Ariel Ekblaw

On tapahtunut, että mikrogravityössä proteiinikristalleja kasvaa eri tavalla, tiettyjä tyyliä kasvaa nopeammin tai kasvaa paremmin, ja voimme edes tehdä uusia sääntöjärjestelmiä tavalla, jota emme voi tehdä maailman gravityön tilanteissa. Tiedämme, että tärkeät biologiset sammut ovat erilaisia maailmassa, erityisesti kun ne sopivat.

So whether it's exceptional quality organoids for testing Alzheimer's drugs or cancer drugs, or artificial retinas that would cure macular degeneration, these therapies would be made in space, stabilized and brought back down to Earth.

A little bit further out, between Earth and the sun, we're working to see if we can help start-up energy companies self-assemble thousands of solar panels in orbit, above the atmosphere. Now, what this would allow us to do is capture raw, unfiltered sunlight and beam it anywhere on Earth, even at night.

This is like a flashlight from space, and it would fundamentally solve the storage problem for solar power, allowing us to deliver abundant green energy to the surface of the Earth. Thank you. These are some of the most responsible ways that we could use space technology in service of Earth.

My team and I have been working on an idea passionately, known for decades in science fiction as off-roading. Not off-roading the humans, but off-roading the heavy industry. We could let Earth recover as a garden planet for generations to come and use space infrastructure to do that off-roading.

This future is a lot closer than you may think. While space travel definitely feels rarefied, and in many ways it certainly still is, I bring dozens of people with me every year into microgravity on parabolic flights. This is how NASA trains astronauts, affectionately known as the vomit comet. It's more fun than it sounds. And this is how we are training the new space generation.

We're building architecture to welcome more people to orbit, whether it's for a long weekend to see the planet from space for the first time, or maybe for a career scientist to commute for a decade to work on a major breakthrough. Rockets like Starship enable us to dream really big, to be able to get enough mass of tesserae tiles and enough people into orbit to be able to fundamentally scale up space infrastructure for the public good.

We know that the business case for space is here. Governments are investing in space-based solar power. Companies are investing in zero-G biotech. And in the next 10 years, we believe that we will be able to deploy our first modularly self-assembling space habitat and contribute to a trillion dollar space economy.

One of the best things we could do with this infrastructure is harness it for the profound benefit of life on Earth. Because fundamentally, space exploration isn't about escaping Earth. In 1968, Bill Anders took this iconic photograph, now lovingly referred to as Earthrise, and he famously remarked, we came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is we discovered the Earth.

Bill's comment reminds us that space exploration is about building an aspirational future for humanity wherever we are, on Earth, in orbit around Earth or beyond.

Access to space is cheap enough now and available enough, we need to update our conception of the possible. If we invest now in space infrastructure, if we invest now in space architecture, new paradigms for how we can build infrastructure in space, we can profoundly expand humanity's horizons while still protecting the heritage of our priceless planet. We don't have to pick one or the other.

Someday we will live on Mars. Someday we will travel outside of the confines of our solar system. But until then, let's put space to work for Earth. Thank you. That was Ariel Ekblad speaking at TED 2025.