Immortality.
In movies, kings are always searching for the secret to immortality.
But is immortality really a good thing?
To a ten-year-old boy, one year is the same as 10% of his life.
To his forty-year-old mother, one year is merely 2.5% of her life.
The same year, 365 days, can feel differently to different people.
If we live until we're 82, that's about 30,000 days.
If this boy lives for 30,000 years, a year to him could feel like a day.
And if this boy's emotions sustain through the potential boredom of living for millions of years, he might become extremely lonely and sad, knowing he has and always will outlive everyone he has ever loved.
But what if everyone were immortal?
Well, first off, Earth is only so big.
So, where would we all live?
(Grunts) "Excuse me!"
"That's my face!"
"Stop it!"
"Pardon me."
"Tight in here!"
Do you remember what you did last year or when you were five?
How much of your past have you forgotten?
If you have trouble remembering what you did when you were five, how will you remember what happened if you were alive a thousand years ago?
A million years ago?
We don't remember every single detail of our past because our brains have a limited capacity and we replace useless memories, like middle school locker combinations, with relevant information.
If this immortal boy finds a companion to fall in love with once every hundred years, he would have ten thousand girlfriends in a million years.
And how many of those ten thousand girls' names will he be able to remember?
This changes what a meaningful relationship means, doesn't it?
Another tricky thing about immortality: Human beings have not always looked the same.
This can be explained by Darwin's theory of evolution.
For instance, if women find taller men more attractive, then more tall men would mate and have children, putting more tall genes in the gene pool.
That means, in the next generation, more children will have the genes to be taller.
Repeat that process for a million years and the average height will be a lot taller than the average height today, assuming there's no natural disaster that wipes out all the tall people.
Our ancestors were short, hairy apes.
We still have body hair, but we don't look like apes any more.
If you're the only person who is immortal, while everyone else keeps evolving, generation after generation, you will eventually look quite different than the people who surround you.
"Hi, how you doing?"
If one of our ancestors, apes, is still alive today, how many people will make friends with it instead of calling the Museum of Natural History?
And one more physical consideration for immortality: Scars.
After all, immortality doesn't automatically translate to invincibility, it just means you cannot die.
But it doesn't guarantee what condition you'll be alive in.
Look at your body and count how many scars you have.
If you have made this many permanent scars within your life, imagine how much damage you would have if you were one thousand years old!
Now, there are approximately 185,000 amputation-related hospital discharges every year in the U.S.
These injuries are due to accidents or illnesses.
Certainly the percentage is low comparing to the total population if you only live for a hundred years.
However, if you've been alive for over one million years, the odds of still having all your limbs are pretty slim.
What about little accessories, like your eyes, your nose, your ears, fingers or toes?
What about your teeth?
What are the odds of you keeping your dental health for a hundred years?
A thousand years?
One million years?
You might end up looking like a horribly scuffed-up Mr. Potato Head with missing pieces and dentures.
So, are you sure you want to live forever?
Now, which superpower physics lesson will you explore next?
Shifting body size and content, super speed, flight, super strength, immortality, and -- invisibility.
"Listen.
Do you hear that?"
my grandmother asked me.
"Listen.
Listen to what the beetle is saying."
I would spend hours and hours listening to the little beetle rolling a huge ball of dung, and while at it, I heard a variety of environmental sounds.
With the keenest of ears, I would hear family chatter, laughter, the wind howling and even crickets chirping.
All these sounds crisscrossed into each other, and I would hear rhythm in between.
Then I would beat my plate with a spoon and my chest with my tiny hands trying to recreate what I was hearing.
I have been beating the same plates, shakers, drums, pans and so much more ever since to become a professional drummer and percussionist.
(Applause) As I grew up, subconsciously, I felt a strong urge to hide my newfound hobby.
Even without it being said out loud, I knew that somehow it was wrong to do what I was doing.
In most of the ceremonies, I noticed that most of the women and girls were not in sight, but when they were, I noticed that they would wear their dancing skirts and shake their waists off, singing, clapping, ululating, while the men filled up the rhythm section.
A few years later, I came to understand what tradition and culture meant, and what was considered taboo or otherwise.
In the majority of African cultures, women have been forbidden to play drums and percussion for a very long time.
I believe this taboo stems from the psychological and traditional belief that the woman is an inferior being.
I grew up hearing that the place of the woman is in the kitchen or in the other room.
Mhm?
(Laughter) Women had been brainwashed and led on for so long until we had fallen victim and actually started believing in this ourselves.
This, coupled with the lack of interest to educate women, played a major, major role in etching this into our minds.
The sounds of the drum provoke emotion and movement.
Essentially, the drum is a very sensual instrument.
Once at a festival, a man asked me how I dared put a drum in between my legs.
I have been considered loose and dirty for playing an instrument.
I have repeatedly been questioned why I would choose to play drums instead of practicing journalism, which I studied for my undergraduate, which has been termed "more decent."
The sight of a woman playing drums enfeebles her, makes her less feminine, less desirable, but all this optimally puts her on a lower social stand.
Drumming has essentially represented the strong African heritage, and its importance can be seen in the many aspects of the African tradition.
Many communities encompass drumming in their day-to-day activities, and still do up to date, from childbirths to initiation ceremonies, welcoming ceremonies, marriages and even burials.
However, this same drum is disappearing very fast from the music scene, and the traditional genre is losing its popularity very quickly amongst the people.
Inspired by the need to preserve this culture, I am teaching the significance and the importance of the drum to young boys, women and girls.
In my journey as a percussion teacher, I have realized that very many women actually want to play the drum, but at the same time, they fear it.
Some fear how society will perceive them.
Others fear the physical pain that comes with playing.
Oh yes, it's not that easy.
Some, because their spouses don't approve of them, and others generally fear the responsibility of being a bearer of culture.
I believe, or I think that all these fears are etched in the collective feminine cautiousness because when we learn of the atrocities that have happened to women, continentally especially, it serves as a constant reminder that one step out of our designated place may end up in very serious consequences.
Well, I use my drum to tell my story and my people's stories.
My roots shaped me and my culture is here to stay with me.
Women can be custodians of culture, too.
We are born to bring forth life, to nurture it.
We can definitely preserve our traditions very, very excellently.
My drum and I, we are here to stay.
(Applause) We are definitely here to stay.
If women have led countries, women have gone to space, women have won Grammys, then the same, same women can play the drum and play it -- to a five-star rating?
No, to a million-star rating.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Chiming) (Metallic drumming) (Chiming) (Rattling) (Drumming) (Applause)
There's a great big elephant in the room called the economy.
So let's start talking about that.
I wanted to give you a current picture of the economy.
That's what I have behind myself.
(Laughter) But of course what we have to remember is this.
And what you have to think about is, when you're dancing in the flames, what's next?
So what I'm going to try to do in the next 17 and a half minutes is I'm going to talk first about the flames -- where we are in the economy -- and then I'm going to take three trends that have taken place at TED over the last 25 years and that will take place in this conference and I will try and bring them together.
And I will try and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like.
Those three trends are the ability to engineer cells, the ability to engineer tissues, and robots.
And somehow it will all make sense.
But anyway, let's start with the economy.
There's a couple of really big problems that are still sitting there.
One is leverage.
And the problem with leverage is it makes the U.S. financial system look like this.
(Laughter) So, a normal commercial bank has nine to 10 times leverage.
That means for every dollar you deposit, it loans out about nine or 10.
A normal investment bank is not a deposit bank, it's an investment bank; it has 15 to 20 times.
It turns out that B of A in September had 32 times.
And your friendly Citibank had 47 times.
Oops.
That means every bad loan goes bad 47 times over.
And that, of course, is the reason why all of you are making such generous and wonderful donations to these nice folks.
And as you think about that, you've got to wonder: so what do banks have in store for you now?
(Laughter) It ain't pretty.
The government, meanwhile, has been acting like Santa Claus.
We all love Santa Claus, right?
But the problem with Santa Clause is, if you look at the mandatory spending of what these folks have been doing and promising folks, it turned out that in 1967, 38 percent was mandatory spending on what we call "entitlements."
And then by 2007 it was 68 percent.
And we weren't supposed to run into 100 percent until about 2030.
Except we've been so busy giving away a trillion here, a trillion there, that we've brought that date of reckoning forward to about 2017.
And we thought we were going to be able to lay these debts off on our kids, but, guess what?
We're going to start to pay them.
And the problem with this stuff is, now that the bill's come due, it turns out Santa isn't quite as cute when it's summertime.
Right?
(Laughter) Here's some advice from one of the largest investors in the United States.
This guy runs the China Investment Corporation.
He is the main buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds.
And he gave an interview in December.
Here's his first bit of advice.
And here's his second bit of advice.
And, by the way, the Chinese Prime Minister reiterated this at Davos last Sunday.
This stuff is getting serious enough that if we don't start paying attention to the deficit, we're going to end up losing the dollar.
And then all bets are off.
Let me show you what it looks like.
I think I can safely say that I'm the only trillionaire in this room.
This is an actual bill.
And it's 10 triliion dollars.
The only problem with this bill is it's not really worth very much.
That was eight bucks last week, four bucks this week, a buck next week.
And that's what happens to currencies when you don't stand behind them.
So the next time somebody as cute as this shows up on your doorstep, and sometimes this creature's called Chrysler and sometimes Ford and sometimes ... whatever you want -- you've just got to say no.
And you've got to start banishing a word that's called "entitlement."
And the reason we have to do that in the short term is because we have just run out of cash.
If you look at the federal budget, this is what it looks like.
The orange slice is what's discretionary.
Everything else is mandated.
It makes no difference if we cut out the bridges to Alaska in the overall scheme of things.
So what we have to start thinking about doing is capping our medical spending because that's a monster that's simply going to eat the entire budget.
We've got to start thinking about asking people to retire a little bit later.
If you're 60 to 65 you retire on time.
Your 401(k) just got nailed.
If you're 50 to 60 we want you to work two years more.
If you're under 50 we want you to work four more years.
The reason why that's reasonable is, when your grandparents were given Social Security, they got it at 65 and were expected to check mmeyers@example.net.
Sixty-eight is young today.
We've also got to cut the military about three percent a year.
We've got to limit other mandatory spending.
We've got to quit borrowing as much, because otherwise the interest is going to eat that whole pie.
And we've got to end up with a smaller government.
And if we don't start changing this trend line, we are going to lose the dollar and start to look like Iceland.
I got what you're thinking.
This is going to happen when hell freezes over.
But let me remind you this December it did snow in Vegas.
(Laughter) Here's what happens if you don't address this stuff.
So, Japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late '80s.
And its 225 largest companies today are worth one quarter of what they were 18 years ago.
We don't fix this now, how would you like to see a Dow 3,500 in 2026?
Because that's the consequence of not dealing with this stuff.
And unless you want this person to not just become the CFO of Florida, but the United States, we'd better deal with this stuff.
That's the short term.
That's the flame part.
That's the financial crisis.
Now, right behind the financial crisis there's a second and bigger wave that we need to talk about.
That wave is much larger, much more powerful, and that's of course the wave of technology.
And what's really important in this stuff is, as we cut, we also have to grow.
Among other things, because startup companies are .02 percent of U.S. GDP investmentm and they're about 17.8 percent of output.
It's groups like that in this room that generate the future of the U.S. economy.
And that's what we've got to keep growing.
We don't have to keep growing these bridges to nowhere.
So let's bring a romance novelist into this conversation.
And that's where these three trends come together.
That's where the ability to engineer microbes, the ability to engineer tissues, and the ability to engineer robots begin to lead to a reboot.
And let me recap some of the stuff you've seen.
Craig Venter showed up last year and showed you the first fully programmable cell that acts like hardware where you can insert DNA and have it boot up as a different species.
In parallel, the folks at MIT have been building a standard registry of biological parts.
So think of it as a Radio Shack for biology.
You can go out and get your proteins, your RNA, your DNA, whatever.
And start building stuff.
In 2006 they brought together high school students and college students and started to build these little odd creatures.
They just happened to be alive instead of circuit boards.
Here was one of the first things they built.
So, cells have this cycle.
First they don't grow.
Then they grow exponentially.
Then they stop growing.
Graduate students wanted a way of telling which stage they were in.
So they engineered these cells so that when they're growing in the exponential phase, they would smell like wintergreen.
And when they stopped growing they would smell like bananas.
And you could tell very easily when your experiment was working and wasn't, and where it was in the phase.
This got a bit more complicated two years later.
Twenty-one countries came together.
Dozens of teams.
They started competing.
The team from Rice University started to engineer the substance in red wine that makes red wine good for you into beer.
So you take resveratrol and you put it into beer.
Of course, one of the judges is wandering by, and he goes, "Wow!
Cancer-fighting beer!
There is a God."
(Laughter) The team from Taiwan was a little bit more ambitious.
They tried to engineer bacterias in such a way that they would act as your kidneys.
Four years ago, I showed you this picture.
And people oohed and ahhed, because Cliff Tabin had been able to grow an extra wing on a chicken.
And that was very cool stuff back then.
But now moving from bacterial engineering to tissue engineering, let me show you what's happened in that period of time.
Two years ago, you saw this creature.
An almost-extinct animal from Xochimilco, Mexico called an axolotl that can re-generate its limbs.
You can freeze half its heart.
It regrows.
You can freeze half the brain.
It regrows.
It's almost like leaving Congress.
(Laughter) But now, you don't have to have the animal itself to regenerate, because you can build cloned mice molars in Petri dishes.
And, of course if you can build mice molars in Petri dishes, you can grow human molars in Petri dishes.
This should not surprise you, right?
I mean, you're born with no teeth.
You give away all your teeth to the tooth fairy.
You re-grow a set of teeth.
But then if you lose one of those second set of teeth, they don't regrow, unless, if you're a lawyer.
(Laughter) But, of course, for most of us, we know how to grow teeth, and therefore we can take adult stem teeth, put them on a biodegradable mold, re-grow a tooth, and simply implant it.
And we can do it with other things.
So, a Spanish woman who was dying of T.B. had a donor trachea, they took all the cells off the trachea, they spraypainted her stem cells onto that cartilage.
She regrew her own trachea, and 72 hours later it was implanted.
She's now running around with her kids.
This is going on in Tony Atala's lab in Wake Forest where he is re-growing ears for injured soldiers, and he's also re-growing bladders.
So there are now nine women walking around Boston with re-grown bladders, which is much more pleasant than walking around with a whole bunch of plastic bags for the rest of your life.
This is kind of getting boring, right?
I mean, you understand where this story's going.
But, I mean it gets more interesting.
Last year, this group was able to take all the cells off a heart, leaving just the cartilage.
Then, they sprayed stem cells onto that heart, from a mouse.
Those stem cells self-organized, and that heart started to beat.
Life happens.
This may be one of the ultimate papers.
This was done in Japan and in the U.S., published at the same time, and it rebooted skin cells into stem cells, last year.
That meant that you can take the stuff right here, and turn it into almost anything in your body.
And this is becoming common, it's moving very quickly, it's moving in a whole series of places.
Third trend: robots.
Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" in our house.
And all we've got is a Roomba.
(Laughter) We also thought we'd have this robot to warn us of danger.
Didn't happen.
And these were robots engineered for a flat world, right?
So, Rosie runs around on skates and the other one ran on flat threads.
If you don't have a flat world, that's not good, which is why the robot's we're designing today are a little different.
This is Boston Dynamics' "BigDog."
And this is about as close as you can get to a physical Turing test.
O.K., so let me remind you, a Turing test is where you've got a wall, you're talking to somebody on the other side of the wall, and when you don't know if that thing is human or animal -- that's when computers have reached human intelligence.
This is not an intelligence Turing rest, but this is as close as you can get to a physical Turing test.
And this stuff is moving very quickly, and by the way, that thing can carry about 350 pounds of weight.
These are not the only interesting robots.
You've also got flies, the size of flies, that are being made by Robert mmeyers@example.net.
You've got Stickybots that are being mmeyers@example.net.
And as you bring these things together, as you bring cells, biological tissue engineering and mechanics together, you begin to get some really odd questions.
In the last Olympics, this gentleman, who had several world records in the Special Olympics, tried to run in the normal Olympics.
The only issue with Oscar Pistorius is he was born without bones in the lower part of his legs.
He came within about a second of qualifying.
He sued to be allowed to run, and he won the suit, but didn't qualify by time.
Next Olympics, you can bet that Oscar, or one of Oscar's successors, is going to make the time.
And two or three Olympics after that, they are going to be unbeatable.
And as you bring these trends together, and as you think of what it means to take people who are profoundly deaf, who can now begin to hear -- I mean, remember the evolution of hearing aids, right?
I mean, your grandparents had these great big cones, and then your parents had these odd boxes that would squawk at odd times during dinner, and now we have these little buds that nobody sees.
And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear.
Now, they can't hear as well as you and I can.
But, in 10 or 15 machine generations they will, and these are machine generations, not human generations.
And about two or three years after they can hear as well as you and I can, they'll be able to hear maybe how bats sing, or how whales talk, or how dogs talk, and other types of tonal scales.
They'll be able to focus their hearing, they'll be able to increase the sensitivity, decrease the sensitivity, do a series of things that we can't do.
And the same thing is happening in eyes.
This is a group in Germany that's beginning to engineer eyes so that people who are blind can begin to see light and dark.
Very primitive.
And then they'll be able to see shape.
And then they'll be able to see color, and then they'll be able to see in definition, and one day, they'll see as well as you and I can.
And a couple of years after that, they'll be able to see in ultraviolet, they'll be able to see in infrared, they'll be able to focus their eyes, they'll be able to come into a microfocus.
They'll do stuff you and I can't do.
All of these things are coming together, and it's a particularly important thing to understand, as we worry about the flames of the present, to keep an eye on the future.
And, of course, the future is looking back 200 years, because next week is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
And it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species."
And Darwin, of course, argued that evolution is a natural state.
It is a natural state in everything that is alive, including hominids.
There have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around, have evolved, have wandered in different places, have gone extinct.
It is common for hominids to evolve.
And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap.
The common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids, not one.
And as you think of the implications of that, here's a brief history of the universe.
The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and then you created all the stars, and all the planets, and all the galaxies, and all the Milky Ways.
And then you created Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and then you got life about four billion years ago, and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago, and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago.
Ta-dah!
Maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe, and all the galaxies, and all the planets, and all the energy, and all the dark energy, and all the rest of stuff is to create what's in this room.
Maybe not.
That would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint.
(Laughter) So, if that's not the purpose of the universe, then what's next?
(Laughter) I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a different species of hominid.
I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis.
And I think this isn't 1,000 years out.
I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it.
And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.
And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)