Hey TED Talks Daily Listeners, it's Elise.
Thank you for making this show part of your daily routine.
We really appreciate it.
And we want to make it even better for you.
So we put together a quick survey, and we'd love to hear your thoughts.
It's listener survey time.
It only takes a few minutes, but it really helps us shape the show and get to know you, our listeners, so much better.
Head to the episode description to find the link to the listener survey.
We would really appreciate you doing it.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help the show.
When it comes to your business, every second counts.
From mega factories to mom and pop shops, Ericsson helps tens of thousands of companies around the world, build powerful connections every day.
Power your business with our connectivity and communication solutions.
The invisible advantage driving your growth.
visit us at erickson .com slash power.
That's ERICSSON .com slash power.
My husband and I recently realized that neither of us were getting the sleep we deserved.
So, we sat down and talked about our ideal beds.
For him, soft as feathers.
For me, firm as a plank.
This would be a huge issue if it weren't for the Sleep Number Smart Bed.
Thankfully, with our new Sleep Number Smart Bed, And we can each dial in our desired sleep number settings to our ideal comfort and finally get the sleep we deserve.
Plus the climate series feature makes sure our bed stays nice and cool through the warm summer months.
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed?
So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side.
And now it's the Sleep Number Everything Smart Bed Sale.
Every smart bed and base are on sale during our Memorial Day event, up to 50 % off, limited time, exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you.
See store or sleepnumber .com for details.
This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Picture this.
Somewhere in the world, an Apple Card user is getting 3 % daily cash back on the purchase of an iPhone 16 at Apple.
That's not all. They also earned 2 % back on the new shoes they bought using Apple Pay.
Visit apple .co backslash card calculator to see how much daily cash back you can earn.
Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at AppleCard .com.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
So many of us dream of space exploration, seeing our tiny blue dot from so far away, discovering new planets soaring among the stars.
Ariel Ekblaa brings space down to earth, so to speak, but not for the reasons you might think.
Ariel, an aerospace engineer and architect, spends much of her time designing structures that will make it easier to build and eventually live in space.
But as she explains in her talk, space is a frontier for more than exploration.
It's a laboratory for solving humanity's biggest challenges.
After Ariel's talk, she and I sat down for a short conversation about the technology she's developing for space construction, the vast implications this technology has for engineering, health and climate, and why it's so important for us to dream big, both on this planet and beyond.
So, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Congrats on giving us TED Talk.
Thank you so much. Talk us through the process of it and any surprises along the way.
Yeah. So it was an amazing process to put together with my curator.
I'm so grateful to the help that she gave me.
And not just shaping the talk but the ideas and the framework behind the message that we really want to share and that's what I think is so special about the process is refining to the very core, what is that idea that's so important to really share with the public and share with the audience.
We have so many things that we take for granted in our field which I think is true for a lot of folks coming from academia.
It was really interesting for me to hear feedback and then also from folks that I was practicing the talk with, what is familiar to people outside of science fiction who weren't steeped in it from when they were a child?
What is and isn't familiar to people about where have we been in space?
People see the Martian and they think, oh great, we've had humans on Mars for some period of time.
And really smart people can understandably think that there's this crossover now between hyper -realistic sci -fi and reality, what is real and what's not.
So learning what really resonated with people and where they were at, and learning to communicate to reach that audience was really an amazing experience for me.
Yeah, it's really amazing how they've gotten it kind of down to a science, how to prepare people as they go through the process.
Yeah, exactly. Something I was surprised about in your talk is to hear your framing of space exploration in service of the earth.
Thank you. How lovely.
Hello, Ted, it's lovely to be here.
I once had a professor ask me why in the world do we spend so much money on space exploration in the face of so many pressing challenges here on Earth.
It's a good question and a tough one for me.
I do believe in the beauty of space exploration for the sake of new knowledge, but space exploration does so much more than just inspire.
Our space program has routinely delivered breakthrough innovations.
The Apollo program gave us the foundation of modern computing, the International Space Station gave us LASIK eye surgery, contributed to that amazing technology.
And now new technologies are coming online to enable life -saving biotech in orbit and even deliver energy from space.
What makes all of this possible?
It's not something that we've heard much before on the TED stage.
So can you break that idea down?
So again, in science fiction, there's been this idea for decades, let's go and either escape the Earth, so something wrong has happened to the Earth or we've let it fall to pieces and we think of space exploration as either an escape or a plan B, but we really want to argue at our Rayleigh Institute where I do my work is we should be protecting the Earth from the beginning and we could use space technology to do that.
And so one of the best things to do with space infrastructure, build these big structures in orbit, but do things like zero -gravity biotech or space -based solar power that use space technology in service of Earth's citizens.
And that's not to say that someday we won't explore Mars or someday we won't travel outside of the confines of the solar system.
But in the near term, we have so much opportunity to put space to work for Earth.
So that's what we really mean by that is use space technology and bring it back down to It's not just pushing to new frontiers for frontier's sake or exploration's sake, right?
But it's in purpose of something.
It's in purpose of something.
And I am enough of a scientist. I love exploration just for the sake of new knowledge, but we also have to remind the public why it's relevant for their day -to -day life.
People know about GPS in many cases, right?
This is space -based technology that powers the precision of where you are with your phone.
It's why Uber works so well.
But there's now an incredible slate of new things that we could be doing in space, but we need to build up the infrastructure to do it.
And that's what people haven't heard about before.
Instead of building space habitats to go away from Earth, let's build up more infrastructure in low earth orbit to serve Earth, to help Earth.
What new things, what do you feel are the most urgent problems that should be solved or could be solved with a better understanding of space or this change of infrastructure as you discussed?
Yeah. The first is that we know that things like proteins, the building blocks of life, they fold differently when they're floating.
And when you're in space, you're in free fall, so you have this sensation of floating.
And if the proteins fold differently, that means that there's all kinds of different drugs and therapies and cures that can only be made in space.
You can stabilize them, and then you can bring them down.
So a great example is Artificial Retinas.
There's a really cool company called LambdaVision that has figured out how to make an artificial retina in orbit.
You can't do it on earth because it starts to sag.
Gravity basically pulls the really delicate little tissue down but you can do it in micro G.
You can stabilize it and then you would be able to cure macular degeneration once these retinas are inserted into the back of the eye.
So it's like a simple surgical procedure, amazing, amazing gift from space so that's the first one.
And then totally different outside of the health care field, there's there's this huge potential to get energy from the sun. Right now, the sun's energy has to filter through our atmosphere, so it has to go through the clouds.
So solar panels, particularly in like a rainy Vancouver, are not gonna get as much energy, but we could put solar panels above the atmosphere, above Earth, get raw unfiltered sunlight, concentrate it so it pierces through the atmosphere better, and basically treat it like a flashlight.
So you could shine energy on Earth even at night, which would fundamentally solve the storage problem for solar power or the intermittency problem.
So, really cool infrastructure, you should be building safely things like this that could, again, leverage this environment of orbit for the benefit of life on Earth.
So assuming there's buy -in for this at scale, what kind of timeline are we looking at?
For the biotech habitat, we think in the next five years, there's gonna be this race to fill the market gap from the International Space Station being decommissioned.
So, we already have a space station in orbit that does a little bit of this, but it's more like a one -off research projects.
It's not a high -throughput bio factory.
So, I think in five years, we could be able to credibly say that we could do another commercial space station focused around biotechnology and really scale up what the ISS did.
Space -based solar power is a little trickier.
We've known how to do it since the 1970s, so it's not a science question like fusion.
It's really a question of the funding and the engineering ability to assemble thousands of solar panels in orbit.
So you can imagine it takes 10 or 15 years, sometimes 20 years on Earth to build a nuclear power plant.
We might similarly take 10 or 15 years to build that infrastructure in orbit and then be able to deliver the clean energy.
So space -based solar power is more of a middle term investment I think.
Does the political environment and the changing attitudes, I guess, in the changing economy, and situations here on Earth, does that have an impact on your timeline and these visions and how so?
It definitely does and I think it's important to remember, luckily space exploration is still one of the few bipartisan things.
So at least in the US in our political climate, it's really special and we actually really treasure it that we can still get some report from both Republicans and Democrats for space.
We're lucky that the current administration does care about space, so I think as an area where we can expect some additional government attention, it's going to be able to be funded.
But we do worry about groups like NASA having their funding cut and how that could change where other groups like us are able to apply to do some of this scientific and engineering precursor work.
Got it. I also think it's important to think about the ways in which we can democratize access to space.
So for some of this infrastructure we're building, we want people to know that you could commute to space.
Or maybe your kids could commute to space for a job.
We do see this kind of self -sustaining, burgeoning space economy, and there's enough investment and enough excitement about this that we think it will no longer be purely dependent on government funding, which is really important for it to mature as an industry.
So keep that in mind if people are listening.
You might be able to commute to a job in space in the future.
Wow. But of course, anytime you are building infrastructure, that's a major drain on resources, so talk us through environmental costs and how much it would require, yeah.
Yes. So one of the biggest challenges we have in the space industry right now is the current carbon footprint of rocket launches is not significant at all compared to aviation, but if we succeed in increasing the frequency of launches, which is what everybody wants to do, then it does really become a serious issue.
So one of the things that we think about to be able to achieve this infrastructural level building in space, we need to be able to do cleaner mass to orbit.
It needs to have a lower carbon footprint than it does right now.
So there's really interesting new rocket engines, liquid oxygen hydrogen engines, that are cleaner than hydrazine, cleaner than some of the old types of rocket fuel.
There's also really cool new companies where it doesn't work for humans because we're a little fragile.
Our biology is very gentle.
But for things that are just mass, like cargo that you need to get to orbit, you might be able to do it with a mass driver or a slingshot.
No way. Get it off the Earth without a rocket.
And so then there's less chemical propulsion burden on the planet.
So definitely a huge area of focus for the space industry.
How can we be responsible as we scale up?
So there's a near future in which you could slingshot, like, a container?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
It normally travels on a container ship.
You can send it off to space.
That's amazing. And in order to have a lower carbon footprint, right?
Yes, exactly. We're doing it for the environment, people.
All right. Well, it is no secret, I'm sure not a secret to you that the fields you are in are heavily male -dominated.
And so I'd just love to know how you've navigated this as a woman and what kind of lessons you've taken from being often the only one, or one of the few in the room.
I'm really lucky in this regard, my mom was one of the first women to ever fly for the United States Air Force.
No way. So she was in the second class of women pilots admitted into the Air Force, she ultimately became an instructor pilot and taught the guys how to fly in her particular squadron.
Oh, like in Top Gun.
Like in Top Gun. Yes.
My parents met in pilot training, so they do have a bit of a ridiculously adorable Top Gun story.
My dad was a fighter pilot.
But my mom, being one of the first women ever allowed to fly, she really raised me with a sense of pride, and she used to say things from the time I was really little.
Girls are good at math.
Just reinforce the fact that you have just as much right an opportunity and natural ability to go out and really succeed and try hard. So I bring that with me in all the different things that I do.
It really helps to have had a role model.
And that's important, I think, that we now show women who would be coming up behind us, So that there are role models, amazing women like Gwen Shotwell, who run SpaceX. Am I supposed to say badass?
She's so badass. And that's an example of young women can look at that whether they're in middle school, high school, undergrad, graduate school and say, oh wow, there's a path for me in this industry.
I might be one of a very few number of women in my quantum physics class, but there's an example and I know that I can achieve that.
We also worked really hard at Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit that I run, to give opportunities to people from all walks of life, not just women by any means, but really thinking about people who traditionally might not have had an aerospace door opened for them, and through bringing them on a zero -gravity flight, affectionately known as the Vomit Comet, we try to introduce more people to this opportunity to be part of the workforce of the space industry now that it's burgeoning so incredibly.
And arguably just you being on the TED stage and just being more externally -focused too is a way of role modeling and showing...
I hope so. I mean showing other folks and younger people especially in marginalized communities that they could do what you do and have a very multi - or polysyllabic title.
Polysyllabic title.
Well, let's bring it back to your experience giving a TED Talk because one of the struggles with especially scientific TED Talks is there's so much nuance, there's so many ideas that So many things I want to say.
So many things that you want to say that you then have to distill into a single talk that's usually 20 minutes or less.
So, what was something you ended up cutting, or that you really wanted to include that you would love to take this platform and this moment to share?
Oh, that's such a great question.
Thank you. There's so much I wanted to say.
And it's a really, like I said again at the beginning, it's such a good exercise to be asked to distill your ideas down.
But something I'd love to share with this audience is before the research that gets shown in the talk happened, the missions to the International Space Station, we did six years of zero gravity flights, of lab testing just on a bench top in the MIT Media Lab with strings suspending the tiles, learning how to actually do robotic self assembly.
And so in a TED Talk you often see kind of the end glory state and the most recent thing that got you there, but there's so much development in science and engineering, so much iterative prototyping and failure and recreating the idea that builds into that.
So I wish, yeah, I could have shown all of those hours in the lab building up to the very first spaceflight tests that we did.
Well, you got to talk about it now.
Thank you. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded.
Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in.
Businesses use Vanta to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 frameworks like SOC2 and ISO 27001.
Centralized security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively managed vendor risk.
Vanta not only saves you time, it can also save you money.
A new IDC white paper found that Vanta customers achieve $535 ,000 per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months.
Join over 9 ,000 global companies like Atlassian and Quora and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
For a limited time get $1 ,000 off Vanta at vanta .com slash TED audio that's vanta .com slash TED audio for $1 ,000 off.
My husband and I recently realized that neither of us were getting the sleep we deserved so we sat down and plank.
This would be a huge issue if it weren't for the Sleep Number Smart Bed.
Thankfully, with our new Sleep Number Smart Bed we can each dial in our desired sleep number settings to our ideal comfort and finally get the sleep we deserve.
Plus, the climate series feature makes sure our bed stays nice and cool through the warm summer months.
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed?
So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side.
And now it's the Sleep Number Everything Smart Bed Sale.
Every smart bed and base are on sale during our Memorial day event.
Up to 50 % off limited time, exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you.
See store or sleepnumber .com for details.
We will now go into a lightning round and it's just a fun way to get to know you outside of the TED Talk topic specifically.
So, all right, first question.
What does innovation or a good idea look or feel like to you?
Ooh, this is going to come from my physics background.
I like it to feel elegant, something that we think a lot about in math and physics, something that doesn't feel kludgy, doesn't feel over -engineered or over -innovated.
It's something that is maybe a new as yet unknown idea that is an elegant solution to a problem.
And sometimes it speaks for itself and sometimes you have to really search for it, but that's probably what first comes to mind.
What is something new that you brought into your life in 2025?
I don't know if this counts but I recently moved to New York.
I decided to split my time between Boston where my MIT lab and the team is and then bring a little bit new energy by moving to New York and kind of expanding my sphere of activity.
And so that has been really delightful and a good change of scenery for me.
Bringing New York into your life in 2025 is pretty big.
It's lovely. I think that counts.
I lived in Boston for 10 years.
So it was time. I think that counts.
What are you hoping to leave behind by the time the year is out?
Oh, that's a great question.
In the team, we're in basically a startup mode constantly.
And so something that my chief of staff and I always think about is survival, survival level fundraising, surviving in the global economy, survival in all of these different ways that a young fledgling startup has to think about.
I would love to get to a point at the end of the year where I've taken care of my team.
We're pretty well -funded.
We have the pathway to really do the meaningful work that we want to do in orbit.
and I can shed some of that survival scale mentality.
So this conference obviously focuses a lot, or at least in the last few years on AI.
Yes. For you, what do you feel like the conversation around AI is missing or what's not talked about enough?
I actually heard the amazing poet Salome today, who just gave her TED Talk as well, say that we think about AI as the kind of scary boogeyman sometimes of all these things that it might bring forward, but there are so many fundamental things to still solve for humanity.
Her point was why are we worried about these superhuman superthinking structures when so much of the Earth's population is still not yet literate.
Hey everyone, jumping in quickly to say that Ariel is referring to poet Salome Agbarucci here who shared a beautiful poem at TED 2025.
Salome's performance will be coming out in just a few weeks.
So make sure to keep an eye out on the feed for that.
And now back to my conversation with Ariel.
And so I actually think one of the things that's missing that she did such a great job of calling out is let's not get obscured.
Absolutely, we should think about AI safety.
Absolutely, we should think about all of the amazing ways to integrate this miraculous technology.
But let's remember that there are still fundamental pockets of humans who need help in a less technologically driven way.
Maybe technology is part of the solution, But go and remember that we're solving really complex problems that AI brings us that are new.
We still have some really fundamental...
What about clean water?
Yeah. What about clean water?
Yeah. That still exists, too.
Yeah, exactly. Some of the mundane things are still just as important and just as critical to solve.
And I thought it was a wonderful part of being here in the TED communities to have been reminded of that.
That's lovely. That's lovely.
Okay. Off the TED stage, what's a fun talent, skill, or hobby that you have that you love so much that you can give another TED Talk about it?
Ooh, I am obsessed with tropical botany.
I have something over 40 houseplants in my house.
I love trying to keep semi -tropical plants alive in Boston – quite a challenge.
Do you have a greenhouse?
What do you do? Do you have to create an environment to allow them to survive?
Some of them get sprayed.
Some of them get misted.
I give them special water – no tap water.
You have to filter out the soft, dissolved salts that are in a lot of our drinking water.
So they get ridiculous attention, and I don't quite have a greenhouse, but someday I would love to have a separate greenhouse for the botany project.
Where are you on talking to plants?
Ooh, I'm pro. Definitely pro.
Yeah, a lot of people talk to plants and they swear by it.
They say that like plants seem to respond.
At least because you're giving them the attention, you know when they need water that might be as basic as that.
It could be that. Here's the scientific explanation because it does seem kind of like, oh, we're all connected as living things by this collective unconscious, but maybe it's just like, oh, I'm paying more attention to it.
I know whether you spot her or not, yeah.
OK. Is there a regret you have, a mistake that you've made in your life that's really taught you something?
I had a wonderful conversation with another TED speaker that reminded me of this the other day.
I went through a really tough situation with my mom.
She got really sick a few years ago.
She has since recovered.
That period of taking care of her was incredibly intense.
It happened to overlap with the pandemic.
But the sense of fulfillment and mattering that I had and she had in that time feels actually so much more profound sometimes than even my day -to -day work and I love my day -to -day work.
I love working on space exploration.
But I basically don't want to have the regret in 10 years of having focused so solely on an aspirational ambition that I didn't do the things, the very human things that just help you feel fulfilled and grounded like taking care of your family, being there when someone really, really needs you, and it was another wonderful conversation that Ted had that was just such a crystallization of that's how you avoid regret, is don't get so caught up in your own excitement, which can be a good thing, that you forget some of the really fundamental basic human needs around fulfillment and taking care of others
and being needed. That's beautiful and a beautiful reminder.
Ariel, thank you so much. My pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been great talking to you.
It's been a delight.
That was Ariel Ekblau in conversation with me, Elise Hu, in 2025.
You can check out Ariel's talk on the TED Talks Daily feed, and at TED .com.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED audio collective.
This episode was produced by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar.
This episode was recorded by Rich Amy's and Dave Palmer of Field Trip.
production support from Daniella Balarezzo and Shu -Han Hu.
The Ted Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, and Tansuka Sangmarnivong.
I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your fee.
Thanks for listening.
Support for the show comes from Capital One.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too.
Oh, really? Thanks Capital One Bank guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply. See CapitalOne .com slash Bank.
CapitalOne NA. Member FDIC.
When it comes to your business, every second counts.
From mega factories to mom and pop shops, Ericsson helps tens of thousands of companies around the world build powerful connections every day.
Power your business with our connectivity and communication solutions, the invisible advantage driving your growth.
Visit us at ericsson .com slash power.
That's E -R -I -C -S -S -O -N .com slash power.
Imagine a toilet so striking it inspired a couture dress.
That's right, Kohler's Veil Smart Toilet in Honed Black actually inspired fashion designer Laura Kim to create a stunning black chiffon dress that debuted on the runway at New York Fashion Week.
The Veil Smart Toilet, with its curved design, deep, rich, textural color, touch screen controls, and customizable cleansing features, can transform your routine into something extraordinary.
That's the power of design.
Design changes everything.
Veil Smart Toilet in Honed Black.
Only from Kohler. Discover the Vail Smart Toilet and go behind the scenes of Kohler's partnership with creative director Laura Kim at Kohler .com
