On October 4, 1957, the world watched in awe and fear as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, into space.
This little metal ball, smaller than two feet in diameter, launched a space race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
that would last for eighteen years and change the world as we know it.
Sputnik was actually not the first piece of human technology to enter space.
That superlative goes to the V-2 rocket used by Germany in missile attacks against Allied cities as a last-ditch effort in the final years of World War II.
It wasn't very effective, but, at the end of the war, both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had captured the technology and the scientists that had developed it and began using them for their own projects.
And by August 1957, the Soviet's successfully tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7, the same rocket that would be used to launch Sputnik two months later.
So, the scary thing about Sputnik was not the orbiting ball itself, but the fact that the same technology could be used to launch a nuclear warhead at any city.
Not wanting to fall too far behind, President Eisenhower ordered the Navy to speed up its own project and launch a satellite as soon as possible.
So, on December 6, 1957, excited people across the nation tuned in to watch the live broadcast as the Vanguard TV3 satellite took off and crashed to the ground two seconds later.
The Vanguard failure was a huge embarassment for the United States.
Newspapers printed headlines like, "Flopnik" and "Kaputnik."
And a Soviet delegate at the U.N. mockingly suggested that the U.S. should receive foreign aid for developing nations.
Fortunately, the Army had been working on their own parallel project, The Explorer, which was successfully launched in January 1958, but the U.S. had barely managed to catch up before they were surpassed again as Yuri Gargarin became the first man in space in April 1961.
Almost a year passed and several more Soviet astronauts completed their missions before Project Mercury succeeded in making John Glenn the first American in orbit in February 1962.
By this time, President Kennedy had realized that simply catching up to each Soviet advance a few months later wasn't going to cut it.
The U.S. had to do something first, and in May 1961, a month after Gargarin's flight, he announced the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
They succeeded in this through the Apollo program with Neil Armstrong taking his famous step on July 20, 1969.
With both countries' next turning their attention to orbital space stations, there's no telling how much longer the space race could have gone on.
But because of improving relations negotiated by Soviet Premier Leonid Breshnev and U.S. President Nixon, the U.S.S.R. and U.S. moved toward cooperation rather than competition.
The successful joint mission, known as Apollo-Soyuz, in which an American Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz craft and the two crews met, shook hands, and exchanged gifts, marked the end of the space race in 1975.
So, in the end, what was the point of this whole space race?
Was it just a massive waste of time?
Two major superpowers trying to outdo each other by pursuing symbolic projects that were both dangerous and expensive, using resources that could have been better spent elsewhere?
Well, sure, sort of, but the biggest benefits of the space program had nothing to do with one country beating another.
During the space race, funding for research and education, in general, increased dramatically, leading to many advances that may not have otherwise been made.
Many NASA technologies developed for space are now widely used in civilian life, from memory foam in mattresses to freeze-dried food, to LEDs in cancer treatment.
And, of course, the satellites that we rely on for our GPS and mobile phone signals would not have been there without the space program.
All of which goes to show that the rewards of scientific research and advancement are often far more vast than even the people pursuing them can imagine.
When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe, it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive.
It really wasn't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic.
For instance, this is Herbert with his grandmother.
When I first met him, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap.
He has been orphaned, as both of his parents died of AIDS, and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS.
He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed.
When she got up to make tea, she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated.
Before I left, I actually asked him if I could get him something.
I thought he would ask for a toy, or candy, and he asked me for slippers, because he said that his feet were cold.
This is Joyce who's -- in this picture -- 21.
Single mother, HIV positive.
I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl, Issa.
And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn't know, but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23.
Joyce's mother is now taking care of her daughter, like so many other Zimbabwean children who've been orphaned by the epidemic.
So a few of the stories.
With every picture, there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told.
All these pictures are from Zimbabwe.
Chris Anderson: Kirsten, will you just take one minute, just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa?
Kirsten Ashburn: Mmm, gosh.
CA: Just -- KA: Actually, I was working at the time, doing production for a fashion photographer.
And I was constantly reading the New York Times, and stunned by the statistics, the numbers.
It was just frightening.
So I quit my job and decided that that's the subject that I wanted to tackle.
And I first actually went to Botswana, where I spent a month -- this is in December 2000 -- then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half, and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe.
CA: That's an amazing story, thank you.
KB: Thanks for letting me show these.
Imagine you're asked to invent something new.
It could be whatever you want made from anything you choose in any shape or size.
That kind of creative freedom sounds so liberating, doesn't it?
Or does it?
If you're like most people, you'd probably be paralyzed by this task.
Without more guidance, where would you even begin?
As it turns out, boundless freedom isn't always helpful.
In reality, any project is restricted by many factors, such as the cost, what materials you have at your disposal, and unbreakable laws of physics.
These factors are called creative constraints, and they're the requirements and limitations we have to address in order to accomplish a goal.
Creative constraints apply across professions, to architects and artists, writers, engineers, and scientists.
In many fields, constraints play a special role as drivers of discovery and invention.
During the scientific process in particular, constraints are an essential part of experimental design.
For instance, a scientist studying a new virus would consider, "How can I use the tools and techniques at hand to create an experiment that tells me how this virus infects the body's cells?
And what are the limits of my knowledge that prevent me from understanding this new viral pathway?"
In engineering, constraints have us apply our scientific discoveries to invent something new and useful.
Take, for example, the landers Viking 1 and 2, which relied on thrusters to arrive safely on the surface of Mars.
The problem?
Those thrusters left foreign chemicals on the ground, contaminating soil samples.
So a new constraint was introduced.
How can we land a probe on Mars without introducing chemicals from Earth?
The next Pathfinder mission used an airbag system to allow the rover to bounce and roll to a halt without burning contaminating fuel.
Years later, we wanted to send a much larger rover: Curiosity.
However, it was too large for the airbag design, so another constraint was defined.
How can we land a large rover while still keeping rocket fuel away from the Martian soil?
In response, engineers had a wild idea.
They designed a skycrane.
Similar to the claw machine at toy stores, it would lower the rover from high above the surface.
With each invention, the engineers demonstrated an essential habit of scientific thinking - that solutions must recognize the limitations of current technology in order to advance it.
Sometimes this progress is iterative, as in, "How can I make a better parachute to land my rover?"
And sometimes, it's innovative, like how to reach our goal when the best possible parachute isn't going to work.
In both cases, the constraints guide decision-making to ensure we reach each objective.
Here's another Mars problem yet to be solved.
Say we want to send astronauts who will need water.
They'd rely on a filtration system that keeps the water very clean and enables 100% recovery.
Those are some pretty tough constraints, and we may not have the technology for it now.
But in the process of trying to meet these objectives, we might discover other applications of any inventions that result.
Building an innovative water filtration system could provide a solution for farmers working in drought-stricken regions, or a way to clean municipal water in polluted cities.
In fact, many scientific advances have occurred when serendipitous failures in one field address the constraints of another.
When scientist Alexander Fleming mistakenly contaminated a Petri dish in the lab, it led to the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin.
The same is true of synthetic dye, plastic, and gunpowder.
All were created mistakenly, but went on to address the constraints of other problems.
Understanding constraints guides scientific progress, and what's true in science is also true in many other fields.
Constraints aren't the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.
“All the World’s a Stage” from "As You Like It" by William Shakespeare All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school.
And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth.
And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part.
The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound.
Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Imagine this: You're fast asleep when all of a sudden you're awoken!
And not by your alarm clock.
Your eyes open, and there's a demon sitting on your chest, pinning you down.
You try to open your mouth and scream, but no sound comes out.
You try to get up and run away, but you realize that you are completely immobilized.
The demon is trying to suffocate you, but you can't fight back.
You've awoken into your dream, and it's a nightmare.
It sounds like a Stephen King movie, but it's actually a medical condition called sleep paralysis, and about half of the population has experienced this strange phenomenon at least once in their life.
This panic-inducing episode of coming face-to-face with the creatures from your nightmares can last anywhere from seconds to minutes and may involve visual or auditory hallucinations of an evil spirit or an out-of-body feeling like you're floating.
Some have even mistaken sleep paralysis for an encounter with a ghost or an alien abduction.
In 1867, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell was the first medical professional to study sleep paralysis.
"The subject awakes to consciousness of his environment but is incapable of moving a muscle.
Lying to all appearance, still asleep.
He's really engaged for a struggle for movement, fraught with acute mental distress.
Could he but manage to stir, the spell would vanish instantly."
Even though Dr. Mitchell was the first to observe patients in a state of sleep paralysis, it's so common that nearly every culture throughout time has had some kind of paranormal explanation for it.
In medieval Europe, you might think that an incubus, a sex-hungry demon in male form, visited you in the night.
In Scandinavia, the mare, a damned woman, is responsible for visiting sleepers and sitting on their rib cages.
In Turkey, a jinn holds you down and tries to strangle you.
In Thailand, Phi Am bruises you while you sleep.
In the southern United States, the hag comes for you.
In Mexico, you could blame subirse el muerto, the dead person, on you.
In Greece, Mora sits upon your chest and tries to asphyxiate you.
In Nepal, Khyaak the ghost resides under the staircase.
It may be easier to blame sleep paralysis on evil spirits because what's actually happening in your brain is much harder to explain.
Modern scientists believe that sleep paralysis is caused by an abnormal overlap of the REM, rapid eye movement, and waking stages of sleep.
During a normal REM cycle, you're experiencing a number of sensory stimuli in the form of a dream, and your brain is unconscious and fully asleep.
During your dream, special neurotransmitters are released, which paralyze almost all of your muscles.
That's called REM atonia.
It's what keeps you from running in your bed when you're being chased in your dreams.
During an episode of sleep paralysis, you're experiencing normal components of REM.
You're dreaming and your muscles are paralyzed, only your brain is conscious and wide awake.
This is what causes you to imagine that you're having an encounter with a menacing presence.
So this explains the hallucinations, but what about the feelings of panic, strangling, choking, chest pressure that so many people describe?
Well during REM, the function that keeps you from acting out your dreams, REM atonia, also removes voluntary control of your breathing.
Your breath becomes more shallow and rapid.
You take in more carbon dioxide and experience a small blockage of your airway.
During a sleep paralysis episode, a combination of your body's fear response to a perceived attack by an evil creature and your brain being wide awake while your body is in an REM sleep state triggers a response for you to take in more oxygen.
That makes you gasp for air, but you can't because REM atonia has removed control of your breath.
This struggle for air while your body sleeps creates a perceived sensation of pressure on the chest or suffocation.
While a few people experience sleep paralysis regularly and it may be linked to sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, many who experience an episode of sleep paralysis do so infrequently, perhaps only once in a lifetime.
So you can rest easy, knowing that an evil entity is not trying to haunt, possess, strangle, or suffocate you.
Save that for the horror films!
Whenever I get to travel for work, I try to find out where my drinking water comes from, and where my poop and pee go.
(Laughter) This has earned me the nickname "The Poo Princess" in my family, and it's ruined many family vacations, because this is not normal.
But thinking about where it all goes is the first step in activating what are actually superpowers in our poop and pee.
(Laughter) Yeah.
And if we use them well, we can live healthier and more beautifully.
Check out this landscape in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Just notice what kinds of words and feelings come to mind.
This landscape was watered with treated sewage water.
Does that change anything for you?
I imagine it might.
And that's OK.
How we feel about this is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.
And I want to explain how it works, but what words do I use?
I mean, I can use profane words like "shit" and "piss," and then my grandma won't watch the video.
Or I can use childish words like "poo" and "pee."
Eh.
Or I can use scientific words like "excrement" and "feces."
Humph.
I'll use a mix.
(Laughter) It's all I got.
(Laughs) So, in this suburb, the poo and the pee and the wash water are going to this treatment plant right in the middle of the community.
It looks more like a park than a treatment plant.
The poo at the very bottom of all those layers of gravel -- not touching anyone -- is providing solid food for those marsh plants.
And the clean, clear water that comes out the other end is traveling underground to water each person's yard.
So even though they're in a desert, they get their own personal oasis.
This approach is called Integrated Water Management, or holistic or closed-loop.
Whatever you want to call it, it's in conflict with the status quo of how we think about sanitation, which is contain, treat, push it away.
But in this approach, we're doing one step better.
We're designing for reuse from the very beginning, because everything does get reused, only now we're planning for it.
And often, that makes for really beautiful spaces.
But the most important thing about this system isn't the technicals of how it works.
It's how you feel about it.
Do you want this in your yard?
Why not?
I got really curious about this question.
Why don't we see more innovation in sanitation?
Why isn't that kind of thing the new normal?
And I care so much about this question, that I work for a nonprofit called Recode.
We want to accelerate adoption of sustainable building and development practices.
We want more innovation.
But a lot of times, whole categories of innovation -- ones that can help us live more beautifully -- turn out to be illegal.
Today's regulations and codes were written under the assumption that best practices would remain best practices, with incremental updates forever and ever.
But innovation isn't always incremental.
It turns out, how we feel about any particular new technique gets into everything we do: how we talk about it, how we encourage people to study, our jokes, our codes ...
And it ultimately determines how innovative we can be.
So, that's the first reason we don't innovate in sanitation.
We're kind of uncomfortable talking about sanitation, that's why I've gotten called "The Poo Princess" so much.
The second reason is: we think the problem is solved here in the US.
But not so.
Here in the US we still get sick from drinking shit in our sewage water.
Seven million people get sick every year, 900 die annually.
And we're not taking a holistic approach to making it better.
So we're not solving it.
Where I live in Portland, Oregon, I can't take Echo for a swim during the rainy season, because we dump raw sewage sometimes into our river.
Our rainwater and our sewage go to the same treatment plant.
Too much rain overflows into the river.
And Portland is not alone here.
Forty percent of municipalities self-report dumping raw or partially treated sewage into our waterways.
The other bummer going on here with our status quo is that half of all of your poop and pee is going to fertilize farmland.
The other half is being incinerated or land-filled.
And that's a bummer to me, because there are amazing nutrients in your daily doody.
It is comparable to pig manure; we're omnivores, they're omnivores.
Think of your poo and pee as a health smoothie for a tree.
(Laughter) The other bummer going on here is that we're quickly moving all the drugs we take into our waterways.
The average wastewater treatment plant can remove maybe half of the drugs that come in.
The other half goes right out the other side.
Consider what a cocktail of pharmaceuticals -- hormones, steroids, Vicodin -- does to a fish, to a dog, to a child.
But this isn't just some problem that we need to contain.
If we flip this around, we can create a resource that can solve so many of our other problems.
And I want to get you comfortable with this idea, so imagine the things I'm going to show you, these technologies, and this attitude that says, "We're going to reuse this.
Let's design to make it beautiful" -- as advanced potty training.
(Laughter) I think you're ready for it.
I think we as a culture are ready for advanced potty training.
And there are three great reasons to enroll today.
Number one: we can fertilize our food.
Each one of us is pooping and peeing something that could fertilize half or maybe all of our food, depending on our diet.
That dark brown poo in the toilet is dark brown because of what?
Dead stuff, bacteria.
That's carbon.
And carbon, if we're getting that into the soil, is going to bind to the other minerals and nutrients in there.
Boom!
Healthier food.
Voilà!
Healthier people.
Chemical fertilizers by definition don't have carbon in them.
Imagine if we could move our animal manure and our human manure to our soil, we might not need to rely on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, mine minerals from far away.
Imagine how much energy we could save.
Now, some of us are concerned about industrial pollutants contaminating this reuse cycle.
That can be addressed.
But we need to separate our discomfort about talking about poo and pee so we can calmly talk about how we want to reuse it and what things we don't want to reuse.
And get this: if we change our approach to sanitation, we can start to slow down climate change.
Remember that carbon in the poop?
If we can get that into our soil bank, it's going to start to absorb carbon dioxide that we put into the air.
And that could help slow down global warming.
I want to show you some brave souls who've had the courage to embrace this advanced potty training approach.
So those folks in New Mexico -- why did they do it?
'Cause they're in a desert?
'Cause they save money?
Yeah.
But more importantly, they felt comfortable seeing what was going down the toilet as a resource.
Here's an average house in Portland, Oregon.
This house is special because they have a composting toilet turning all their poo and pee, over time, into a soil amendment.
Their wash water, their shower water, is going underground to a series of mulch basins, and then watering that orchard downhill.
When they went to get this permitted, it wasn't allowed in Oregon.
But it was allowed in five other states nearby.
That was Recode's -- my organization's -- first code-change campaign.
Here's a great example where the Integrated Water Management approach was the cheapest.
This is three high-rise residential buildings in downtown Portland, and they're not flushing to the sewer system.
How?
Well, their wash water is getting reused to flush toilets, cool mechanical systems, water the landscape.
And then once the building has thoroughly used everything -- aka, shat in it -- it's treated to highest standard right on-site by plants and bacteria, and then infiltrated into the groundwater right below.
And all that was cheaper than updating the surrounding sewer infrastructure.
So that's the last reason we should get really excited about doing things differently: we can save a lot of money.
This was the first permit of its kind in Oregon.
Brave and open-minded people sat down and felt comfortable saying, "Yeah, that shit makes sense."
(Laughter) "Let's do it."
(Applause) You know?
I keep showing examples where everyone's reusing everything on-site.
Why?
Well, when we look at our aging infrastructure -- and it is old -- and we look at the cost of updating it, three-quarters of that cost is just the pipes snaking through our city.
So as we build anew, as we renovate, it might make more sense to treat and reuse everything on-site.
San Francisco realized that it made sense to invest in rebates for every household to reuse their wash water and their rainwater to water the backyard, because the amount of water they would save as a community would be so big.
But why were all these projects so innovative?
The money piece, yeah.
But more importantly, they felt comfortable with this idea of advanced potty training.
Imagine if we embraced innovation for sanitation the way we have for, say, solar power.
Think about it -- solar power used to be uncommon and unaffordable.
Now it's more a part of our web of power than ever before.
And it's creating resiliency.
We now have sources of power like the sun that don't vary with our earthly dramas.
What's driving all that innovation?
It's us.
We're talking about energy.
It's cool to talk about energy.
Some folks are even talking about the problems with the limited resources where our current energy is coming from.
We encourage our best and brightest to work on this issue -- better solar panels, better batteries, everything.
So let's talk about where our drinking water is coming from, where our poo and pee are actually going.
If we can get over this discomfort with this entire topic, we could create something that creates our future goldmine.
Every time you flush the toilet, I want you to think, "Where is my poop and pee going?
Will they be gainfully employed?"
(Laughter) "Or are they going to be wreaking havoc in some waterway?"
If you don't know, find out.
And if you don't like the answer, figure out how you can communicate to those who can drive this change that you have advanced potty training, that you are ready for reuse.
How all of you feel is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)