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- [Announcer] Ten, nine.
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Ignition sequence starts.
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Six, five, four, three,
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two, one, zero.
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All engine running.
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Lift off.
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We have a lift off.
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32 minutes past the hour.
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Lift off on Apollo 11.
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[upbeat instrumental music]
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- [Lisa] Imagine that you're
on a trip to a distant planet.
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So you're in a spacecraft,
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and you have to figure
out how to feed yourself
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and the rest of your crew.
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One idea is to take a packet of seeds
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that can grow using elements
of the air, water, and energy,
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and that can grow really fast,
in a matter of hours.
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It's a way of making food
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that doesn't require any
arable land whatsoever.
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You can grow food anywhere, anytime,
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rain or shine, day or night.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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- [Speaker 1] The way we
farm today will not sustain
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human civilization as we know it.
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- [Speaker 2] There's not
gonna be enough water.
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And there's not gonna be enough land.
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- [Speaker 1] We are
never going to replace
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traditional agriculture,
but we sure can innovate.
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- [Speaker 3] We can learn
how to at least pivot
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and to work with this changing world.
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[dynamic music continues]
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[wind howling]
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- Being a scientist, thinking
about climate science,
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is why I do many of the things that I do.
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[somber music]
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I was one of the many people
who went to New Orleans
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after Hurricane Katrina hit.
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My mother's family's from Louisiana,
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so I went to Louisiana a lot as a kid.
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Very fond memories.
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But going back to Louisiana in 2005
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was a very different story.
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And just seeing the devastation
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that this weather event created,
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that had a huge impact.
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That got me interested in trying
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to be a part of the solution.
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[helicopter buzzing]
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[somber music continues]
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We really looked at the biggest problem,
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and the biggest opportunity,
which is alternative meat.
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Replacements for beef,
chicken, pork, et cetera.
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And we asked the question, we
said, if we can solve this,
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if we can make something
like a meat alternative
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that tastes good, then we can,
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you know, solve many problems.
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And we need to do it in a
way that uses much less land,
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that does not lead to deforestation,
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that doesn't emit as much of
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the greenhouse gas emissions that we have.
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[ambient electronic music]
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NASA started working
on the technical piece,
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but didn't finish.
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And that's what takes the longest,
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is figuring out the science,
doing all the research,
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the studies, the scale-up work.
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Well this is very exciting.
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It's for our air protein beef
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to be infused with Mexican flavors.
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- It's easy to flavor.
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It can be pushed into
barbecues, into pork dish.
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- We're making food in a whole new way.
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Food that is highly nutritious.
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Our initial protein ingredients
have 80% protein content
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with all of the essential amino acids,
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then rich in vitamins and minerals.
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What did you think when
I first asked you that,
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you know, if we can make meat from air?
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- I first thought of the
structure, the texture of meat.
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How it feels like when you bite into it,
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how it tastes, the smell.
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And then how do I create that in the lab?
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Taking the powder that we have,
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the ingredient that we made from air,
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and putting that into these various forms,
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so that when we eat
it, it feels like meat.
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It tastes like meat.
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- Yeah, there you go.
- Just dive right in?
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- [Christopher] One bite.
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- There was an element of magic.
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There was an element of science.
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There's an element of mystery
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and history that we all put in.
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- The texture.
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- The texture of the
protein is really nice.
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- Yeah.
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- Perfect for meat taco,
coming from a Mexican.
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- Our process is a new
type of fermentation.
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And fermentation makes beer,
makes wine, makes yogurt,
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makes cheese, and now
it makes air protein.
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And it will make more things.
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So if you're dealing with yogurt,
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your agricultural input is milk.
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Same with cheese.
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In our case, what we actually feed it,
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the elements that make up those inputs.
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So milk is made up of
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen.
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We feed it those elements.
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So here we have where it all begins.
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[upbeat electronic music]
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- These serve as cultures to grow out
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larger lots of material,
that which we can then refine
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and purify to produce
protein-rich ingredients.
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And it really comes down to, you know,
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this culture being the
start of the process,
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going through multiple refining steps.
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- [Filmmaker] Just so that I understand,
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in these little beakers
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are the microbes to
which you add hydrogen,
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oxygen, carbon dioxide.
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And you mix it all around,
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and you can make pasta, or meat, or bread.
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Is that...?
- In a nutshell.
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That's it.
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All right, yeah.
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So now we're gonna transfer our cultures
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to a controlled growth environment
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to propagate this culture.
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- [Filmmaker] So how long
will they stay in there?
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- Anywhere from 24 to 72 hours,
depending on the culture.
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And at that time they're ready
to go into a larger reactor.
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[upbeat electronic continues]
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- I have to tell you
that I'm super excited.
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I haven't tasted the
air protein bread yet.
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I love the way it looks.
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We're continuously fine-tuning
and refining recipes,
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'cause that's what you have to do.
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You have your ingredient,
now you have to mix it
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with other ingredients,
and get your final recipe.
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So that's an ongoing process.
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Okay.
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Air protein bread.
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- Cheers.
- Cheers.
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- That's very good.
- Thank you.
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- Everyone loves food.
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I love food as a very
applicable, relatable science.
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- I've always been interested in food,
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and I've also been interested
in kind of all aspects
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of science, chemistry,
microbiology, engineering.
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- I was watching, like, a
Domino's commercial actually,
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about a new sauce that
they were unveiling.
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And was like, who does that?
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So, Googled "food science,"
quite literally,
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and discovered it's a field.
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- Most of it is chemistry, yeah.
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- Doing food science that has, like,
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a larger purpose is interesting to me.
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- So I'm gonna make air protein egg.
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This is air protein.
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I'm gonna put the water in now.
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[upbeat instrumental music]
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Air protein egg is
similar with egg in pasta
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because it has the
emulsification properties,
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and also, like, water-holding and binding.
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So it helps the dough come
together pretty nicely.
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[upbeat music continues]
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[machine whirs]
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Gonna make a nest here.
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So I'm gonna measure the
firmness of the pasta.
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I'm gonna lay down the pasta right here.
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We wanna be consistent and we want for--
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We want the pasta to
hold up during boiling
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so it doesn't, like, mush when you eat it.
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[dramatic orchestral music]
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- Hey Lisa, how are you?
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- It's really busy this morning.
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- Yeah, it is, it is.
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- [Lisa] Bring me up to speed.
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What's happening?
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- They're prepping the
micronutrients, if you will,
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that the fermentation requires.
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So that's being prepped.
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Basically just final
checkouts of all the systems.
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- There's a huge food security benefit
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to this way of making food,
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and you can make it in a matter of hours.
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You don't have to wait
for the right season.
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96 hours later, your
system is fully producing.
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- [Neil] That's one small step for man,
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one giant leap for mankind.
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- We stand on the shoulders
of the NASA scientists
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who thought up this idea
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of making nutrients from
elements of the air.
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[ambient electronic music]
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We face lots of scientific
and engineering challenges.
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It's not easy, but
we're seeing the effects
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of climate change now.
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And the need to act is only getting
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more important and more urgent.
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[ambient music continues]
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[upbeat electronic music]
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