Ariel Ekblaw

There's a lot that we can learn from space agriculture and then be able to take some of those lessons down to Earth.

We just did a big space garden project with Daikin, one of the world's largest HVAC companies, thinking about how do you

Keep air humidified.

How do you keep it at the right temperature in an extreme environment?

How do you get CO2 out of the air and turn it into oxygen for humans or the opposite for plants, right?

Plants need CO2.

So we're working with some exceptional partners to put together this notion of a

space garden?

How would we actually do plant growth in orbit?

And then brought this to the Venice Architecture Biennale earlier this year.

Yes, I think there's a mix.

It's going to be humans and robots working together.

So we call this human-robotic interaction or the symbiosis between humans and robots.

In the future, we're already thinking about things like AI data centers in space, partly to get the carbon footprint of those installations off of Earth, but also to get really abundant green energy from

to those installations.

And so a company that we spun out of our work at Aurelia called Rendezvous Robotics is taking the test array work forward to be able to do things at that scale without humans involved.

But on the habitation side, yes, I think we will have humans.

I think we're a critical part of exploration, what it means to find new knowledge for the sake of new knowledge and explore this frontier.

So I think it'll continue to be a mix of humans and robots.

I anticipate that the workers are less likely than people think from science fiction to actually live in space, steady state.