Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Blue Suede Boots

[title]

>> mcguire: good afternoon, everyone. my nameis joanne mcguire. i am the executive vice president of lockheed martin space systemscompany, and i am just very pleased to welcome all of you to this second in a series of distinguishedlecture series, co-sponsored by nasa and lockheed martin corporation, in honor of nasa's 50thanniversary. these lectures are designed to highlight the extraordinary ways in whichour nation's space program has brought both tangible and inspirational benefits, not justto the american public, but to the world at large. i'd like to ask all of you to pleasejoin me for a moment in congratulating nasa for nearly 50 years of really truly remarkableachievements.all of us at lockheed martin are proud to have been a strong and trusted partner ofnasa since its inception and this lecture

series is the latest manifestation of ourhalf century relationship. as nasa's partner on the orion crew exploration vehicle, weanticipate our stars will continue to shine together for many decades to come. there isno question that the greatest discoveries are yet to come, as nasa and our nation pursuea bold new era of exploration. joining us today is shana dale, deputy administratorfor nasa. shana, we're delighted to be partnered with nasa for this special lecture seriesand to have partnered with nasa for these many years on our nation's vital space achievements.today, our latest achievement is securing the services of dr. eric schmidt, chairmanand ceo of google with us today as our distinguished speaker. we're honored to have you with ustoday, as well, dr. schmidt, and we look forward

to hearing your comments. to introduce ourspeaker, it is my great pleasure to have congressman bart gordon, chairman of the us house committeeon science and technology and dean of the tennessee congressional delegation. congressmangordon's commitment to responsible, bipartisan efforts to advance science, technology andeducation has been really the hallmark of his congressional service. he is highly regardedfor his work on issues important to nasa and has fought for additional funding to ensurethat the agency maintains a robust and balanced set of programs in science, aeronautics andhuman space flight. congressman, gordon, please. >> gordon: thank you so much, ms. mcguire,and more importantly, i want to thank lockheed and the news museum for your hospitality heretonight, or today, maybe--oh, there's the

capitol there too. that was good timing. thankyou for that. and nasa, thank you for putting together this 50th anniversary lecture series.you know, in that regard, it's interesting to note that the house science & technologycommittee is also celebrating a 50th anniversary this year. both nasa and our committee arechildren of sputnik and as the inspiration for so many of the folks that were early involvedin the nasa program. and it's my great pleasure to be able to introduce dr. eric schmidt today.you know, i can really think of no one that is more appropriate in speaking to us todayabout inspiring innovation and exploration as it is dr. schmidt. i have a long historyof his, or a long sheet of his resume, but i think it's--rather than take his time, youcan all google him; i'm sure he's heard that

before. but you know, he really is in a rarifiedair of those ceos that have been able to take a company and take it from a noun to a verb.you know, my generation, i still say can i xerox this, or may i have a band-aid or akleenex. and so now you have joined that very small realm of verbs or nouns to verbs. andi think also that google exemplifies the critical importance of innovation and r&d to--thatis necessary if we're going to continue the quality of life that we have in this country.i was talking to ms. mcguire, she has a 7-year-old daughter, i have a 6-year-old daughter andi'm very concerned that when you look around the world now, there are almost seven billionpeople in the world, half of which make less than $2 a day. and if our daughters are goingto be able to inherit a nation with a standard

of living that's going to be even better thanours then, we have to do it by through innovation and research. we have to be making 50 or 100widgets for every one widget they're making elsewhere. and that's why i was reading todayabout cloning. i don't know whether dr. schmidt we can clone you or not, but we're going tohave to have increase really emphasis in this country on research and development so thatour kids won't become the first generation of americans to inherit a national standardof living less than their parents. it's a real challenge. you're going to be a partof being able to solve that challenge and i'm glad you're here, and i'm sure peopleare glad that i'm not going to take any more time from your speech. i will say that hopefully,we might get you cloned some day, but we can't--and

we can clone animals now, but we can't clonea congressman and i'm in the middle of a vote. and so i've already missed the first two andso i'm--please accept my apologies, i'll look forward to hearing your remarks that i'm sureare going to be re-telecast later. so, thank you all.>> schmidt: well, thank you very much, congressman, in your busy schedule to come. this is a congressmanwho has led a lot of the most important fights for nasa, for science, and for space exploration.his service is phenomenal. i want to congratulate nasa for its 50th year anniversary. nasa hasbeen a part of all of our lives for so much of the fantasy and the excitement of beingan american and being a citizen of our great country. i want to talk today about architectures,and how systems will work over the next 50

years. i want to think that architecturesof how we go about science and exploration and technology will be different, right. wewill have to think about it in a different way. i think that the internet will show anew approach for us, how we can actually build these systems. those of you in the audienceare people who actually are in charge of how the system will evolve over the next 50 years.now is the time to think about how to design it so that we have a tremendous next 50 years.the next set of missions that the president and others have articulated, mars and so forthand so on, will span many generations, just as the internet has. and i want to take youthrough some of my observations on that. i also want to take a minute and congratulatethe museum. shelby and the team here are in

the process of getting organized for launchingthis formally later this spring. this is a phenomenal accomplishment by all the peopleinvolved with this, and it's a strong testament to america, to the principles the countryhas been founded and all the things that we care about. and i'm very, very proud to havebeen invited to actually participate in this, i think one of the first major public eventshere. so, let's talk a little bit about nasa and what i'm going to do is have robin getstarted, robin zeigler, get started. we're going to do a few demos here to give you asense of what is possible now with some of the things that nasa has been doing. as apilot, i'm very actually grateful for everything that nasa has done, and i think one of thethings that people always forget is how much

impact nasa has had on things other than space--digitalfly-by wire systems, wind shear and icing; perfect, good opportunities today to takeadvantage of these new systems built by nasa. jet engine combustors, engine nozzle chevrons,all of these interesting parts of the technology that you all simply consume as, you know,as consumers, you don't even notice it. but when i think about nasa and i think aboutgoogle, i think of--both has being in the business of making things that were amazingcommonplace, right? if you look at the history of aviation which i know something about,people were terrified with this sort of weather before nasa came along. it was actually aserious life-threatening problem and now we can deal with it. that's an amazing achievement.it happens every day. and it's going to continue,

given the leadership of nasa and the missionof nasa and the things that nasa is trying to do. when i think about google, we try todo the same thing. we try to do the things that are amazing. the things which were amazinglyimpossible 10 years ago are now routine. i was trying to think of an "aha" moment, ithought, well, what is the most interesting query that i can give? and i thought how longwill i live? it seems like the most important question you could ask google. and since weuse google for everything, i asked google and the answer is, there's an age calculator,i typed in all the parameters and it came up 67. bad answer. bad answer, bad answer,reject that answer. okay. so, i reprogrammed the age calculator a little bit and i cameup to 86; much better answer. i stopped. i

moved to other searches. that's an "aha" momentand i know how long i'm going to live and the answer is 84 not 67 because google toldme. now, robin, let's start. this is the crookedest street in the world in san francisco and you'relooking at with a product called google street view. we started off with a view of the earthand as you saw as we zoomed down. and you notice you see the folks and the cars, youhave street signs and so forth. is that alcatraz in the distance there? maybe you could sortof go, yeah, i'm not sure. it's a tourist destination now, don't worry. and here weare, and here you are and you're just on google wandering around. what's interesting aboutthis is look at the human scale of this experience, this exploration. it seems kind of routine,right? this is, by the way, phenomenal technology

to do this, before we get too ahead of it.let's keep going. when we go to--the same thing in google earth, the first thing wascalled street view, in google earth we can see everything there is around. the firstimage that you saw was the same street in google earth and now we're visiting, lookslike, washington, dc. and of course, here's the capitol, which you're right sort of nextdoor. now we can wander around and so forth. now the pictures here include these 3d modelsof all the buildings. and, the shapes that you're seeing, and the contours were, in fact,calculated in 11 days in missions in the shuttle in 2000. for completely unrelated reasons,they decided to do a topography of the earth and they happened to, by virtue of their publicmission, make it available to everyone. so

we just sort of took it and use it and nowwhen you use google earth you're really following the data that the shuttle mission calculated.keep going. now when you think about washington, there's a lot of discussions, for example,about--let's see what we're going to do next here. yes, it turns out that there's a lotof debate about global warming. and this is a--what is the--how many meters? five meters,15 feet. and so the good news is the capitol is going to be preserved. okay. i'm a littleworried about the smithsonian and i want you all to look at the nasa headquarters. it'sa little bit of a problem. i think it has an underground parking garage; you're in bigtrouble. not to make a point about global warming or any of those things or sea levelchange, but there is an article yesterday

that says that there is a possibility of thisscenario occurring by the years 2100. now, why is it important we show this to you now,because this is an example of the kind of visualization that you can do by taking thisplatform that represents google earth, and then showing what could happen. obviously,we don't want that to happen. keep going. what's interesting about all of this--whatare we going to do next here? yeah, let's take a look. this is another example of nasa.nasa, i think this was langley, gave us some climate models, and the climate models happento show the path of katrina. and so we've now overlaid the images that we got from youall, essentially, and you can see as you see the cloud moving, it has information aboutvelocity and position and so forth and so

on. these models were used real-time in orderto understand what was going on and, of course, you could see the velocity and that kind ofthing. many, many, many more people participated in understanding the phenomena and obviouslyalso the aftermath. we won't show you now, but there's a large amount of imagery thatwas done to help rescue missions and so forth, again, overlaid on top of this work, again,in conjunction with nasa. let's move to our next one. now when i think about the earth,i also would like to think about what are the things that i'd like to do and i've alwayswanted to climb mt. everest. now, if you're looking at me, this is clearly not going tohappen. so what we've decided to do is, i was just sitting in my office one day andi thought, let me just climb mt. everest on

google earth. so here we are and we sort ofwander up and you can see the south call and so forth and so on and this is the vision,and i've achieved my objective. well, have i? yeah, actually i have. i have a sense ofit. i have a sense of what it's like to be at the highest peak of earth. again, i couldparticipate in this new and interesting way. and by the way, it's really cold. okay. ifi then look at--let's see where we're going next. when i think about--what i also liketo do, i was talking about aviation. we have a person who is a blogger who covers googleearth who decided to build a model, a flight stimulator. and he took a publicly availableswiss fighter pilot video of a swiss air force pilot wandering around the alps. you see onone side, you see the actual film and on the

other side, you see the recreation in googleearth.now, again, this is available to all of us through the work that nasa and others andhave done to make it possible to see topography and pictures. this information is satelliteand aviation data and you'll see that--and of course it comes with a great soundtrackand so forth and so on. and again, someone else, just like me flying mt. everest, thisis perhaps a person who is unlikely to be flying his own f-18 in the middle of the swissalps can really recreate this. and it's just a phenomenal experience. we have many, manytechnologies coming that are like this over the next little while. why don't--in fact,here's a picture of the fake pilot, there's a picture of the real pilot. so this authoreven inserted a picture of himself in it.

let's move to our next one. when i think aboutthis whole phenomenon, how we use information, i then think about scale and i was tryingto think about what's the best example that i can use about scale? and i was trying tothink about, well, there's the moon sort of nearby. so what we've done now is we've simplytaken imagery of the moon, thank you, nasa. it's by the way, moon.google.com, in caseyou want to go visit the moon, if you're not currently planning on a moon mission anytimesoon. now, and here we are and let's go visit where neil armstrong went. and you can, you'llsee that we can, in fact, get to the point where you can see a picture of his footprints.now the kind of stuff that i'm talking about which we did under a space act agreement withnasa, and we're showing not just nasa planetary

content, as we've discussed, but also we'reworking on disaster response. here is a picture of neil armstrong's footprints. again, thesepictures are collaborated, are given to us by nasa and others. this mechanism is geneticallyavailable on all of google earth. so, we can, showing off what we can do. let's keep going.now if you're on the moon, perhaps what you're really interested in is space. so let's goto a--i don't know, this is a particular interesting star field. this star field is--looks likea normal star field. it was actually done in the deep space initiative with the hubble.and, this is a picture of the--and to give you an example, the width of that pictureis somewhere around 10 to the 25 centimeters, which is a number that is--here's an analogyfor you. if the interaction between carbon

atoms is maybe 1 over 10 to the minus 12th,because of the way they interact, and 10 to the 12th is on the order of 100,000 years.so what you're seeing is you're seeing something that has the scale or width, something you'venever seen before. there's nothing in the world of the scale, this is the deepest image,it's also the most, the oldest image we have in history because it was done approximately13 billion years ago roughly 10% of what we believe the life of the universe is. and itwas not done with one picture, by the way. the hubble went around and took picture afterpicture after picture because there was so little light. pretty neat, okay? so you saynormal picture. let's see where that picture is in context, so you got a sense of how farit really is. oh, looks like a pretty normal

star field. and by the way, there are billionsand billions of stars and galaxies even in this field. as we move out, we begin to seethat perhaps this is a tiny, tiny, little piece of a tiny, tiny little constellationthat doesn't even show up on our constellation map, as we go deeper, and deeper, and deeperin both time and history. some of our constellations begin to show up and now we begin to see whatis familiar to us. there is no tool and there is no feature i know of on earth that canshow you a resolution that goes from 1 to 10 to the 25th in that amount of time. that'swhat nasa can do. that's what information technology can do and that's, frankly, whywe all work at google. let's thank robin for the demo and let me keep, let me keep talking.so if you think about it, what you really

do is you set up audacious goals and you makethis all happen because you cannot possibly anticipate the challenges that you have tosurmount. it's clear that the assumptions will change and you cannot predict the innovationsthat engineers will make. the internet architecture was invented in 1973. the world wide web wasinvented in 1991, 1992. the protocols that we deal with every day now that are so commonplacewere not even thought about 20 years, until 20 years after the original design. that isa remarkable achievement of technology in computer science. there's no way to understandhow people will take advantage of this technical innovation. a man in italy used earth, googleearth to discover the remains and antiques of an ancient roman villa, literally in hisbackyard. archeologists in france used google

earth to discover a hundred candidate sitesfor ancient celtic settlements. in the search for these various meteor craters, an impactcraters, they're using the satellite imagery from nasa and the other work in order to actuallydo real science on how the earth was formed and shaped. we didn't anticipate all of this,we just put the data out there and people did it. it's also clear to me that the peoplewho start the mission are not the ones that are going to complete it. an interesting factthat i did in researching this is that the average age in the front room for apollo 11was about 32. the average age at google is about 31. the memory of the ibm 360s--i usedas a young programmer on ibm 360-91 which will both date me and also give you, havea sense of sympathy for me; 2.5 megabits in

core memory, a real cores. the memory of theipod that our average employee carries now is 80 gigabytes, which is 256,000 times 2.5megabits. so, the rate of change here has been so phenomenal. it's of the scale thati just showed you in that star field. so the internet is the fastest growing communicationsmedium in history, again, so fitting that we're here at this wonderful museum. morethan 1.3 billion internet users worldwide, on the order of a couple hundred million newusers every year, 8 hours of video get uploaded to youtube every day, that should be everyminute, and there's 70 million blogs exist in a 120,000 created every day. it's a lotof blogs and a lot of writers, not so many readers i suspect. when you, when you--thisdemocratization of information which is fundamental

to what is occurring here has a lot of implicationsfor both nasa and for google, and for the world here in washington. since anyone cancreate, edit, publish and share information, you know, it's a new jump ball, it's a newscenario. and normally what happens is that the rate of progress in field occurs at arelatively predictable rate. examples would be that scientific research, the number ofpapers doubles every 15 years; so sort of a predictable rate. in astronomy, the--sincewe're sort of talking about astronomy right now--the distance of the farthest galaxy wecould see has doubled roughly every 10 years; so again, reasonable rates. the world thati live in, doubling times are much, much shorter. moore's law, of course, everybody knows aboutthis, processing power doubles every 18 months.

that means, by the way, 10 times every 5 years,a hundred times in 10. there's a law called kryder's law which is the memory, disk memory,in particular, doubles every 12 months. so this immense, immense amounts of data storesbeing created over and over again. so, an obvious example is that in 2019, an ipod typedevice would be able to contain 85 years of video. in other words, you could never watchit. you'd be dead. you're going to be carrying it and you'll say, well, i couldn't watchit. i'm sorry, i died. it's actually a serious problem like because it's going to cause alot of stress. you know, if i'd only lived another year longer, i could have watchedthat other episode. so, the other interesting thing about this in spurge [ph] of informationis that there's a lot of new voices and new

ideas. with all that, with all that contentout there, you know, search is obviously what google does, becomes it's more important thanever. over 20% of the searches that we do every day are for items we haven't seen inat least the last 90 days. so people are naturally curious, and i want us to take advantage ofthat curiosity. so here's some ideas for success as we think about this. the buzzwords thatwe use in computer science are open, scalable and flexible architectures. and a lot of thenasa work was done before that became the--that's the most politically correct way i could saythis, before those became the principles of design. these hardware designs that are notextensible ultimately do not serve the mission very well. in my case, to show you how foolishi was, when i was a graduate student at berkley,

i built a network--one of the first networksbuilt of its type--for my master thesis, and by the way, i got my masters thesis and idesigned a protocol where there could only be 26 machines, because there were only fourat the time and i couldn't imagine that the university would ever have more than 26. sothe machines were called a, b, c, d, you know, etcetera. they still gave me my degree andthen shortly there later they tore out my network and put in a proper network. so everybodycan make this mistake. the internet started off with four nodes, now it has somewherebetween 250,000 and a million broad networks, by any definition. it's just phenomenal. thenumber of servers, there are roughly--january 1983, we have an accurate number because ofdarpa, 400 servers. in july 2007, our best

estimate is 489 million servers. and thisis growing and continuing to grow. it's growing faster than you think, because it's growingall the time. so, when you build an innovation model, you want to build it in a way that'scollaborative. and this is often at odds with how people think about government programs,procurements, the traditional structures of business and private groups and so forth andso on. you want to figure out a way to do it in a much more open way. and everybodyloves what nasa is doing. it should be possible to pull this off big time. the web, for example,today is built out of products known as linux, apache, mysql. these are open software technologies.the creators of mysql, by the way, just so you--in cases there's any concern that thesemight be hobby businesses--were just purchased

for about a billion dollars by sun microsystems.these are real businesses with different characteristics, but it shows you that you can really delivertremendous value. so if you solve a big problem, solve it by opening it up to the public. assumethat you don't have all the answers because i can assure you that we don't. and i suspectnobody does. it's too, everything is too connected. you're not getting the benefit of everyoneunless you figure out a way to do it in an open way. there's a couple of really goodones. nasa did something called the centennial challenge program. and i think one of thepeople here was one of the authors of this program, so thank you for that. a particularengineer from maine won $200,000 in may 2007, for designing a new astronaut glove. the innerbladder of the glove used one of his kitchen

cleaning gloves because it was the right solution,and it just worked. and there's example after example that when you bring in the creativityof people who maybe he didn't, maybe he didn't have a lot else going on in his life, youknow, maybe he needed something to work on. you know, you just made his day and you justsaved yourself a million dollars, but more importantly, you served the mission really,really well. the lunar x prize that google has announced. we announced a few months agoa prize which is graduated, but think of it as between $20 and $30 million. basically,get something launched, get it to the moon, make sure when it lands it can still drivearound. okay, very straightforward. that's the non-technical explanation. look at ourwebsite, you can see all the details if you

want to bid. why would we do this? becauseit's fun, right? it's just so much fun. now the people who are going to attempt the lunarx prize, and we think there's a whole bunch of folks are probably going to spend morethan the value of the prize. but what's nice about the prize is it brings everybody together,it gets everybody's competitive juices, and you get the multiplicative effect, not justof the money that we're putting in, the money that nasa's putting in, but the money thatall the other people, all the other universities and other programs, that really want to bepart of this historic opportunity to change science in a good way. another aspect of theproblem that i think we all face has to do with this notion of how do you learn? andin these interconnected worlds, you have to

learn more quickly. part of the success ofthe internet and it's true of all the companies; google is simply one of the examples--is thatwe're built on a ship and iterate philosophy. what happens is basically we try something,we try something, we try something, and we're proud of this, by the way. we celebrate thefact that we tried this, we cancelled this, this didn't work, we shifted and so forth.they wiggle, right, in an interesting way. and not only does the technology allows that,but it's part of our culture. we have programs where we encourage our engineers to spend20% of their time on things of their own interest, not what their manager is telling them thatthey have to do. again, unheard of in traditional engineering that drives much of the creativeprocess inside our company. there are many,

many such examples. so, i don't know. whohere was a big apple lisa user? the old, it was the predecessor to the mac, right. butthey learned a lot from the apple lisa that made the mac a great success way back when.it happens in telecommunications. the at&t long distance network crashed for nine hoursdue to a bug consisting of a single line of c code in 1990. we've all forgotten that,but the fact of the matter is they do it too. so the obvious messages for me is to say,well, nasa, you should just ship and iterate. well, this is a minor problem, but you can'tapply exactly the same approach we do because mars and the earth are only this close onthis day. or saturn is only in this position in this particular place. or you have a particularlaunch window due to orbital mechanics that

you really do have to launch within this window.and there are some--humorous now, but embarrassing at the time examples. gemini 5 splashed downoff course 100 miles because of a programming error involving the way they did the calculationwith a decimal point. an even more famous example, and unfortunately a negative onein 1962, mariner 1, went off course, and nasa at the time had to blow it up because of anerror in the fortran, right. and, a hyphen had been dropped from the guidance programloaded aboard the computer. it's been quoted as the single most expensive hyphen in history.so i don't think it's fair for me to say, well, hey you, guys, you should just adoptthis ship and iterate phenomena. i think what you have to do is you have to recognize thatthe ship and iterate model is the best model

for learning and then adapt it to the constraintsthat are very much in your present. so one way to think about it, and as a manager italk to people a lot about this is that one of the best ways to be lucky is to createmore luck. and the way you create more luck is you have more at bats. you get more shots,more launches, more learning, so forth and so on. so the more you put everything aroundone single event, the less likely it's going to be a perfect success. the more you figureout a way to iterate, and there are many, many ways in which you can iterate. you caniterate with openness. you can iterate with extensibility. remember the story that i usedabout the internet, that the underlying protocols were designed around a simple model of end-to-endconnectivity. no one anticipated all of the

stuff that would be built on top of it. sogiven that you have these real constraints about launches and windows and so forth, makethe platform such that it's the simplest possible platform that people can then build on topof. build open systems, not closed systems. don't try to solve the whole problem rightnow. the problem as correctly defined in my view is to build the platform, the thing thatis extensible to the next example. another example, we were looking at this. most spacecraftcan't talk to each other in any significant way. now you say, well, i'm not sure i wantspacecraft talking to each other. well, actually, it's kind of useful for spacecraft to talkto each other especially when they can relay information and telemetry and other information,and furthermore, we as a country can use that

for many, many different reasons. well, isn'tit obvious that the spacecraft should have an internet on them too? i mean it doesn'thave to be an open internet, you could have your own private copy with a gateway, so peoplearen't randomly steering the spacecraft wherever they want to go. but the fact of the matteris it does make sense. and in fact, there are people now working, and this is a greatstory, people working to build an interplanetary internet. that all the same principles thati'm talking about apply, not just on earth, but to the objects that we're busy launching,and by the way, not just the us, but everybody, but also the moon and mars and so forth andso on. and this internet is interesting because there's this minor problem that as you spin,right, you lose connectivity, you have to

wait for the packet. so the whole notion oflatency is very different. it's like a long time before that packet shows up. but thenit comes very quickly and then there's a long time again. we haven't quite figured a wayto solve planetary rotation yet. so the fact of the matter is you have to design theseprotocols, with a small number of modifications it's possible for nasa and the world to havenot just an internet that is part of the earth, but also an internet that goes all the wayout there. i don't know if it's get all the way out to the deep space fields because itwill take 13 billion years to get there, but it'll get pretty far. so by standardizingthe protocols, by standardizing the ways in which things talk to each other, by makingsure that when you have multiple vendors,

multiple contractors, they're using a commonsubstrate of communication and extensibility, you have a much, much greater chance of creatingan opportunity like the ones i'm describing in the internet where this platform, thisvery interesting thing that was designed for one thing, is in fact now even more valuable,even more powerful, rather than mission limited in one way or the other. so the technology-basedcase continues and i think it's pretty interesting. what does it look like in 10 years? processorsand phones and computers a hundred times more powerful, storage a thousand times cheaper,a ubiquitous wireless broadband, a cell phone for everyone who wants them in the world.this will occur in our lifetimes especially since i'm living, remember to 84. how cannasa take advantage of this? i'll give you

another example, so something fun. norad hasa program where santa--they know where santa lives and they track santa as he goes aroundthe world. and these guys are pretty clever. so, they shot videos of santa visiting variouscities and towns around the world. and they have a route gps as you could track him. andi thought, wow, pretty interesting. how many people look at this? ten million people hadnothing else to do, right, but to follow santa as he wandered the world visiting and spreadingjoy around the world. it had a big impact on families and kids. how can we, how cannasa take advantage of that? to me that's the interesting question. there's a storyabout alan beam, one of the most famous astronauts, that there's a benefit to being an astronaut;obvious, get lost in space. no. the benefit

is that you can get the attention of any kidfor five minutes in rapt attention; if we can't use that observation to further themission of nasa and the things that we care about, we're not doing our jobs right. inmany ways, google and nasa are similar in that they're based on optimism. pete wordenwho's my good friend, one of the directors of nasa, says that, "remember that space ishard. it's really hard. it's hard science. it takes an optimist to want to pull all ofthis off." and i like that a lot. you have to be optimistic to want to send a man tothe moon, to mars, to explore every planet, to build a space station. you also have tobe optimistic to believe that you can cover all the world's information starting withborrowed servers in your stanford dorm room;

it's the same principle. and indeed, we'rebusy doing it as best we can. ed lu who is a good employee and i think the us astronauthas been in the space the longest, i asked him sort of what's it like? what did you doall day? he said, "i looked at the earth. i literally just loved to look at the earthas it was underneath me." so what i was thinking about was, how can we get that, how can weget that feeling? because if you think about it, every person that i know of, basically,looks at the world on their cell phone now, right. how can we get that same passion thated had, that same feeling about the world, the world around them, the sense of wonderment?they spend--today, people spend literally so much time looking at this screen or theother choices as well, how can we get that

information? and i think that is our jointmission. how do we get this amazing amount of information that is being generated aboutthe world and science and the things that can--how can we get that so that it is thesame level of rapt attention as ed had sitting, spinning around, right, looking at the wondermentthat is the world around us. that's why i'm such a strong supporter of nasa. that's whygoogle is such a strong partner for nasa and that's why we're so very, very happy to wishnasa a great 50th anniversary. so thank you very much and i'm interested in your questionsand comments.we have our first question in the middle. >> logsdan: david logsdan, us chamber of commerce,space enterprise council. >> schmidt: let's see if we can get the--ithink the lady has a mike for you, that would

be great if you could--that way they couldhear you on the video tape. >> logsdan: david logsdan, us chamber of commerce,space enterprise council. a few years ago, the futurist, alvin toffler, was at a conference,a space-related conference where he mentioned that the information age was the third wave,that space was the fourth wave. in your mind, what do you consider the fifth wave? is ita combination of space-related activities and applications, coupled with information?what is your vision for the fifth wave and with that vision, how can that be a stimulusfor the economy? >> schmidt: most people that i talked to inthis area actually believe that the next huge phenomena that's going to hit us will be inbiology, in biotechnology, the issues and

opportunities that the genome, recombinantdna, those sorts of things do. i think all of us are to some degree enablers of thatnext wave. and the argument is pretty simple. in order to do the kinds of things that wewant to be able to do for health, society as a whole, improving the lot of the world,we're going to need the kind of information and computing power and networks and learningthat's going on today in the other waves that you described. it's probable that the combinationof the creation of this enormous information network that i talked about earlier, the commercializationof space which the nasa, the nasa leadership has done a tremendous job moving forward,if you think about 10 years ago versus now, again, which also creates a large number ofjobs, a large number of opportunities and

this openness, right, making it possible forpeople to enter the system at the appropriate things. both of those create very large numbersof jobs and probably a significant wealth opportunity for investors. a lot of peoplebelieve that as more and more of the stuff is done in the private sector, people willfigure out a way to make money, because there's economic value. in google's case, for example,these satellite images that we showed you, we buy them from commercial satellite providers.they're making money and doing a great job for us, by the way. there are many, many newthings of that type that can be done. so one of the reasons that i'm here is to say toyou all that there are tremendous private opportunities for investment in space technology,high technology, information technology. google

is an example of it, there will be many others.eventually, i think all of us will be subsumed to some degree under this biology and biotechbecause the promise is so strong. they're not quite there yet because the computersaren't quite fast enough, we don't really quite understand the networks quite well,but everybody is working on it. yes, sir. let's see if we can get a microphone.>> o'connell: matt o'connell of geoeye, one of those commercial satellite operators. weget criticized for taking… >> schmidt: and a partner, thank you. thankyou for all those nice pictures. >> o'connell: thank you. we get criticizedfor taking pictures of areas that some people think are sensitive and i know that at googlethere's been a debate about whether or not

you should show those pictures. i think thearguments in favor of openness are winning, but i'd love to hear your comments, becausei get it all around the world. >> schmidt: from a google perspective, thisquestion about public information, what's public, what's private is turning into beone of the sort of central questions for the internet. and, you all should know that there'sa law that restricts--you certainly know this--commercial satellite imagery to a certain level of resolutionwhich we're governed by and we need that, obviously. so there, in fact, is some legislationand some regulation in this area. we've taken a position that subject to meeting the law,and there are certain countries which have special terms which are even more restrictivewith respect to commercial imagery, we want

to get as close to that as we can becausewe think the society benefits from such, such pictures. the fact of the matter is that ithink we're in a transition period where people are learning that things which are, whichthey thought were not generally known are becoming more generally known. my favoriteexamples are these situations where something from space--people assume that you'd neversee it from space, but in fact, it's embarrassing or the wrong thing or so forth that peopleare making appropriate changes. so i think this is a transitional period. the benefitsof being able to see that third dimension, what pilots see when they fly, turns out tobe phenomenal. i talked to queen noor about her husband who died, who was a pilot, andshe told me that part of the reason he was

a pilot was that when he flew around the middleeast, he never saw any boundaries. he never saw the little lines that we see on the mapwhich is what we assume those lines are like etched in the desert, right. we all know wherethey are. it's right there on the map, but it really isn't. i went to a photography showfrom one of the astronauts who was particularly good at mid-format camera photography, showingwhat the earth really looked like. and i think that it's both a message of peace, but it'salso a message of the importance of the earth that i think we want to get out. there aresome things that we do to be responsive to this. we are very, very careful not to showreal-time because we think real-time could be misused and you could imagine 20 ways inwhich real-time images could be used. and

we also have various mechanisms for thingswhich are sensitive or inappropriate to try to consider whether we should remove thoseas well. so we want to be sensitive to that. but, the overwhelming conclusion is the societybenefits from more of that kind of imagery being available, and thank you for helpingmake that happen. more questions. way at the back.>> kemp [ph]: eric, chris kemp [ph] at ames research center. increasingly, collaborativetechnologies are free and systems are increasingly being developed in open source. and it's hardto procure what's free. what advice do you have for federal agencies that are tryingto use tools which are free? >> schmidt: so let's just do this again. thegovernment which has like a trillion dollar

deficit can't buy something which is free,it has to buy something which costs money. >> kemp [ph]: seemingly.>> schmidt: does that--everyone says yes. okay. welcome to washington, i guess. eventhe technologies that i was describing that are free, are, typically come with a supportburden. so what companies do when they work with the companies that i mentioned is theyactually do a procurement in the washington sense or in the government sense, but theydo it for a service. the software itself is free, but the support, its integration andso forth, and that works pretty well. so, we use the term free, but we all understandthat people are paying for this. they're paying for engineering, they're paying for supportand so forth and so on, and that's where the

revenue is being created. to put it anotherway, sometimes you for the software, sometimes you pay for the service. at the end of theday, you're going to pay for something. so, it has to do with what you're procuring. there'sno question that the generation of computer people that i work with now are all buildingon top of this linux platform which is open source, but they're building tremendous companies.google, of course, is largely linux based, to give you an example, and obviously verysuccessful. more questions.well, thank you for inviting me. thank you all for a wonderful afternoon and i hope youall get home in the middle of the storm. so thank you very much.

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