The New Era of Discovery | Explorers Fest

[Applause] That's 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9. We have ignition sequence start. The engines are on. 4, 7:51 a.m. There's a fire. [Music] [Applause] And over an enemy, that two-zero-niner. [Applause] [Music] How does it feel up there? Oh yeah, look at that picture on there, Suzie. Earth coming up. Wow! Every... you got a color film, Jim? Amy? I roll a color, man. They're pretty thick. Oh, I got a radar. They're beautiful shots. [Applause] Good afternoon, good luck, Dad. Hi, my name is Ron Garan. I'm here with my friends Nicole Stott and Anousheh Ansari. We want to share some stories with you today. But before we do, we want to set the stage by talking about one specific image.

Now, images have the power to change our perspective. They can change the way we see our world. They can change the way we see ourselves. And there's probably no image that has changed the way we see ourselves more than an image that was taken on Christmas Eve 1968. Now, the story begins 50 years ago atop the tallest, the heaviest, the most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status, the Saturn V.

Saturn V launched the crew of Apollo 8. The mission objective was to be the first crewed spacecraft in history to travel to the moon, enter into orbit around the moon, and of course, to return back safely. Now, this would propel the United States in the race to be the first on the moon, to propel them ahead of the Soviet Union. But after reaching the moon and entering into orbit around it, the crew witnessed something never seen before by human eyes as the crew experienced the Earth rising from behind the lunar horizon.

I wonder if they realized the significance of that moment. They had just become the first humans in history to see the whole Earth as a planet and the first to capture that for the rest of us. This famous photograph, commonly known as Earthrise, is probably the most influential photograph ever taken. This image showed us for the first time our living planet, our biosphere, our Earth.

It revolutionized how we see the world, how we see ourselves, with its simple message that we are one people traveling on one planet towards one shared future in this breathtaking beauty. There is a deep heralding to the unity that we as a species are called to. Since then, less than 600 people have traveled to space. The three of us standing before you have had that privilege. We were able to escape the confines of our planet and look back and profoundly experience seeing our beautiful planet from the vantage point of space.

I was born a long, long time ago in a country far, far away—sad Iran. I love the night skies. I would sleep outside on summer nights and look at those stars, and I wanted to fly up there and touch them. I wanted to understand what their light was made out of. I wanted to understand what our world was made out of and how it's built.

This love of space allowed me to exercise my imagination. When I was 12 years old, before I knew it, there was a revolution in Iran. There were shouting, screaming, burning buildings, gunshots. I was scared. I had never heard a gunshot before. Before I could even adjust to that, there was a war.

There was an eight-year war that broke out between Iran and Iraq, and within the first year, there were bombings. There were long lines for food and fuel. There were gunshots and sirens. We had to go to shelter. It was a scary time for me. But there was one place I could always go at night and look at the beautiful night skies and let my imagination take me to a different place, to a different planet—perhaps some place that was peaceful, some place where there were no gunshots, some place that I could take the rest of my family and everyone who wanted to go with me and be safe and be playful.

That's what I wanted to do. On September 18, 2006, I had the amazing opportunity to fly to the International Space Station for an 11-day mission. It was my dream come true. I was now actually floating in space where I wanted to go, amongst those stars that I dreamed about. I was looking at our planet, and I was able to see this beautiful canvas of tans and crimson of the desert, with the deep greens of the forests, highlighted by the whites of the highest mountain peaks.

I could see the glow of the serpentine rivers as they flowed into the sea, and it was an amazing colorful canvas that I was looking at. But what amazed me the most was the deep blue colors—the different shades of blue of our ocean, which covers most of our planet—our blue planet. And I was mesmerized by it.

I looked down on Earth, and what I could see and feel was this energy, life energy coming from it. I could see no borders, no walls—nothing was dividing us. We were all one. And the feeling that I got, the sense of oneness that I had with the planet and with everyone else on it, was something that I wanted to share with everyone.

I wanted to be able to tell everyone how we're connected and we're all citizens of one planet Earth—that we're all astronauts on this spaceship Earth, going through the universe together. I imagined how that would transform everyone's lives.

So my dream of becoming an astronaut was realized when I, along with the crew of STS-124, launched into space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. I remember that first day. That first day in space, the most remarkable, the most memorable, most amazing thing was when I had the opportunity to look out of the window for the first time. When my tasks were over, I got to unstrap and float over to a window. It was just absolutely breathtaking.

I remember the first thing that hit me was just how incredibly thin our atmosphere appeared. In that sobering moment, I was hit with the realization that that paper-thin layer is what's keeping every living thing on this planet alive. But in spite of this fragility, I couldn't help but fall in love with the beauty of our planet. It's a constant dance of color and light and motion.

What was really amazing and beautiful was to see the colors change on the Earth, to see thunderstorms casting long shadows across the horizon, and watch the clouds turn from pink to red to gray and finally to black. Then, as we crossed into the dark side of the orbit, to see all the lights of the cities and towns—all the evidence of human activity—all of a sudden come to life. It really gave me the sense that we live on a living, breathing organism.

Now, we saw amazing things—many amazing things in space—the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was almost as if we could reach out and touch them. Now, this was an incredibly overwhelming visual experience, but it was also much, much more than just a visual experience.

What I experienced in space was a profound sense of gratitude—gratitude for the opportunity to see the planet from that perspective and gratitude for the planet that we've been given. In some way, I don't think I'll ever be able to fully put into words, but being physically detached from the Earth made me feel deeply interconnected with everyone on it.

Now, although I didn't have the view of the Earth that the Apollo 8 guys had, nevertheless, from space, I was able to look back and see what we have: always been one single human family with a common origin. And now, in a very real way, I had a deep awareness of the reality of our common future.

As you can tell, we all—maybe it’s just me—we all share similar feelings about our experience in space, even with some of the different twists on the stories about it. The underlying reaction is the same: flying in space brings us back to Earth. We see a living, breathing planet. It is our home. It brings us back to home.

While there are a lot of complex things that go on while we're in space, I came home with three very simple lessons to share, and that's that we live on a planet, we are all Earthlings, and the only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere that blankets us all. Now, these stunning views remind us of what it was like to be in space.

It is, like Ron said, overwhelmingly impressively beautiful. While it looks like we're slowly passing over the planet, I know that we're traveling at 17,500 miles an hour, or five miles a second, which means that we get one of these stunning sunrises or sunsets every 45 minutes as we go around the Earth every 90 minutes. Pretty amazing!

And these views also remind me, like Ron said, how separated I was, but how, in contrast to that physical distance, I don't think I ever felt any more connected to everyone and everything below me than I did right then. Every time I looked out the window, there was some new surprise—the vastness of the oceans. There was a depth and color and texture to them that I had never experienced or felt before.

When I looked out the window, I wanted to see familiar things. I wanted to see Florida from space. I considered Florida my home, but very quickly Florida became just this special place on Earth—that's my home. I don't know when exactly that happened, but believe me, it does.

I started thinking about Earth not just as home, but as a planet in space and as a living organism. I couldn't deny the interconnectivity of everything that I saw below me, and I started thinking about us all as Earthlings. So during my six months in space, I got into a routine where I would almost say goodnight to the Earth.

When my tasks were over, and it was time to get ready for bed, I would go to the cupola, which is this windowed observatory on the bottom of the space station, and I would just gaze at the Earth for a little while. As I would gaze back at this beautiful scene, I would wonder what the next 50 years would look like: How far would we progress in overcoming the challenges facing our planet?

As I would take in this beautiful scene, I would routinely be hit in the gut with a sobering contradiction between the beauty of our planet and the suffering that exists on our planet. What I couldn't reconcile was the indescribable beauty of our seemingly peaceful blue planet suspended in this inky blackness, and yet on that same planet, there are untold tragedies that happen every day.

As many of our colleagues report from the ISS, you can actually see the negative effect humans have made on our planet: clear-cutting of forests, mountaintop removal operations, industrial pollutants entering rivers, giant crop burnings that cover whole areas of the globe, sending smoke to the limits of the atmosphere, covering almost entire continents.

I watched into space with the belief that we already right now have all the technology and all the resources necessary to solve many, if not all, the problems facing our planet. I spent a good deal of my time Earth gazing, pondering the question—if this is true, why do these issues still remain? More importantly, what can we do to address these challenges?

The answer to that question lies in our shared experience of living and working on the International Space Station. The valuable lessons that experience gives us for life here on Earth. So for my time in space, this was my home—this beautiful masterpiece in space: the International Space Station, or the ISS.

There is no better example of living off the grid than the ISS. There are systems that regulate all the conditions that we need to survive: the right amount of oxygen for us to breathe, clean water for us to drink. But these systems are not automatic; they require care and maintenance and attention.

As we go about our daily activities, our science experiments in space, these life-support systems are what keep us alive in an otherwise lifeless expanse of space. Through the ISS, we have created mechanical systems in space that do the best we can to mimic what our planet does for us naturally.

So, as you heard, on the space station, we rely on machines. These machines are our life-support system, and we take good care of them. You can bet if something goes wrong with any of those machines, everyone will come together, collaborate, and make sure that we fix it immediately because we can't live without them.

We’re hoping that we can apply that same sense of urgency here on our planet. We are all crew of the spaceship Earth, and we need to take care of our life-support system to have a beautiful, peaceful spaceship that we can all live on here at home. We need to come together, collaborate, and restore our life-support system.

In the words of legendary Buckminster Fuller, we should learn how to become crew of spaceship Earth, not just passengers. And on the ISS, we are acutely aware of the conditions that are necessary to sustain life.

With our help, the machines do this for us. When we return from our time in space, though, even though we intellectually knew it before, we become acutely aware that we require these same conditions down here on Earth to survive. But down here on Earth, it’s not the machines that do this for us. They aren't creating those conditions. It's life itself—it's the living, breathing planet.

It's the humans, and plants, and animals, and the chemical mixtures of air and the oceans. It's the Earth itself—all interconnected—that creates these conditions. It's biodiversity. And as you've heard tonight, the two most important things about the International Space Station are that we have these amazing, strong international relationships that it's built on.

But perhaps more importantly, it's that we're living there like we should be living here on spaceship Earth. We must all work together to protect our biosphere—the life-support systems of our planet—for ourselves and for the benefits of countless possible next generations and for all life.

Because of this, we decided to get all of our astronaut friends together, and we've launched a couple of years ago an organization called Constellation. Our first mission is inspired by the work of E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

So we are working to advocate for and to point attention to this important work. So that together, we could inspire the actions necessary for nations to sign and embrace the pivotal Convention on Biological Diversity. In 2020, we want to bring together astronauts from all around the world to share their profound experiences of seeing the beauty of our planet from space—from their different national, cultural, and religious backgrounds—and partner with National Geographic Society to work with all the various organizations signed up for the Campaign for Nature.

We want to work with all of you. In addition to that, advocating for this most important set of goals in our civilization's history. Our shared vision—Constellations, National Geographic’s—hopefully all of you here in this room and anyone that you touch outside of these rooms is to come together and make sure that we can preserve 30% of Earth’s biodiversity by 2030 and increase that to 50% by 2050.

We also need to make sure that we meet all the 17 sustainable development goals, and we do everything possible to make sure that we don't have global warming exceed the limits of one and a half degree Celsius. This is just called good housekeeping. It's called planetary stewardship.

We have to all work together and aspire to live up to this. No matter where we're from, what we do, or what nation we are from, we have to do it together. We have to come together to make our planet safe again.

Our time in space has proven that when we start from a foundation of awe and wonder, we open the mind to new ideas and solutions that encourage cooperation. Together, and only through profound cooperation and a shared mission, will we build a future that we all want to experience here on Earth.

Awe and wonder are the secret ingredients that change everything. They can allow us to create a better future. There should be no passengers on Spaceship Earth—only crewmates. And as crewmates, we are all responsible for minding the ship and the care of each other.

I hope you can tell that we, as Constellation, as our crew, are excited to be joining National Geographic as a voice for the Campaign for Nature, and together, we know that we can create a positive future where all life thrives. Thank you.

Well, I think we can agree that that powerful opening is a great tip for the festival, but also a great tip for our first panel conversation on the new era of discovery. You know, technology is a driver in so much of our daily lives, helping us explore the world around us and make decisions on what route to take to work, what jacket to bring as we walk out the door.

So how can we use technology to advance the exploration of our planet? National Geographic is committed to developing innovative technology with our National Geographic Labs team. I want to share one exciting project that the labs group currently has in development called the Canopy Drone.

Here's a video of the drone being tested in a forest canopy, piloted by a labs team member via remote control. National Geographic is working with the Illinois Institute of Technology to incorporate autonomy into the drone so it's capable of flying and navigating through very complex environments without the need for GPS or the need of a human pilot.

This technology will radically reduce the cost of monitoring, and it will accelerate our ability to conduct biodiversity and wildlife monitoring in densely forested areas where you cannot see the animals from above. The speakers you are about to meet are also using technology to help them explore the world and gather data in new and exciting ways. With that, I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Heather Lynch.

Heather is a quantitative ecologist studying penguin populations in Antarctica. Very NatGeo! Please welcome Heather Lynch.

Well, thank you very much! Antarctica is changing, and nowhere is it changing more rapidly than on the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where it's getting warmer, wetter, and the sea ice is breaking up earlier each year. These changes are having major impacts on the wildlife in the region.

As a penguin biologist specializing in population dynamics, it was one of the highlights of my research career when National Geographic approached me as they prepared their November 2018 feature special on the region. They asked me, "Well, how many penguins are there in the region, and do we know how their populations have changed?"

You can see my answer in the graphic behind me. The Antarctic Adelie penguin populations have crashed, even as the more sub-Antarctic Gentoo population has skyrocketed. We know that because on the Western Antarctic Peninsula, we can survey these populations the old-fashioned way—accessing colonies by boats and counting nests one by one.

But there are some colonies that are too big, too remote, or too inaccessible to be monitored this way. In fact, it turns out that the majority of our uncertainty about how many penguins there are stems from colonies like Zabadovski Island behind me. We can't count individual penguin heads to monitor these populations.

So to solve this problem, my lab and several others around the world are pioneering the use of satellite imagery as an alternative method of monitoring these populations. Now, when we're monitoring them from satellites, we're not counting individual penguin nests anymore.

Instead, what we're doing is we're using the guano stain—that pinkish-red stain you see in the photograph. It turns out that that guano stain that's left behind at the colony, we can use it to estimate the number of penguins that are breeding within it. So satellite imagery has radically transformed our ability to monitor penguins—not just the ones that we can access directly, but all around Antarctica, and not just in one year, but in every year.

In fact, satellite imagery can do one step better because it turns out that the spatial pattern of the penguins on the landscape—with its one big area or they're fragmented across the landscape—tells us something important about the health of the colony—whether it's increasing or whether it's declining and maybe at risk of critical collapse.

So satellite imagery is not just giving us more information; it's actually, in many cases, giving us better information. So the challenge now becomes not can we access these colonies to survey the populations directly, but how do we possibly deal with the volumes of information that we're now getting? We get tens of thousands of satellite images from Antarctica every year, and there just aren't enough penguin biologists in the world to annotate and to interpret all of that satellite imagery.

So the key now is automation. With help from the National Science Foundation and NASA and, most recently, the AI for Earth program, my lab is pioneering the use of computer vision and machine learning to automate the detection of penguin colonies in satellite imagery. One of our big early successes in this arena was our discovery in the Danger Islands of several very, very large Adelie penguin colonies.

The Danger Islands is an island chain off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is so small it does not even appear on maps of Antarctica. Yet it turns out there are more Adelie penguins in the Danger Islands than the entire rest of the Antarctic Peninsula combined. The vast majority of these penguins were not known to exist before we discovered them in Landsat imagery using automated algorithms that would find guano forests in places we never expected.

In response to our discovery, the proposed marine protected area for the Western Antarctic Peninsula was expanded by upwards of 2 million hectares to include this important biological hotspot. It's such a beautiful illustration of how better technology really can lead to better conservation.

We can also use satellites to plan expeditions to the region like we did when we went to the Danger Islands, and that allowed us to deploy another amazing tool for penguin conservation, and that's drones. Drones allow us to map out in extraordinary detail all of the penguins at a colony, and we can count each individual nest.

But drones also allow us to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of these colonies, as you can see in the lower left of the screen. These three-dimensional models allow us to understand how penguin colonies are responding to the landscape terrain, but also how, over hundreds or thousands of years of occupation, penguins are actually shaping the islands on which they live.

The threats that face penguins are as urgent as they've ever been, but with machine learning, computer vision, drones, and satellite imagery, we have the capacity to monitor their populations and respond to threats like never before.

I'm super excited to see where technology will take penguin conservation over the next decade, and now I hope you're excited as well. Thank you very much!

Thank you, Heather, that was terrific. So next, we have a pair of explorers who work side by side in the same lab, looking at life in the deep sea—or what Bob Ballard likes to remind us can be called the final frontier. Please welcome marine ecologist Whitney Goodell and ocean conservation ecologist Jonathan Giddens.

So I'm an ocean ecologist, and I study the deep sea. What I love about ecology is that it's not a study of things; it's a study of relationships within a system. A deep perspective of ecology also looks at the relationship between people and nature, and I developed this perspective because when I grew up, I would draw everything I learned about at school.

Every subject had a journal, and I would stay up sometimes all night illustrating the pages. Through drawing, I learned to see nature as a whole and not something with just little parts that are subtractive. Because in a drawing, things make sense in relation to everything else, and so I believe in the tradition of the early naturalists that art is a partner in the scientific exploration of the deep sea.

I'm Whitney Goodell. I'm a marine ecologist and a National Geographic fellow with Exploration Technology Labs. Something that I hear a lot—and I've actually already heard it a couple times this week from some of you, probably—is, "Oh, you work with the ocean? I always wanted to be a marine biologist when I was a kid."

I, on the other hand, when I was five years old, told my family on a trip to Hawaii, we were heading to the beach and sorting out the day's activities, and I told my family I didn't want to snorkel; the ocean was this unknown place. I didn't know what was below the surface, and I didn’t want to go snorkeling around the unknown, which is kind of an ironic start to my career and my character. But it really begs the question: What else don’t we know, and how is that limiting us?

The deep sea—you've heard it before—we know more about the surface of the Moon or the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean. The deep sea is a huge unknown; it's the Earth's last frontier. It's often pictured as a desolate place, so remote that it might as well be another planet.

But the ocean makes up 99% of the living space on this planet, and only 5% of the deep sea has been explored. So we do not know our own home! Up until relatively recently, the challenge had been—well, how do we actually get there?

So it was not even a hundred years ago that naturalist William Beebe and engineer Barton devised the bathysphere, a two-ton ball of steel that they crawled inside and went a half a mile deep down into the bottom of the ocean off of Bermuda. But imagery and photography had not advanced enough at that time to take pictures there, so what Beebe did is he called on a telephone line up to the surface to artist Charles Wyckoff on the surface, and as he peered out of the portholes in the deep, she was up there drawing and painting these creatures as he described this area.

So while technology took the two men down to the bottom of the ocean, it was art that brought the deep sea into the hearts and minds of people. Now, with the Deep Ocean Dropcam developed by National Geographic Exploration Technology Lab, the deep sea is in reach like never before.

Instead of a two-ton ball of steel, it’s just bigger than a basketball, and it goes down from the surface to the bottom of the ocean and takes high-definition video footage of the seafloor. Here we’re seeing a six-gill shark down at 900 meters, under crushing pressure—this is far, far below diving depths and in perpetual darkness until the Dropcam illuminates the scene.

So how it’s programmed is to record for a number of hours, then when it's done recording, it pops up so that it releases its weight and pops up to the surface. Then it sends a chirp over VHF radio, where we can use an antenna and locate where it is and thereby image the deep like never before.

Because this technology now comes in travel size, it can go all over the world! So we actually have video footage, like what you saw a couple of slides ago, from all of these points on the globe, and this is growing! But these cameras really open up opportunities for opportunistic deployments. So if a ship is going somewhere and they're doing research off that ship, well great! Let’s get some cameras on there, throw them overboard—let’s see what’s down there!

This is really helping us build a spatial understanding of where things live, but it's really cool that we could take it one step further and we can start exploring why do things live where they live. So, in order to explore that, we pull in data—we pull in different kinds of data, like habitat data and sea surface temperature or ocean chemistry.

We can start layering on that information over what we already have—over our points. So we start with our points, we can look at spatial things like how far away is it from different habitats, like trenches or plateaus— is it near spreading ridges? What’s the sea surface temperature—does that matter? What’s the ocean chemistry, phosphate concentrations, nitrate?

We can start looking at all of this information that already exists, we can layer it on, and we can start really understanding the differences between each of these places that we have video footage of. By that we can really start exploring the relationships between these things.

So what the video footage that you saw was in a process of annotation, which is identifying and counting the species present. I construct biodiversity indices so that we can map biodiversity in the deep sea, and with the environmental variables that Whitney showed, I can model the relationship between biodiversity and its environment so that we can better understand and inform management of these systems based on science.

But the process of discovery does not stop there! This is from a recent expedition to the Seychelles, where we were collecting imagery of the seafloor, but I was also using imagination to sense my relationship with the ocean in deep time. These are the types of transformative experiences that I want to share from these places, so as scientists and explorers, we often get to go to these places that are remote and wild and beautiful, and not that many people get to go there.

I want everybody to feel connected to the ocean as a thing of beauty that they’re a part of, and so I think that going forward we can bridge art and science and technology together—not only go further but also bring back the awe and wonder that we find. So please follow us into the deep. If there’s anybody also interested in incorporating science into your art or into your science, please reach out; I’d love to speak with you!

So, the deep sea really is our big unknown, and this, you know, how can we protect something? How can we properly protect something that we don’t know? The Earth is changing really fast, and we are not letting excuses like it’s hard to get there or it’s hard to study—we're not letting that stop us from learning about this place that makes up well over half of the Earth!

So exploration and analysis really provide us the information necessary to start understanding the things and really start building what we need to move forward. It's going to take critical action and appropriately designed management in order to conserve this part of our Earth. For ocean conservation, we really need to collect, connect, and protect. Thank you guys so much—great stuff!

Thank you, Whitney. Thank you, Jonathan. Our final speaker uses artificial intelligence to catalog bioacoustics in species to learn more about biodiversity. Please welcome Holger Clink.

Hi! I’m exploring nature by eavesdropping. What I would like to do today is to present a few highlights of projects we are currently working on. First, I would like to take you south to the Central American rainforest, which you can see behind me, and this is what the rainforest sounds like during the night. It's very much driven by the vocalizations—in this case, of insects.

We can visualize the soundscape to make more sense of it. Let me briefly talk you through what you’re seeing here. So on the x-axis, we have the time—in this case, four days of continuous data we collected in Panama. On the y-axis, we have the frequency of the picture of the sound, and then color-coded you can see the intensity of the sound signals we are recording.

So in this specific case, we have during the day one cicada species, which makes a real lot of noise, and during the night, we have ten cricket species which are calling a lot. But the species where are the family of animals we are mainly interested in are katydids. There are about a hundred different species of them in the area we’re working at, and these are grasshopper-like insects which are mimicking leaves.

You can see they come in various shapes and sizes, and they play a really important role in that ecosystem—a lot of animals, including many of the 80 bat species we have there, but even monkeys, which specialize on katydids as a primary food source. So we also call them nature's popcorn—that's really what it comes down to.

We believe that by monitoring katydid richness as well as abundance and distribution of katydids, that is a really good indication for us how well the rainforest ecosystem is doing, and we're using acoustics to obtain this kind of information. Now, I'd like to take you even further south.

And first, I want to show you what the katydid sounds like. Katydids produce sounds which are most often not audible to us because they're in the ultrasonic frequency range—but we can manipulate the sound to make it audible to you. So you have two dominant sound sources here: the higher frequency pitch sound, this one—that is an echolocating bat who tries to find a katydid to eat. And then the lower frequency sound, which you hear, this one—this is a katydid, trying to attract a female.

So in collaboration with National Geographic and also Microsoft, we're developing machine learning tools which allow us to extract these calls and species ID katydids from our long-term acoustic data sets we’re collecting in the tropics. So now I'm going to take you a little bit further south.

This is the Antarctic ice field. I spent a lot of time down there during my PhD, and I can tell you if you're standing on the ice, there’s not a whole lot going on—maybe the occasional penguin. But listen to what happens when you put in an underwater microphone, which we call a hydrophone, underwater. This is what it sounds like.

In my opinion, this is one of the most amazing soundscapes we have on Earth. These are vocalizations produced by pinnipeds—primarily, in this case, whales, seals, and leopard seals, which I studied during my PhD. Marine mammals make a lot of noise underwater, and sound travels very efficiently in the water.

So really, passive acoustics is a go-to tool for us to monitor the abundance, distribution, and also migration of marine mammals, including the endangered ones, in the ocean. Now I would like to bring it back to the temperate regions. I’m at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, so naturally, I listen to a lot of birds as well. Birds are terrific indicators for ecosystem health, but they're also challenging.

It's a taxonomically very diverse group of animals—there are over 10,000 species in the world, and a lot of them produce a variety of vocalizations. Listen to this guy—this is a bird which you can find right now in your backyard here in the DC area; it’s a brown thrasher. This species alone is known to produce over 1,000 different sound types!

So you can imagine that makes our automated acoustic analysis a little bit more challenging. They also have a tendency to call on top of each other! This is a very short snippet of sound I recorded in Stewart Park in Ithaca, where my laboratory is. In this case, we have six passerine species vocalizing at the same time, doing a dawn chorus.

What you can see and hear is that a lot of their vocalizations overlap in time and frequency, and that’s a real challenge for us to tease this really complex soundscape apart and figure out what species are present at a certain location. But using, again, AI and deep learning methods, we have made really great strides in cracking that knot.

We’re working on a project called BirdNET, and we’re currently training models which are able to differentiate 1,000 bird species—primarily North American species acoustically. Moving forward, we want to include more Central and South American species in this analysis to bring this tool into the regions where we have time-critical conservation efforts.

Thank you! This, by the way, was a wet tally—seals are one of those species you heard vocalizing earlier. That was great, Holger! Thanks for that. We’re going to have a quick panel discussion in just a minute, but before we do, I have a question for you.

Sure! So how exactly do katydids vocalize? So katydids obviously don’t have a vocal tract like we do; what they do is they call—it's stridulation. So they're rubbing body parts against another, and what they do is they lift up their wings. At the base of one wing, they have a sharp ridge, and on the base of the second wing, they have a row of knobs. By rubbing those two against each other, they're producing this stridulation, which causes the wings to vibrate and produce sound.

And it’s very interesting—also, like, they hear—their ears are just below the knee on their front legs, and they're very sensitive to sound intensity. So it's very directional hearing, and what the females do, they can reorient their body and can figure out from which direction the male is calling and then head in that direction where the male is actually vocalizing.

So it’s a little bit like Marco Polo. Just... all right! Well, with that, why don’t we invite our panel to the stage here. We can [Applause]. So there were some themes that each of you hit on, and what I want to go to right away—particularly Jonathan, what you showed us in terms of art playing a role in how we think about science and exploration—how do we think about the impacts as technology advances in the field of the human role in the field? You want to start us, Jonathan?

Yeah, I think that it’s really—the transformation comes on a personal level. It’s a personal story that really can connect people and go through this transformation that we need and how we relate with the natural world. I see that technology is a great tool—it is a great tool to connect us all—but what we really need is art as a partner in this process to help to kind of grab people and help people go through these transformative experiences with nature. So that they connect and love nature and see themselves, see ourselves, as a part of this thing of beauty.

It’s another kind of a message instead of, like, “Do this or you’re all gonna die.” It’s more just, like, “Hey, you know, we’re on this beautiful space—there’s just so much beauty to discover,” and kind of have that transformation happen and then have the technology connect us so that it’s not just separate little things here and there, but we have this opportunity to really have a movement with technology connecting us.

And Heather, with your satellite imagery that you’re using, you're in extreme environments where you're doing this work, and so there’s always been some limitation of how many humans can go into the field. So how do you see this in terms of the scale of the research and what we understand? You spoke to a little bit of it in your talk.

Absolutely! Well, I think that technology really expands the umbrella of exploration in a way that I think is sometimes underappreciated, particularly when it comes to supporting people who want to be explorers but can't spend six, eight, or twelve months in Antarctica. I mean, I can find a million penguins in the morning and still get my kid off the bus in the afternoon! And that, I think, really speaks to the power of technology to really grow the community.

So, you know, one of our explorers, Sarah Parcak—of course, she’s been here before—and she’s really using that satellite technology for archaeology. But what she’s done is she’s really unleashed a whole army of citizen scientists who are helping to look at the work and better informing where we go for archaeology. How do you see the role of citizens in this technology that you’re using?

Absolutely! So we created what we call “Be A Penguin Detective” on a website that we developed. It turns out that school kids all over the country have really responded to this, and we’ll have an entire fifth-grade class look for new penguin colonies in satellite imagery.

In fact, we’ve had brand new emperor penguin colonies that were discovered by citizens out there just exploring because they’re interested. It really gives them an opportunity to do exactly what we’re doing when we’re looking at the satellite imagery, so it’s a great way to scale up and get more eyeballs, but also just to get people really excited.

So we need—you talked about the Dropcams, and we’re all super excited about what we’re seeing from the Dropcams, but you also talked about how we send them on ships or if somebody’s going here or whatever. How do you see ultimately scaling this work?

Well, on the deployment side of it, I think that, you know, connecting so that it’s not just one team that’s got to be doing all of it. We can’t be everywhere; we can’t be doing all of that. It really allows for sort of expanding out. So that we can, kind of with some training, there can be people all over the world that are, you know, if they're connected to expeditions going on, then they can start kind of creating their army of—or sending off their army of cameras.

And really what that allows for is it allows for, you know, footage and information from a huge network across the globe—it’s not just restricted to these tiny areas. What you talked about using sort of layers of information and data to begin to get a picture of our deep sea. You have over 200 explorers here, and as I said, from over 50 countries.

How do you see the opportunities for collaborating with just the groups here?

Yeah, that’s a great question because the data layers part is really an important part of exploring these relationships. Because sure, you can get video footage of animals, but really what’s going to give us this information is how does that relate to other things? And that can be so many different things.

The human element is going to be a huge part in understanding not only, you know, how things are now but how they’re going to change in the future. So connecting with explorers that can give us information across the globe about different types of whatever types of information that they are working with, particularly with the human element—whether it’s fishing or pollution that’s going into rivers, things like that—all of that kind of information can help tell the story of what’s going on.

So, terrific opportunity for explorers here to connect with you and see how they can become part of that network? Yes!

Okay. Okay, I don’t really understand how you deploy the technology in the forest; can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure! So we’re building very small and inexpensive passive acoustic recorders which basically just record sound 24/7 to an SD card. So we try to make them as small and inexpensive as possible so we can distribute them to as many people as possible.

Especially the work we're doing, for example, in Central Africa, it takes a lot of effort to get into these jungle areas, and we have to carry them all in a backpack, so you want to keep it as light as possible, and then we put them out there and let them record for weeks to months at a time. And then typically we cover them and then use machine learning to analyze the data.

But moving forward, we’re really interested in applying these machine learning algorithms in more real-time applications—especially for gunshots, poaching, those kinds of applications. It’s really important that we get the information to the people who are on the ground very quickly, and that will be the next step for us—to apply these methods in a more real-time application.

You know, I spoke in my opening remarks about how many great supporters we have in the audience, in addition to explorers. Some have been truly generous with the National Geographic Society, both individuals and corporate partners, and the Hubbard Council, etc.

How do you prioritize your areas, and what would you say to some of our supporters if they’re interested in helping you scale this work?

Yeah, I mean, a lot is really technology development, and I really want to give a shout out to some of the high-tech industry which really helps us a lot. So we, you know, we get support from Microsoft with our AI for Earth grant. We’re also working on the BirdNET project with Google, and really, it’s them helping us to push the science to the next level.

We could not do that ourselves, so really it’s a really energetic collaboration which makes that happen, and the more of these tech companies we can have helping us out, the better off we’ll be.

And that was going to be my next question—is how engaged are you with the private sector to bring them in and develop side-by-side technologies or tools that can help you in the field?

I guess I'll keep things up! We couldn’t do a lot of what we do without working with some of the same tech companies that Holger mentioned. So that includes 360-degree camera technology in the field. All of the support that we’ve had from Microsoft on the AI for Earth project is just amazing opportunities to go out to Microsoft headquarters and learn from the very best out there.

So that’s been critical not only for me personally but also for my students to give them that opportunity. It is, as Tokarev mentioned, a really nice synergy between conservation and technology and industry, all in one.

Yeah, we are partnering with the National Geographic Society Exploration Technology Lab and reaching out to different partners like MIT Media Lab, AI companies, as well, to help try to figure out how to deal with all this data that we have. Basically, we have over 35 terabytes of data right now, that footage. So we’re looking for help in how to kind of pipeline the data to make it a little bit faster to analyze.

So we definitely are looking for partners in that. Yeah, because you can imagine when you're looking at video footage of the deep ocean, you have to pull data out of that video, so you just have to sit there and watch it, and that takes a long time.

So we’re working with partners to automate that and streamline that to make that a bit faster. You know, one of the criticisms of AI, as much as we love advancements in technology, especially those we can apply in exploration and conservation, is that it’s pattern recognition.

How do you deal with this issue of patterns today and whether they’re the patterns they should be or they’re just the patterns? Right now, how do you sort of look at time when you’re really dealing with artificial intelligence?

Well, this was kind of a quite a controversial, you know, question in an issue. And I would—I guess my feeling is that to the extent that we’re able to support conservation, I don’t care how it is that we got to that answer.

It might be a bit of a black box, but if we can make really good short-term forecasts that are actually meaningful to policymakers, that’s good enough for me. Because a lot of what we do in my lab is that kind of action-ready science, and so however we get there—and we may not understand exactly how the models work now, we hope to get there, but I think it is improving conservation, so...

I couldn’t help but notice on your slides there were numerous mentions of guano detection—also known as penguin poo! Exactly! And we know that that’s the trail often followed to tell us where colonies are.

Do you see, with technology, finding other ways forward to uncover where they’ve been and where they’re going? Absolutely! Well, I always say, you know, we will never have fewer satellites in the sky than we have right now. Like, we will only get more satellites, more resolution, and higher repeat times.

So the future is really bright, and all of the work that we do now investing in how to use those new tools will only continue to grow and blossom in the future. So I absolutely—I’m sure that we’ll have better sensors, more often in the future.

I see Jonathan Bailey smiling over here, so I guess that means the panel has brought out all the things we were hoping to cover here. But before we close, I do have one question for the panel.

So obviously, machines are taking over a lot of life in different places. What we’ve been talking about is machines becoming explorers, going into the field. Do we think we might actually have a National Geographic Explorer that’s a machine in the future?

I think increasingly we’re getting National Geographic explorers who are programmers who program those machines, because at the end of the day, somebody had to sit there and make those models work. Again, I think that kind of speaks to, you know, growing the pie for who can contribute to exploration.

Comments? I think that that kind of overlooks one of the huge values of explorers, which is the ability, the creativity, and the ability to connect with other explorers and other people. I mean, sure, they’re really good at going out in the field and doing what they do, but the strength is really that human aspect.

It was a bit of a TIA. I think one thing we can all agree on is that, you know, when machines and humans combine, that’s when we’re at our best! And that’s certainly true when we’re out in the field.

So thank you, panel! It’s been fascinating. Filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer, Sandesh Kedar: "Wow! Look at this! This is incredible! I was actually hoping we’d stay a little bit longer in space so I wouldn’t have to come in front of all of you; this is quite terrifying!"

See Derek and Jubei Beverly in the audience. This is quite a mesmerizing place to be right here.