This astonishing video takes environmental innovation to its outer limits: you’ll need to be pretty imaginative to find a way to invest in the ideas it explores
The eye-opening Stanford University talk by NASA titan Chris McKay, is called ‘Biologically Reversible Exploration’
Just in case you thought that everything Chris says in the talk is beyond contradiction, I found a link to a relevant article in Science Magazine called: ‘Reversible Exploration Not Worth the Cost’ by Samuel C Schon, a graduate student at the Planetary Geoscience Group at Brown University.
I found an impressive interactive slideshow of the talk on something called TalkMiner. You can click on any slide and it will play the video from that point.
TalkMiner takes videos of presentations, finds the moments in the talk when the slide is on the screen and creates an interactive clickable gallery of slides. Now all we’d like is for them to provide an OCRed version of the text in the slide, so that we can quote from it more easily!
The slideshow seems to have a different (or perhaps additional) title to the talk. It was called ‘Astrobiology and society, the long view’ and was dated February 24th 2010.
McKay is a Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames. He received his Ph.D. in AstroGeophysics from the University of Colorado in 1982 He has been a research scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center since that time.
His current research focuses on the evolution of the Solar System and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human settlements.
McKay been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, travelling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. His is a co-investigator on the Titan Huygens probe in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission for 2007, and the Mars Science Lander mission for 2009. He is currently the Program Scientist for the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program.
