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To use that analogy.
And of course a garden hose is using, for you techies,
a 54 kilobit line speed.
And remember there's 8 bits per byte, so it's not really 8 bytes
at 56 bytes, it's bits.
So we really need to get to very, very large numbers,
10 to the 9th, 10 to the 12th terabytes of information.
So instead of filling up Lake Michigan in, let's say,
20,000 years to get that movie to you, we need to fill up
Lake Michigan in a second.
Now I can send you the long movies and the videos
and everything over the net.
So, again, there's trade-offs.
What's the trade off with the computer industry?
Well, certainly security and then, of course, today's big
problem is identity theft and I could talk to you about
identity theft and so could the FBI all day long,
and there are things we can do there to minimize it,
prevent it, and I'll leave that for another time.
The other area I wanted to touch on a little bit was
the manufacturing industry.
Ah, here's where it starts to become fun.
I need to touch a little bit on the powers of 10.
If we look at today's power of minus 10, negative power,
at 10 to the minus 9th, that's a nanometer.
What's a nanometer?
Well light travels about the length of a sheet of paper
in a nanometer, travelling around the planet about
seven and a half times a second around the Earth.
Out in space, 10 billion years and we still are receiving light
from bodies that perhaps disappeared
10 billion years ago.
So that's the part that we need to understand
about nanotechnology, this is a brave new world emerging.
Now we're getting to the point where we'll have medicines
and technologies to help replace parts in our body.
Now we're getting to areas that, obviously, are controversial,
going back to our ball point pen.
And this nanotechnology arena has opened up a very broad area
and a huge promise of solutions, technically speaking.
We just completed a few years ago the Genome Project.
Well, what is that?
Basically, the Genome Project has given us a parts list
for our body.
We now have a parts list.
Look, when you go to the Auto Zone or the local
car parts store, the first thing they ask you for if you want
a unique part for your car is the vehicle identification
number because that identifies it to your specific car.
Well, I'm going to give you a new acronym.
I'm going to call it the BIN number,
the Body Identification Number, because now we have
a parts list, as I mentioned, for the body.
But here comes the trade-off.
Stem cells and the research of stem cells, that is one of our
most controversial areas today.
Now look, I can't tell you if there's a soul
in the petri dish, but I can tell you that we're using
stem cells to grow new eyes for some animals.
We're using stem cells to grow new body parts.
Now if we're lying on the table, wherever, and our life depends
on that stem cell, now I'll leave that decision with you.
I just can talk to you about the technology.
A technologist, a scientist, that's all I can talk about.
The rest I'll leave to the politicians and the folks
in that arena.
But as far as a solution, we can do it.
We can make it happen.
I wanted to touch also on hybrid crops a little bit.
The promise of food for the whole planet and,
again, the trade-off.
Some countries are saying, oh no, I don't want, you know,
any artificial foods in my body.
Hey look, again, I can only talk about the technology.
I just want to live as long as my Twinkies, right,
because those things have a lot of things in them
that preserve them.
So maybe there's a solution and a balance, I think that's
the key, a balance for artificial foods, hybrid foods.
And my goodness, we're in the part of the United States
where we could literally supply the planet with food.
But technology gives us a lot of trade-offs.
Now I'm getting into an area that's the most controversial
and offers the most solutions: the arena of military
and space exploration.
The day is coming, I think, when we won't have to send humans,
even on very critical missions, out to space.
Machines can do this.
Machines are doing a lot of work now and we let them do
the dangerous work.
Whether the sheriff is using a robot to disarm a bomb
or using an airplane to overlook a battlefield without
any human intervention.
And that's the promise of technology
for space exploration.
I mentioned a while ago that 186,000 miles per second
is fast on Earth, but out there, it takes billions of years
to get anywhere.
Can we exceed the speed of light?
I don't know.
We have theories about folding space.
Maybe we can achieve that speed and exceed the speed of light
in effect.
Albert Einstein left us the formulas to work with that.
He never really said we could never exceed the speed of light
as mass because mass, at that speed, mass is infinite.
Well in a way he opened up the world for us to think
about other things.
So I leave you with these thoughts about technology that
the key word is balance.
Balance, of course, will cause conflict and bring more conflict
as we try to achieve more balance,
it's a Catch-22 if you will.
But technology also offers solutions, so think about fire,
the ball point pen, the stem cell, and that parts list
that we now have for the body, that now we are characterizing
the parts list for the Genome Project.
And it's a big job, it's like trying to characterize
a row of ants between San Francisco and New York
and each ant or each fifth ant has some characteristic
that is going to save our body for a little longer.
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