Caleb Harper: My talk is about how to solve
the global food crisis
Technology and seed is for an adverse world.
What if you had perfect world?
Researching this for me
took me to a place of learning about Mir Space Station.
You know, the most space constrained environment
the least amount of resources.
You know it costs them a lot of money
to ship water into space.
So, they created something on Mir called Aeroponics.
That was inspirational to me
where they create a fog in a box.
And that fog is between five and fifty microns dense
and all of those microns of water contain also
all the nutrients and the oxygen the plants need.
The thing that inspired me is they reported
that they use 98 percent less water.
And that they grew anywhere like
a theoretical possibility of
twenty times faster plant production.
So, one square foot of soil
three heads of broccoli in a year.
That’s if you have the water, if you don’t have pests
if you have the fertilizer
if you… if, right? The farmer “if”.
Whereas in Aeroponics we’re producing 18.
What if, I just took one square foot of
the tallest building in Boston
just one on the whole facade
I get between three in the ground
or 3,000 in that facade.
So, we started by hacking things from
Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond
you know, atomizers, nebulizers
learning about the technology of creating mist
making plants dance
killing a lot of plants, unfortunately.
You know, we were technologists, a group of technologists
falling backwards into a very old world.
So, then we went to the first 60 square feet.
Inside of this 60 square feet
we’re experimenting with all kinds of things
But I think most importantly
we fed about 300 people in the Media Lab, once a month
and we made a lot of local food donations.
But even better than that the bright green colors
the bright white roots, the crispness
the quality of all of this food.
You know, is this a new grocery store of the future?
Is this is a new restaurant?
Is this just a pick your own lettuce patch for dorks?
( audience laughter )
This was the first time that many people in the Media Lab
had ever ripped the roots off of anything.
You know, it’s just a reality.
We get our salad in bags, and that’s
there’s nothing wrong with that, we live in the city but
you know, this created a spark of inspiration that said
“Well, maybe, you know, maybe
image based processing and machine learning
has something to do with food.”
You can log into this farm.
So, you log in, you monitor the system.
You get a history.
That history becomes a digital recipe.
These are all the broccolis in my lab by IP address.
Right. We have IP addressable broccolis.
We create all this cool stuff, now we got to email it.
Why are we shipping things?
Why are we shipping with planes, trains and automobiles?
Why can’t we email food like we email information?
So, Willy Wonka style why can’t we particalize it
and then send it over to the other side
to be reconstituted somewhere else?
If this seems crazy, we’re already doing it.
These are labs that I am sending all over the world
in different places.
So, this really becomes just a platform.
So, here’s the tools.
First personal computer for food we call it GRO-bot.
GRO-bot is a hacker platform for kids.
we’re trying to get this done super-cheap
and send it all over the world
This is what I am doing.
I am connecting school children that experiment
and want to know why does a plant grow tall
why is it short, why does it taste funny.
Why does algae grow in the water?
But then we are recording that.
And they can email that to their friend
but even more importantly, say they express a novel protein
and that novel protein is incredibly important to humanity
we never knew it existed because those climates that
the kids created playing, don’t exist on Earth.
So, if you can distribute all of this across the world
you can make breakthroughs so much faster.
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