuff.

That's worldometer.info there.

Thank you very much, Molly. And thank you very much, Alok.

Still to come on tonight's show, what happens

when the earth's resources run out?

How will we dress ourselves in the future?

We check out the clothes made out of smart materials.

And the latest generation of humanoid robots.

And how they'll save lives.

When people talked of the future, along with hoverboards

and teleportation, we were also promised a form of life after death.

Cryonic suspension is the freezing procedure by which

we preserve patients after they have been pronounced legally dead

in the hope that at some future date medical science may be able

to restore them to active life, health and youth.

There are two whole body patients in this capsule,

plus one neuropreservation patient in which case only the head was

placed into suspension.

Medical science of the future should also be able to repair most

any freezing damage caused by the unperfected freezing techniques

that we currently use.

That was a man discussing cryonics back in the '60s.

I think it was 1969. It was very popular in the '60s

and '70s, the discussion of freezing yourself.

In fact, very recently, only a few weeks ago three Oxford academics

announced they wanted to freeze their heads for two of them.

One doing an entire body freezing

so that it would be somehow resurrected.

I think it's a scam, myself.

I think it's one of these things that they presume, 200 years,

people will have forgotten about them. We can tip them in a skip

at some stage.

It's also a no lose situation for them if they've got the money, I guess.

Possibly, they lose the money but it's after their death.

But it's no trivial matter to freeze someone and then return them.

The problem is that we're made mostly of water. 70% or 80% water.

And here's a carrot, also made mostly of water.

When you freeze something like this, as we all know,

when you freeze vegetables and then you defreeze them -

this is the idea of bringing them back to life -

they're not the same as they went in and...

AUDIENCE GROANS

-Oh, my Lord!

-Lots of this water, where has it come from?

It's not the same as the one that went into the freezer.

And the reason is when you freeze something that is mostly water,

it turns to ice.

And ice does something weird to the cells that we're all made of

and that carrot is made of.

And that's who we are, these cells that interconnect.

Is it because the water expands as it becomes ice

and becomes too large for the cell?

Yeah. As the ice crystals form, they're basically disrupting

all the machinery inside the cells.

They can poke through the membrane, they can splinter the membranes.

All of that stuff comes out.

And the idea that you could freeze something like that and recover its

function later seems very fanciful, especially when you see this.

Let's just have a look at what freezing looks like

when crystals form. And her are some crystals of sodium acetate.

-I'm sort of giving it an opportunity to crystallise.

-Right.

This is slow and you can see it. It's quite beautiful.

I hope. OK, ready?

-You can see it right there in the middle.

-Oh, my God.

Imagine that is your cell and that crystal is forming.

It's basically disrupting the nucleus of the crystal.

It's maybe met the membrane and it's bursting through it.

This is not a good situation to be in if that's your head.

-That's beautiful.

-It is beautiful.

That's maybe what they think as they're being frozen.

-Wow.

-"This is wonderful, I can't wait to see the future."

Nope, turns out you're not going to see a future at all.

-That is absolutely lovely.

-It is wonderful, isn't it?

There is a way round this. Or at least potentially.

That was slow and you got these very large crystals because of it.

As I was saying, they are mechanical objects

and they're going to do some stuff to you.

What if you could freeze it so fast that all of the crystals were tiny?

Really weenie ones. So actually they could be accommodated...

If you freeze so quickly they only have time to grow very tiny?

Tons of them form immediately and you get these tiny crystals.

And how would we achieve that?

Very, very cold stuff.

One of the things that these people are doing is being

plunged into liquid nitrogen. We've got some here.

First, let's just show people how fast you can freeze

something like a carrot.

At home you put this in the freezer and it would take several hours.

OK, grand. Hang on. There we go. Right.

You must think I'm obsessed with carrots but they are good for you.

-And in it goes. Now that's boiling the nitrogen.

-Yep.

That object is much hotter than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.

This stuff coming off here is not nitrogen.

You can't see it, it's an invisible gas.

This is the quite plentiful water vapour in the air

condensing to form a cloud.

But basically, liquid nitrogen is boiling off

and as a result that carrot is getting very cold, very fast.

That's been in for a minute now. Let's take it out.

That doesn't augur well for whoever paid 50 grand to freeze their head.

Obviously they won't do that.

That would be really offensive if they went,

"Oh, your uncle, yeah, he's here.

"There he is."

"How much of him do you want to bring home? He's there."

What can we possibly do to make a happy ending to this

particular item about tiny crystals?

Science is unsolved but one thing we can do with liquid nitrogen is make

tiny crystals and that improves the flavour and mouth feel of ice cream.

-Really?

-Yes.

-Heston's always doing this kind of nonsense.

What exactly is the science behind this?

If you think about it ice cream is basically cream, which is

mostly water with a bit of flavouring in it.

So when you freeze ice cream, you're making ice crystals.

And when you're eating ice cream you're eating ice.

But it doesn't taste crunchy, it doesn't taste mechanical. Why?

Because the crystals are tiny.

In order to get them really tiny

you have to constantly move them around and break them up.

Or you just put liquid nitrogen in and make tiny crystals

-in ten seconds.

-OK.

And so this, in theory, should make very, very smooth ice cream.

-What is this?

-This is cream with egg and a bit of vanilla.

-All right.

Which is a traditional ice cream mix, I think you'll find.

Are you ready to go?

-OK.

-You're going to pour that in and I'm going to mix it round. Go, go, go.

So the nitrogen is going in there, but it is immediately boiling off.

All the nitrogen is doing is cooling it off very fast.

-We're not adding nitrogen to the ice cream.

-That's boiling off.

It's not our magic ingredient.

OK, that's great, that's great, I think. He says.

-Is that working?

-Yeah. I think so.

It's a hell of a visual effect you've created anyway.

I've got an ice cream scoop over here.

# Just one... #

Here we go.

-Didn't get that reference.

-No, I got it.

Traditionally on television programmes they taste a thing

and go...

DARA MUMBLES

Unless it's MasterChef in which they go...

I'm getting the nitrogen.

-Are you?

-It tastes very nitrogen-y.

It's very rocky and icy this. Does it have to melt a little bit?

-It's frozen solid.

-It should be smooth.

It's not smooth in the slightest, look.

-You put too much nitrogen in.

-Who was in charge of the nitrogen?

You were supposed to say when for God's sake. I'm not a chef.

-Let's let the audience... Yeah, yeah.

-Do you want a go?

Hello, madam, how are you? Yes, you, the one standing at the front.

Go on then you, come on.

How much did you want that? You were pushing. You were stepping in.

I'll grab you as well, sir. Come in as well. Thank you very much.

Here, you take that.

There we go. Now, do you find it rocky and icy like I do?

-And thus unpalatable and not nice?

-Like an outer planet.

-It's good. It's melted a bit.

-It's melted a bit.

-It is very smooth.

It's hard on the outside but microscopically very smooth.

Loving this guy. That's exactly what we want to hear.

-Well said.

-Nobody has ever on MasterChef gone,

"Microscopically smooth."

Delicious, OK.

If you want to get involved and try some of Mark's experiments at home -

maybe this one isn't the first one to try out -

there are some step-by-step instructions on the website....

Thank you very much, Mark. It was very good.

We carry around with us a lot of very sophisticated

materials in our pockets and our bags.

The stuff, for example, that makes up our own personal technology.

A question for yourselves in the audience, how many minerals,

specifically rare earth metals, do you think are used to make

an iPhone? Any guesses?

-AUDIENCE SHOUTS NUMBERS

-10, 50, four that man goes.

-100.

-100. I'm not even sure there are 100 rare earth metals.

There are nine and where do 90% of these rare earth minerals come from?

China, you're absolutely right. We've got a really smart crowd.

China is where they come from which is handy

because that's where the phones are made.

However, we do not have an endless supply of these materials.

But help could be at hand, as unlikely as it may seem

there are people planning to mine the surface of the moon.

Mark's been to find out

if this audacious plan could ever actually work.

Asteroids are some of the richest sources of metals

in the solar system.

And that means the moon, which has been bombarded by asteroids,

will have billions of years' worth of asteroidal metal

lying in the dirt for the taking.

Most of the heavy metals we mine here on earth

were also dumped here by asteroid impacts.

At a mining facility in North Ontario,

they're pioneering sampling equipment for the next wild frontier -

mining the moon.

But is moon mining really feasible?

Why aren't we already up there blasting away at the rock?

RUMBLING

This is how mining works on earth. Huge explosions.

RUMBLING

God, I can feel it coming towards me.

We've always used brute force - enormous drills, machines.

But that won't necessarily work on the moon.

Asteroids hitting the moon would have had their metals

vaporised on impact, scattering far and wide through the lunar soil.

So why don't we simply go and scoop up the loose stuff on the surface?

Even that is easier said than done.

Machines for digging on the moon have to deal with dust that

behaves like none you'll ever see on earth.

That's why director of development Dale Boucher

tests lunar samplers on his own simulated moon dust.

So if I was to just sort of plunge this thing into it...

This is sort of dusty on the surface...

It kind of gets solid.

It's just a bit of an odd material.

This material compacts very quickly with depth.

The first ten centimetres is a fine powdery material.

Once you get below that, it hardens up very quickly.

Scooping up moon dust poses another problem you don't get on earth.

Areas in full sunlight will look like this.

'But only a few metres away in permanent shadow,

'it could be frozen solid and over 200 degrees colder.'

God. It'd be terrible to be sent to the moon with a scoop and go...

-HE LAUGHS

-That's right, "Now what do I do?"

'Whether you're digging or drilling,

'you go equipped if you want to tackle moon dust.

'But that presents another problem, because flying heavy machinery

'up to the moon is the last thing you want to do.'

Launching and landing, soft landing,

something on the moon is very expensive.

Rough magnitude of 250,000 US

to land a one litre of bottle of water on the moon.

-That's an expensive drink.

-It is very expensive.

Even though the technology to harvest lunar soil is real,

it seems the odds are stacked against doing it cheaply.

Mining the surface deposits of the moon is clearly possible,

but it would have to compete with terrestrial mining.

This stuff - it's huge, it's big business.

Bearing in mind that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars

to transport one kilogram of stuff from the moon to the earth,

the question is - would it ever be economically viable?

You could save on shipping raw materials back to earth

by processing metals in situ.

But here that usually involves burning fossil fuels

to smelt the ore. You can forget that on the moon.

But new developments in electrolysis could transform

the viability of moon mining.

Passing electricity through molten rock can draw the metals out.

At MIT in Boston,

Professor Antoine Allanore's team are pioneering

ways to reach incredibly high temperatures

using nothing more than the power of light.

Dr Guillaume Lambotte melts metal ore with highly focused xenon lamps.

Electrolysis leaves behind a blob of pure nickel.

In this case this is xenon lamp,

but you could use maybe a laser as a source or even sun.

You don't need to bring additional energy into space.

You're basically using what's available over there.

Antoine's metal extraction could be powered by something that's

always free in space - sunlight.

Not only that, but electrolysis has a by-product that's

worthless on earth, but priceless out there.

Oxygen.

Suddenly the idea of a mining base on the moon seems much more viable.

Dr Lewis Dartnell works for the UK Space Agency.

What's really exciting is the waste product from this process,

the oxygen on the moon is incredibly valuable commodity itself

because you can use it for astronauts for breathing.

And so with metals from the lunar dust

and oxygen from the lunar dust, you've basically got

everything you need to start building self-sustaining habitats.

I mean, you're literally living off the land.

So it's not an outlandish proposition, really -

mining the moon and creating a self-sufficient lunar base.

It sort of feels like all the ingredients are there.

There's problems still to be solved, of course there are.

Economics need to be worked out, but in broad brush strokes I think

we understand pretty well how to do it.

In terms of future resources, the real value of moon mining is

so much more than just a source of raw materials.

A self-sufficient mining base would give us

our first home away from home in the solar system.

And the potential rewards from that are astronomical.

So what you're saying, Mark, is this an economic question?

It'll only be done when it's cheaper to get it from the moon

than it is to try digging it out from the earth.

I think the real question is - will we ever really afford

the minerals we can get on the moon to bring them back to the earth?

Probably they'll be more valuable out there, because we all want to explore

the rest of the solar system. It'd be the perfect place to do it.

We would use that, we would mine there in order to

create the rockets and to head off from there.

It's got all the ingredients. I mean, we can get the oxygen,

we can get the metals we can get the water...

We're pretty sure we can get the water there.

We can have a self-sufficient base there and use it as a base

to explore the solar system.

And also, there is helium-3 on the moon,

if you take a look at scans of the moon.

And helium-3 is rather interesting because some people theorise

that it can be used as a fuel for fusion reactors of the future.

Most people would just think of helium

in terms of balloons at a kid's party.

Helium's... Helium's used in MRI scanners?

Yeah, I mean helium, if we run out of helium it's a really big problem.

It's the best refrigerant we've got.

Basically, all that diagnostic equipment in hospitals

is all cooled using helium.

Actually, it's a finite supply cos when it goes out of your balloon

or it comes out of the machine, it has escape velocity.

It goes into space. So we are losing...

It's the only atom species that's going out of the earth.

-It leaves the earth's orbit?

-Yeah.

The balloon that you get at a kid's party...

Not the balloon, the helium does.

Obviously not the balloon, that would be weird.

Space were filled with Peppa Pig balloons moving around.

-But when you do that...

-HE INHALES AND SPEAKS IN A HIGH PITCH

..that just...?

That helium is going to end up in space, very likely.

My God, it's astonishing. How many years?

What's the worst estimate that we have

in terms of running out of helium?

Well, you know, we disagree and other people do too.

50 years is a time frame that's likely,

100 years - very, very likely.

Look, thank you very much, Mark and Dr Michio Kaku.

APPLAUSE

Now here with this week's science news is Helen.

Now we know that light is important when you're growing crops,

but it's just been discovered that it can be used to change their flavour.

This team of scientists in Florida put harvested fruit under

different colours of light.

And what they found is that the different wavelengths affected

the molecules for taste and smell.

We could see this technology in our supermarkets

and even in our fridges to get the most out of our fruit and veg.

The search for alternative energy sources is relentless

and this week's is really bizarre.

This is a fuel cell and it may sound weird, but it runs entirely on urine.

As urine goes through these tubes here,

it's broken down by a cocktail of bacteria to generate electricity.

There's no shortage of urine, even in remote places.

Fuel cells like this could be used to power everything

from lights to mobile phones.

A spider's web is one of nature's deadliest traps

and now scientists have discovered why some are so effective.

And they've caught it on film for the first time.

As insects fly, the movement of their wings builds up positive charge

and that draws the web towards it.

As you can see, the moment the two touch

it's all over for the fly.

Still to come -

we discover how kind or otherwise the future will be to us.

-There you are.

-What?!

What the hell...?

Hi-five.

And Alok makes new friends with the latest robots.

What you do is straighten your hand slightly.

GRASPY: It's a pleasure to meet you, Alok.

Whenever we do a show about the future,

we are haunted by the predictions of televisions shows past.

Check out this fantastic clip from Tomorrow's World from 1965.

Tomorrow's girl could well look something like this.

On her head, no hair - a nylon wig.

Just a quick wipe with a damp cloth and your head's as good as new.

You notice the shirt with no collar, but that is made of paper.

Just the thing for jotting down telephone numbers.

In fact, you could make notes all over yourself.

The jacket and skirt are in plastic.

The sort of material that they used for covering kitchen tables

not so very long ago.

And if the synthetic weather should prove unreliable,

then we have a plastic Mackintosh with these extremely

interesting transparent pockets

to discourage you from loading them up with all sorts of junk.

LAUGHTER

All the pockets are transparent now. That's the way...

That's just the way that fashion has gone.

We are now...offer a hostage to the same kind of fortune.

This is the bit that will be shown in clips on science programmes

in another 40 or 50 years' time.

We're not going to predict fashion but fabrics

-and modern contemporary fabrics, they will change.

-Yes.

So this is an opalescent material mimicking the colours

and the opalelescence of a butterfly wing. And in exactly the same way.

So those are not pigments. Light doesn't hit it and is absorbed

and reflected off at a particular pigment,

but actually there are little platelets in a butterfly's wing

which basically selectively reflect different wavelengths

and interfere with each other.

And therefore you get this slightly changing angle and iridescence.

In this fabric, they're done with little polystyrene balls,

so the distance between them is the colour you see.

-So you can change that distance by stretching it.

-Oh, yeah.

-This is very good.

-This is one over on the butterfly.

This is green, right. We're green. And then blue.

How great is that?

I mean, somebody said the best use for that is if you're getting fat.

LAUGHTER

As you get fatter, the colours you wear change and...

Looking a bit blue today, John.

That kind of way, OK.

-So it's an opalescent material.

-Yeah.

-A wearable opalescence.

But I think that the interesting thing about this is

just that the microstructural control

now that's coming into fabrics and textiles,

these things called technical textiles.

All electronics are being filtered into there,

so you're going to see a much more responsive

interesting smart-wearing materials.

React to light or sound or...?

Yeah, so there's things called electroluminescent materials

and these are essentially pigments that

when you run an electric current through them, they give off light.

-Oh, hello.

-There it is.

-Wow, that's amazing.

-This is zinc sulphide.

That is just incredibly... That is just a strip of laminated card.

It's really flat.

And it's bendy and... You can't see where the light's produced.

It's a very even light.

So this is not really a fabric yet, but it's getting there.

So the idea of the clothes that can light up, well,

this seems one of the good candidates for that.

And in fact there's a British designer, Amy Winters,

who's here tonight and she's lent us one of her dresses,

which features these materials in her dresses.

-This is Izzy who is going to model.

-Izzy, how are you?

What are we combining with from Izzy here?

I'll just plug you in.

The one downside of this stuff is that it needs quite a high voltage.

It's not a high current but a high voltage.

Although you can have your battery packs,

they wear out quite quickly. Now, here we go.

Actually, this dress also reacts to music

and does different things depending on the different volumes.

So is that reacting to your voice at the moment?

It seems to be, actually. I was a bit surprised by that.

OK, well, that seems a bit unformed.

Let's bring some music in. Play some music, please.

DRUMMING

So you get these different panels lighting up

depending on the volume level.

That's quite good, that's quite good.

The other thing I like about this a lot is that you're at a party,

you don't want people to invade your personal space.

This does that for you. Keep away. But also, you know...

Essentially, you put on a light and floor show

and you put on a huge demonstration, but...

It says, "Come to me, but not too close."

You impale them on the giant spikes of the dress.

You're bringing them in, you're pushing them out.

Thank you, Izzy.

Look forward to whatever party you have to carry around

your own battery pack to attend. It's going to be very, very good.

I'm not sure how practical that is,

but it'll make great viewing in 50 years' time.

Our childhoods were full of exciting information of what the future

would look like and we were always assured that we'd be sharing

that future with robots. That, of course, has never happened.

But has their time finally come.

Alok has been to not one

but two universities in Philadelphia in search of our future robots.

And he's finding new generations of machines - ones that can cope

with the mess and the unpredictability of the real world.

Could the future be robots like Graspy?

Oh, he is a happy robot.

He's the brain child of robot enthusiast

Professor Katherine Kuchenbecker.

Hi, Graspy. How are you doing today?

-It's a him, by the way, is it?

-Well, yeah, Graspy is a him.

-GRASPY:

-What is your name?

-My name's Alok.

-It's a pleasure to meet you, Alok.

You've got a wonderful accent.

Let's begin.

He can talk, he can see.

But above all, Graspy has sensors that give him

touch which make him much more useful than your average robot.

All right, Graspy. Pick the cup up without using your touch sensors.

-Oh!

-Well, there we go, look.

'Turn the sensors back on and it's a whole different story.'

All right.

Maybe give it to Alok.

Thank you very much.

-Now. Thanks, Graspy.

-That was perfect.

-Very good.

'It might not look like much

'but Graspy's sensitivity to subtle objects is a giant leap forward.'

When it first touches the object,

it's able to figure out how hard to squeeze...and then it comes over here

and when the cup hits the table, it recognises that and lets it go.

I mean it's impressive.

-Yes, well, it does what you would expect it to do.

-Yeah, that's right.

That's what robots in movies do, they don't crush things. Why would they?

Why indeed? But I'm told he's got an even more impressive trick.

One that makes him alarmingly human.

He can extract touchy-feely information in exactly

the same way that we do.

Hmmm, what does that feel like?

-GRASPY:

-Squishy, compressible and soft.

-BOTH:

-Squishy, compressible...

-and soft.

Wow, it's not often you get a robot's view of our world.

Catherine gave Graspy a variety of surfaces to feel and then

taught him the wide range of words that we use to describe them.

-GRASPY:

-Soft, squishy, hairy, scratchy and unpleasant.

-Soft, squishy, hairy, scratchy...

-Scratchy, unpleasant.

-Unpleasant.

Oh, Graspy, you didn't like it?

And then he learned the connections,

to deduce the meaning of these adjectives.

So you taught Graspy these words...

-Yes.

-..and then he learnt what those mean in terms of sensation?

-Yeah.

Catherine's elegant software and Graspy's uniquely sensitive

fingers have given him an amazing sense of touch.

It's an essential attribute but that alone isn't

going to deliver our humanoid robot of the future.

We want more from our robots

and a growing number of researchers are working on it.

The scientists at Drexel University have set themselves

an even more difficult challenge.

They're designing a robot that can think like us.

This is Hubo.

No-one has directly programmed him

and no-one is remotely controlling him.

He's learning to think for himself.

He's in training for the DARPA Challenge.

The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA,

has challenged technologists to build a robot that can

operate independently

somewhere we can't go, like a nuclear disaster zone,

and the prize is 2,000,000.

This is what they'd love Hubo to look like with his best suit on.

He's a strong contender to win, but in reality,

he's still very much a work in progress.

In some ways, being able to walk or use tools is something

you would've expected robots to do quite a long time ago

but all these actions, all these movements that we make,

they're incredibly hard for robots to replicate.

We take them completely for granted.

Let's take a really simple action, for example.

Shall we try a high five, Hubo?

Let's give it a go.

Ah, not bad.

You could probably do with straightening your hand slightly,

a bit more force. It's not too bad.

Hubo can mimic my hand action

but what about the supreme balancing act that we perform every day?

Walking on two feet - a nightmare for a robot.

But our world is built for us.

If Hubo's going to be any use in a human crisis,

he'll have to walk like us.

And there we go. Now, that's a normal walk, but it's...whoa!

Falling over, a lot, is exactly how we learn to walk.

But, for Hubo, there's added stress.

He has to learn to cope with the debris of a nuclear explosion.

They're trying to pack years of human learning into a robot

that was "born" just weeks ago.

Yet, spurred on by the DARPA Challenge, they are making progress.

Hubo must also learn how to drive a vehicle in a disaster zone.

Just getting into one is proving difficult enough.

It's not like this thing's got a brain like Einstein,

it's not even Dara O'Briain, let's be honest, but the thing is

it's doing all these things that we unconsciously do.

In fact, most of what we do every day is second nature to us,

it's in our subconscious.

If robots like Hubo are going to be part of our future,

they'll have to understand that.

It's a really important part of thinking like a human being.

The team have until the end of 2014

to perfect Hubo for the DARPA Robotic Challenge.

If they win, we may be a step closer to having a functioning,

and possibly even useful, fully-autonomous robot.

It's very exciting, it's very exciting to see this robot struggle

with an environment and learn, which is the most striking thing.

Well, exactly. Deconstructing the things that we take

completely for granted is actually very, very hard to do

and the best way they've found is to let it make mistakes.

Fall over, try things out and the world is built for us,

two arms, two legs, and it has to sort of replace that functionality.

This ability to check different textures,

I mean, this would be particularly useful

if we were going to send them off into space to do mining or

exploration, the ability to basically touch different surfaces.

Exactly. Touch is so essential to how we get feedback.

That's the weakness of robotics today.

Robotics is a massive investment in the future?

Japan makes 30% of all robots, and remember in the Shinto religion,

people believe that there are spirits even in robots.

That's why children love robots in Japan.

There are plays in Japan where robots actually play

a certain person in the play and robots greet you at grocery stores,

inside convenience stores, because of this Shinto tradition

that you believe there are spirits everywhere.

OK, now I'm going to introduce you to a robot here.

This is a little fellow called NAO.

NAO lives in a school in Birmingham where

he works with some autistic children there.

Now, let's see if I've got these controls right.

Don't keep moving your head, all right?

Launch a task.

-NAO:

-Which task do you want to launch?

Presentation.

Presentation.

Hello, my name is NAO.

I'm a humanoid robot, imagined and manufactured by Aldebaran Robotics.

I come with software and I'm fully programmable.

I'm autonomous and I can connect to the internet through Wi-Fi.

LAUGHTER

I can recognise your face, answer your questions,

play music, grab objects and even play soccer like a pro.

LAUGHTER

-Do you want more technical details?

-No.

There we go. You can sit down again, NAO.

Oh, how sweet is that? That's gorgeous. That's NAO.

APPLAUSE

So, in a school outside Birmingham, there are 15 autistic students

and they work with NAO all the time.

I mean, we can see robots being useful in that

-kind of therapeutic environment as well?

-Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, what's amazing is how quickly

and automatically we attribute a mind and emotions to...

It's an object.

As far as I know, it doesn't actually feel pain or anything

but it's just amazing how automatically we have these

feelings about something that behaves even remotely like a human.

One of the things that advanced Graspy and Hubo was the DARPA prize.

-Yeah.

-It's in the grand tradition.

There's a long tradition of prizes,

going back to the Longitude rewards back in the 18th century.

The last big DARPA project was called ARPANET,

a way to hook up computers together back in the '60s.

ARPANET was declassified in 1989. Now, it's called the internet.

That didn't go anywhere.

So the internet is a direct by-product of a DARPA project.

The GPS system is another DARPA project.

So it's a useful thing.

I mean, it seems unusual to dangle this prize, dangle this carrot

in front of science, you know, to change the direction of it perhaps.

Look at DNA sequencing,

James Watson publicly stated that he wanted to win the Nobel Prize

and that's why he decided to work on DNA

and that changed world history and so these prizes mean something.

The Nobel Prize does inspire the next generation of scientists to

bust open barriers and change world history.

It's partly, I think,

because whatever scientists

and engineers say about their...you know,

wanting to help the human race, they are ego-driven people, right?

-And they want to win.

-Speak for yourself.

Can I show you something which I think is a fine, fine invention.

It's a pair of gloves.

Looks like a perfectly normal pair of gloves but there is

a receiver built into it along with a couple of other things.

These are actually sold now as a kind of Bluetooth accessory.

I've got something coming through here. Let me just... Hello?

I'm very, very well, I know. The awkward thing is...

Hang on, let me just put you through a microphone

and you can say hello again.

-GLOVE:

-Hi, how are you?

Dara, a few years ago,

surely someone would have carted you away by now.

There's people in white coats over there.

-Genuinely, I am actually on a call.

-How's the show?

It's been going very well so far. Turns out Alok has half a brain.

They are great, I think that's fantastic. Hang on, and off.

It's brilliant, it's a really good thing.

I've got to say, more than the glove-phone,

I'm looking forward to the watch-phone.

Really, I've held back investing in smartphones

until the watch-phone comes along, that's what I want.

-Really?

-Oh, God, come on.

Can I give one last view of the future which is how we will

all look in the future?

There is an app which I highly recommend you all download,

it's called the Oldify app.

Alok has been running around with it for the day.

What have you discovered, Alok?

Well, I wouldn't say it's scientific...

-No.

-..but not everything has to be, OK, as much as we love science.

You take a picture of someone and then, well, you can

see what they look like in many years,

hence it makes them yawn and stuff.

I think we actually... We start off with me. There's me.

There's what I'll look like, I suppose, in 30 or 40 years' time.

You've held on to your hair which is pretty impressive.

-It doesn't do anything to the hair.

-Oh, dear.

Mark's nose gets twice as big for some reason in the future,

I'm not sure really why.

-MARK:

-I think noses do keep growing, don't they?

-They do, yeah.

Is there any of me?

-Here we go.

-I think, Dara, you're next, yeah.

-There you are.

-What?!

-LAUGHTER

What the hell? Why do I have...? Am I in a Thriller video? What is this?

-I mean, you look remarkably baby-faced in that one...

-I know!

-There's nothing in there.

-I've got liver spots.

I think it's the expression on there, really,

-it's more like "Get away!"

-Here, it's a smile, here, it's "You kids!

"You kids in my garden!"

Hideous, awful, oh, my God.

That, unfortunately, is essentially what we have to leave you with

but more than anything as we gaze into the future,

I'd like to thank my guests, Dr Michio Kaku, Dr Molly Crockett

and our team, Helen, Alok and Mark.

From all of us, those of us with full brains, those of us

who resemble...who can almost possibly have what resembles

a normal life even though we have half a brain, for those of us

who look hideous when we're old, that is all from Science Club.

Good luck in your own future. I'm Dara O'Briain, good night.

Next time -

we explore why size matters,

how big data is saving tiny lives

and Mark will be swallowing a miniature camera.

Even your mouth is weird!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd