Ariel Ekblaw

Instead of building space habitats to go away from Earth, let's build up more infrastructure in low-Earth orbit to serve Earth, to help Earth.

The first is that we know that things like proteins, the building blocks of life, they fold differently when they're floating.

And when you're in space, you're in free fall, so you have this sensation of floating.

And if the proteins fold differently, that means that there's all kinds of different drugs and therapies and cures that can only be made in space.

You can stabilize them, and then you can bring them down.

So a great example is artificial retinas.

There's a really cool company called LambdaVision that has figured out how to make an artificial retina in orbit.

Wow.

You can't do it on Earth because it starts to sag.

Gravity basically pulls the really delicate little tissue down.

But you can do it in micro-G.

You can stabilize it, and then you would be able to cure macular degeneration once these retinas are inserted into the back of the eye.

So it's like a simple surgical procedure.

Amazing, amazing gift from space.

That's wild.

That's the first one.

And then totally different, outside of the healthcare field, there's this huge potential to get energy from the sun.

Right now, the sun's energy has to filter through our atmosphere.

So it has to go through the clouds.

So solar panels, particularly in like a rainy Vancouver, are not going to get as much energy.