[Music]
 Hey, well there you go. Okay.
 Dr. Jonathan Trent in the studio with us. A local scientist who's...
 You started here in Santa Cruz. Way back at UC Santa Cruz,
 one of the first students in the early 70s and setting the ocean and microorganisms back in those days.
 Now, it was the first wave.
 The first wave of Santa Cruz UCSC grads, huh?
 Just after they got them out of their trailers, I was in that early group.
 It was quite fun.
 I probably would never have finished my academic career if it hadn't been for UCSC and it's free, wheeling.
 They didn't do grades back then, right?
 It's not even a pass fail. You just took a class and if you did well, you got credit and if you didn't do well, you didn't get credit.
 Oh, wow.
 And then they threw you out if you didn't pass a bunch of classes in a certain time.
 It wasn't totally without consequence.
 How did you decide on UC Santa Cruz?
 Well, to be honest, when I finished high school, I decided I didn't want to go to the university.
 I wanted to just teach myself an auto-ductile kind of person.
 I started studying the library, but my high school girlfriend got accepted at UCSC and she compelled me to apply.
 Ah, girls, huh?
 And I really took it off the college.
 You know, I'm glad you're one of those people who has been well influenced by the women you love.
 Yeah.
 So you went from there and once you were in, how did you discover your passion?
 Oh, my. Well, I'm shopped around a lot and that was a good thing about UCSC.
 I came in and studied literature for a while and then switched to linguistics and mathematics
 and got involved with John Grinder and Richard Bandler.
 Oh, I don't think.
 I don't think.
 Wow.
 Before they was NLP, they were working on their first books called The Structure of Magic.
 And they were looking for linguistic cues for behavioral patterns.
 And I was one of the guinea pigs that they were using in the classes that we were in.
 It was fun.
 It was interesting.
 I mean, I had studied transformational grammar with John Grinder and then I was taking biology
 to be a well rounded person.
 And so I met John Pierce, who was a professor in bird of physiology and subtitle ecology.
 And I had been a diver my whole life.
 And so it was really a great connection to start realizing there were names for all those.
 Teachers of the city.
 Oh, boy.
 Wow.
 You were scuba diver?
 I was scuba diver, yeah.
 And so the actual progression was that I was studying subtitly ecology in the kelp beds with
 John Pierce at Hopkins.
 And I had this idea.
 Mary Silver was my professor for pelagic ecology studying the open ocean.
 And I naively said, "Why not use scuba to study the open ocean?"
 You're out there.
 I guess.
 Mary gave us the keys to the Boston Whaler and we went out in the middle of Monterey Bay
 and went diving.
 Wow.
 It was quite an eye opener.
 We ended up writing a paper about our observations because we were able to see things that most
 marine scientists couldn't sample.
 Our first paper was published in science.
 Is that what they called snow?
 Yes, marine snow is what it's called.
 The debt reduction of some sort in the water?
 Yeah, it's to try this.
 It's all kinds of remains that stay floating.
 A lot of mucous, slimy stuff that's in the ocean.
 And it's really impossible to study unless you get in the water or you have some robotic
 system.
 I mean, this was back in the days when we did Apollo.
 We sent people to the moon.
 We sent people into the deep ocean and that was a bit nutty really.
 I mean, now we do everything with robots.
 They're way better than what we can do and not death.
 Don't be restricted.
 Yeah, well, no one dies, right?
 Do you like to switch the virtual or do you want the guys really like to be out there
 in the field?
 Well, I was really enamored of diving in the open ocean and I did a lot of it.
 I went from San Francisco to Hawaii and dove along that whole cruise track and then Hawaii
 to Tahiti.
 I went dove along that whole cruise track and from Woods Hole to the Azores and Azores
 to Scotland and dove almost every day along that cruise track.
 The only days we didn't dive was when the weather was really horrible and we couldn't
 get in the water.
 It was too dangerous.
 Well, you saw the world really.
 Yeah, it did.
 From underwater world.
 Underwater world.
 Actually, dove through most of the main currents in the ocean, not in the Arctic or in the Antarctic.
 Most of the currents themselves.
 Yeah, well, it's really quite amazing because as you cross the equator, you go through
 a really high productivity zone.
 I saw the deserts and the forests and the real jungles of the ocean.
 Wow.
 And I took pictures.
 Wow.
 I took pictures along the way.
 I had a girlfriend when I was at Scripps doing my PhD who saw some of my photographs.
 She was an artist and she said, "Well, you have to do an exhibit because that's how artists
 think."
 And I said, "Well, no, they're just an archive of things I've observed."
 "No, no, no, you need to do."
 I gathered together all my savings as a graduate student and I spent, I don't know, $4,000
 framing all these beautiful photographs.
 And I put them up in an exhibit at Scripps and then at the Museum in LA.
 And then it was over and I thought, "Wow, I was all a lot of work and I know it's just
 going to sit in a closet somewhere or a garage."
 And so I submitted it to the Smithsonian.
 And I traveled with the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition series for five years and went all
 over the country.
 In fact, all over Canada.
 Wow.
 What was the name of the exhibit?
 It was called UFOs.
 It was called UFOs, the unfamiliar fan of the open sea unfamiliar sea.
 I guess Mufan wasn't a thing yet.
 No, no, no, no, it was before that.
 And they were all slides that I carefully had enlarged into pictures.
 And they're all actually now hanging at Moss Landing Marine Lab.
 Oh, beautiful.
 So they're all framed photographs.
 The Embary?
 They're not there.
 They're Moss Landing.
 The San Jose State University Marine Lab in Moss Landing.
 Oh, good to know.
 Yeah.
 Interesting.
 They've been there for like 20 years.
 Sure.
 So from the ocean to other kinds of inner spaces and outer spaces.
 So that was just your training ground.
 Was that still when you were at UC?
 Where did you go from UC?
 I left UC Santa Cruz and moved to Hopkins and worked at Hopkins Marine Station doing research
 for a while.
 And then that's in Monterey and Pacific Grove.
 And then I went to Scripps Institution of Ocean.
 Oh, down south.
 Down in La Jolla.
 Yeah.
 And I did my PhD there.
 I actually got involved in a really interesting project.
 You know, the hydrothermal vents have been discovered back then.
 A lot of people thought that's where life itself emerged.
 Yes, it's true.
 Probably not.
 But the temperatures are just excruciating.
 Well, what was it about the-- is that where you first saw extreme profiles?
 Yeah.
 So what happened was the hydrothermal vents were a real mystery because they were surrounded
 by life in the deep ocean.
 And it's partly because it's like an oasis in a dark, cold, like a fire.
 It's a kept fire on the cold night.
 Yes.
 A hearth in the middle of the dark ocean.
 Yes.
 That's a metaphor I really like to use.
 And I was studying bacteria that lived in the deep ocean that are called piezo files
 or barophiles.
 These organisms were isolated from the Marianas trench.
 So you know, that's--
 I remember these articles, weren't they like found on like old whale bone fossils or something
 like that?
 They were actually found just in the water and in the sediments.
 And they were brought up under pressure and kept cold.
 And we kept them alive in the lab at 1,000 atmospheres of pressure, 1,000 bars of pressure.
 Wow.
 So they might survive on a Jupiterian satellite or something, huh?
 They can handle the heavy pressure.
 The temperature's pretty cold, but they can handle amazing pressure.
 So you know--
 Not only do they handle the pressure, but they require the pressure.
 Did you have to build a special chamber that could withstand those pressures?
 Absolutely.
 So we had titanium cylinders and we put the microbes inside basically syringes, plastic
 syringes, and we threw them in with the media inside the syringe and then capped off.
 And then we threw them into these titanium vessels, filled it with silicon oil, and then
 pressurized them.
 And we could decompress them once a week or every other week and we would change their
 media so they could grow.
 And they would survive just a short period of time decompressed.
 Oh, wow.
 So they had to get recompressed right away or they would die.
 Yeah, because we couldn't survive where they lived.
 Oh, yeah, it really sounds like you're to them, the equivalent of a gray alien who's
 like putting them in a little experimental spaceship and giving them new life experiences.
 There are a lot of environments that we can't have.
 So how would you describe their natural habitat?
 Oh my god, dark, cold.
 I mean, they're only light as biologically generated.
 It's really about--
 Really?
 They're on light?
 Peace out.
 So they're studying didn't produce light lupioluminescence, but all around their organisms that do.
 So they had other creatures in their ecosystem?
 Oh, yeah.
 The deep ocean is a desert, but it's not a dead desert.
 It's a live desert.
 I'll restow the microbial level, especially.
 Oh, especially on the microbial level, right?
 And we're talking about harvesting magnesium nodules from the deep ocean now.
 And those are microbially generated over hundreds, if not thousands of years and very
 slow, cold, dark environment.
 It's a pretty amazing place to think.
 When you consider that it's covering 71% of the Earth's surface, it's dark and cold and
 never changing it, really the only influx is coming from stuff sinking from the surface
 water into this dark environment.
 And many of the larger organisms vertically migrate up into the surface waters and then
 back down.
 Well, is it more stable than the land in terms of climate change?
 Oh, absolutely.
 Well, it's a very good question as to whether the oceans have always been cold, but they've
 certainly been cold for a very long time.
 So they'd have more of an uninterrupted chain of evolution than land?
 Yeah, you know, it used to be thought in 19th century biology, evolutionary biology.
 People like Huxley suggested that the deep ocean was inhabited by the primordial ooze.
 Because it'd be a long term.
 They have more years involving than we would.
 Yes, exactly right.
 And there was actually, when they went on those, it disvoitages of discovery in the early 20th
 century and 19th century.
 They would bring samples back to the laboratory and they found this material in the samples
 that they brought back that was ubiquitous.
 And it was somewhat organized in somewhat, it just, it wasn't really biological, but
 it wasn't a biological.
 And it became known as Bethibius.
 And it was ubiquitous and many of the scientists like Huxley and Heckle, they were speculating
 about this stuff.
 They called it the oerschlimme, you know, the ancient slime that was left over from the
 origins of life.
 And you know, the amazing thing about this is there was a chemist that went to see and
 he collected this material to look at fresh samples because all of the scientists at that
 point had looked at preserved samples that were preserved with alcohol.
 And what this guy discovered was that this was an artifact that this oerschlimme, which
 they called Bethibius acli, was only formed when they added alcohol to seawater.
 And it was fine to complete nonsense.
 There was nothing like that.
 And this guy, oops, discovered it.
 And not people, the people who make these types of discoveries don't get very famous
 because the scientific community were their most famous people being embarrassed to be
 able to retract.
 So oops, oops.
 Anyway, it's funny that you mentioned that about the oerschlimme and the primitive ooze
 in the deep ocean.
 Yes.
 And it had us all this time to evolve for so for how many years, billion years?
 Yeah.
 Well, it's not clear how long the oceans have been cold.
 There's some evidence that the oceans during the history of the earth have been actually
 quite warm.
 And they've gone through excursions of cooling and warm.
 And your understanding of life is that when it's warmer, there's more life, typically,
 right?
 Depends that the temperature range, the Goldilocks range, the temperature has to be quite right.
 Biology loves it.
 Yes.
 And it's a relation of temperature and pressure, probably, right?
 Well, in the ocean pressure is important.
 On land, it's not as important, although there are organisms living in the deep earth.
 But the temperature limit has been something that we've been wondering about for a long
 time.
 It's something that I've spent quite a lot of time studying.
 Do you study organisms in the atmosphere as well?
 I didn't.
 But there were people at NASA when I was at NASA that studied atmospheric organisms in
 higher altitudes.
 They were extremely good.
 Yeah.
 It's not clear that they're actually metabolically active, but they're certainly sampleable.
 They're up in the air.
 But whether they are living up there or just surviving up there is a different story.
 You have to understand the requirements for metabolism, water, and an energy source.
 Yeah.
 Well, they'd have a lot of sun up there.
 People and UV, and they would have to protect themselves from the ultraviolet.
 Yeah.
 Because that damages their biomolecules.
 Oh, wow.
 Anyway, I mean, I spent a lot of time studying all this stuff.
 Yeah, I was just studying streamer files from hydro-sermal vents.
 Do they have a genetic manipulation that succeeded in the meaning of survival at such
 high temperatures underwater?
 You mean the organisms living in the highest?
 Streamer files in the high temperatures.
 Yeah, I heard they're like some of them had a flat July that would cool the water around
 them by flipping really fast.
 That would cause the water to be cooler, and their immediate membrane vicinity.
 I don't know.
 How did they survive at these temperatures?
 Well, you have to understand that bacteria are so small.
 Yeah.
 So there are fractions of the diameter of a human hair.
 And so they live in a world that's completely alien to us.
 So when you say that they're flipping their infilligella and they're moving the water,
 that's not true.
 It's been compared, if you were a microbe, if you were the size of a bacterium and you
 had a flagellum, moving your flagella would be like being in a swimming pool of molasses
 at room temperature.
 Oh, so really hard.
 So their so-called Reynolds number is incredibly low.
 And so their whole environment.
 And you're moving your hands through this pool of molasses at the speed of the minute
 hand on a clock.
 They move incredibly fast.
 If you look at it in body lengths per hour and you compared it to a bicyclist, they're
 moving at a speed which would be comparable to riding a bike at, I think, it was 600 miles
 per hour.
 Wow.
 And they stop within one body length.
 So they're moving incredibly fast if you look at it at a scale.
 So that's one of the year.
 What kind of communities do they have?
 So they're totally different.
 It's an incredible diversity of organisms down there.
 If they live within communities, it's true.
 What we end up studying in the lab are the freaks that we can isolate.
 You take them out of the community.
 Yeah, you take them out of the community.
 And then some weird organism that might be a keystone species in the sense that you
 provide it with some kind of growth medium and that organism survives.
 And all the others are not capable of dealing with the complexity of the change that you
 just made.
 Oh, so.
 But I mean, these organisms are amazing.
 There's no doubt.
 They've created their biochemistry for a long time.
 Their DNA didn't explain how they could survive.
 It was long hypothesized that the DNA would be GC rich, which means to a rather of the
 nucleotides that are holding the DNA together that have an extra bond to them would make
 the DNA more stable.
 And that proved not to be true.
 That DNA was not stabilized that way.
 In fact, I studied an organism near boiling sulfuric acid.
 And it had a very low GC content.
 That was his natural habitat?
 His natural habitat was first observed in the hot springs in Yellowstone by a guy named
 Tom Brock in the 1960s or 70s.
 And it's interesting because they went to look for them and Tom Brock was the professor
 said, "Well, there's nothing alive in that pool."
 Then his grad students found these organisms living there, which they called Sopholobus.
 Sopholobus.
 Sopholobus.
 A sittle coderios was in the admin.
 And this is the ones that they tell you not to put your foot in the water there because
 of these bacteria.
 The yellow stone water.
 No, no, no, no, no.
 It's only because the water is so hot and so acidic that your skin would slough off.
 Oh, it's not because of the bacteria.
 No, no, no, no, no.
 They don't live at temperatures below 150 degrees.
 So they would never be able to be pathogenic because they can't cope with our body temperature.
 We're just being able to talk about that.
 We're too cold.
 We're too cold.
 Yeah, it is.
 It's really because they must have had a whole interesting history about how they survive
 the ice ages and stuff.
 Well, you know, a lot of microbes survive a lot of high temperature microbes and a lot
 of medium temperature microbes and even low temperature microbes survive really well when
 they get cooled down provided they get cooled down fast enough.
 Right.
 So cryopreservation.
 Yeah, that's all right.
 You know, I mean, you find mammoth frozen in the glacier somewhere.
 Right.
 With the lunch in the tummy.
 The tissues that are available to use, right?
 Yes.
 It doesn't break down.
 So cryopreservation works well for microbes.
 It works well for microbes.
 It's not so well for humans because of the complexity of it.
 We haven't figured out how to thaw us out.
 We can freeze this pretty well, but thawing us out as well.
 I think the big story this week was that they've successfully done this with brain tissue.
 Oh, okay.
 Brain tissue seems to be preserved and can be thawed out after three months.
 Like, that makes sense.
 There's a lot of fatty tissue there.
 But it's a lot of fat in it.
 So fat has a way of organizing when it gets cooled.
 And the key has always been freezing at the right rate.
 If you freeze too slowly and there's water present, then the crystals grow and they damage
 the cell membranes.
 Yeah.
 Just rough.
 Sharp edges.
 If you freeze them incredibly fast, like plunge freeze them in a way that they really get
 exposed.
 The flash freeze.
 Flash freeze.
 But do you get in a way that it doesn't go from the outside in, but goes through the
 whole thing?
 All at once.
 All at once.
 And then the water molecules stay as tiny little structures.
 Because I understand water when it gets colder expands, unlike all our surfaces.
 Water expands and it grows into crystals when it freezes.
 That's what's deadly to the membrane.
 That's right.
 But if you can freeze it fast enough that the water doesn't have time to crystallize, then
 actually organisms can survive this kind of freezing.
 Well, so you could do whole body freezes then.
 Yeah, in principle.
 You know, what kind of technology freezes that way though?
 Temperature from the inside out.
 From when you're a micron in diameter, when you're a fraction of the size of a hair, you
 can do this by plunge freezing organisms.
 And actually, usually you use what's called a cryoprotectant that is you soak them in
 something that helps to maintain them.
 And there are, you know, there are organisms that produce these funny substances.
 Like Bing drop the 12 of that liquid nitrogen or something like that.
 Yeah, and you're thinking that's not so good because it boils off.
 But there are organisms that have these cryoprotectants in them that are yeast and certain cells
 that produce these polysaccharized, these sugars, they replace the water.
 And there seems like tardigrades that are incredible survivors under these harsh conditions.
 It's fun to talk about this stuff because it's my ancient history.
 Yeah, it's a little background theory.
 But we love extremeophiles and we love this kind of contemplation of the universe of microbes
 and the building blocks of the bigger kingdoms.
 Well, it is 228.
 I'm talking about that.
 And the second half, we were going to go into your current project.
 Yeah, we were just getting to know you.
 Okay.
 And letting people hear what wonderful things you've been paying attention to.
 Yeah, because we do know that in a sense, your story is a bit like Joseph Campbell story
 arc where you started here, you went out into the world, learned many things, and you brought
 them back home.
 I'm just going to go back to your hair and you're sharing them with us, your local community
 today.
 And you're the journey of the hero of yours.
 Yes, of course.
 What do you brought back to us?
 And you're going to have a project that actually transforms a bit of our ecosystem and our energy
 structure and our data structure.
 Yeah.
 Well, it's interesting.
 You know, I think about my career.
 When I was doing marine science, I got involved in open water diving and that provided an
 insight into marine science at the time that a bottle or that a marine scientist, a biologist,
 or even a marine chemist or geologist, studied the ocean with a net they dragged through
 the water with a bottle they hung off a ship and the ships going up and down.
 And everything that's fragile or small and fragile in the ocean really was invisible to
 them because it was destroyed under the sampling conditions.
 And I jumped in the water and I said, "Woo, look at that.
 Look at that."
 And then I, of course, was able to sample with a syringe, one tiny volume of water and then
 right next to it, less than an inch away, another volume of water.
 And I could compare them in the laboratory in ways that the other people on board couldn't.
 And that provided some insights.
 And then I was studying the effects of pressure and temperature on microbes and some people
 came with samples from the so-called hydrothermal vents that we talked about.
 And they tried to get bacteria to grow under these super high temperature and high pressure
 conditions.
 And they did experiments in our lab with a high temperature, high pressure apparatus.
 And they got data and they published it in nature.
 And I was in the lab and I was watching everything they were doing and they got it published
 in nature.
 But I watched what they did and I knew a lot about pressure at the time.
 And I said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait."
 They didn't do all the right experiments.
 And I did the control experiments that they, quote unquote, didn't have time to do.
 And so I discovered their results were completely wrong.
 And so they're so-called black smoker bacteria, which is what the hydrothermal vents are called
 because of the metal sulfides that were black smoke-like stuff.
 And they was wrong.
 I published a paper saying that all of their data can be explained in another way.
 And I was invited to a lab in Germany where they were studying real thermophiles.
 They grew at 220 degrees Fahrenheit and they were exciting.
 I brought to them the possibility of sampling the ocean and we went around to a lot of hot
 springs and sampled places.
 That's a fun job.
 So the ocean was the lab.
 Wow.
 Hey, we do have to take a break for a moment.
 We do.
 We're going to talk about your latest project.
 Oh, great.
 I'm looking forward to that.
 All right.
 See you in a minute.
 We're with Jonathan Trent here on Santa Cruz Voice.
 Future now, we'll be right back.
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 Hi everybody.
 Welcome back.
 We're talking with Dr. Jonathan Trent.
 We're talking about extremophiles in his background.
 I hear from UC Santa Cruz moving forward and setting the most extreme forms of life on
 the planet.
 But that was just for the fun of it.
 We really wanted to talk about today is based on that depth of awareness and insight.
 But it's a whole new kind of invention that is going to benefit people here in Santa Cruz
 and a lot of other folks in the future.
 I was studying these extremophiles and I'm studying a particular protein that they make
 called a heat shock protein.
 And that protein was incredibly interesting because when I characterise the protein, it
 turned out to be related to a human protein.
 And this put gave me a cover on nature and kind of fame and blah, blah, blah.
 And I went on to study it a lot more.
 It became a very controversial topic.
 And it forced me because of the science, the scientific community being peer review.
 I kind of became a pariah in the scientific community because what I observed with this
 extremophile didn't fit with the central dogma or the central paradigm of the scientific
 community at the time.
 Original thinking is almost punished in these circles, right?
 It really is.
 I think Schopenhauer said it best is that truth passes through three stages.
 First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is taken to self-evident.
 So until my theory becomes self-evident, I had to find another thing to do.
 And so because I couldn't get grants that were peer reviewed because people were out
 to get me from my weirdness in my theories based on the extremophile.
 And one of the things I started doing I called the green team at NASA, which was global research
 into energy and the environment at NASA.
 And it was basically saying, well, look, NASA's come up with a lot of great technology.
 What can we really apply to the global problems that are so pressing and so imminent in terms
 of the disasters that we keep hearing about that are really global in scale?
 Wasn't NASA naturally thinking of outer space rather than Earth space?
 Always, but the original mandate, the original charter for NASA was to study space for the
 benefit of the Earth.
 And so I went back to the charter from 1950 and said, hey, everyone, what we're going
 to do with the green team is look at how we can utilize space technology to do things
 really good for the Earth.
 Like satellite information.
 Satellite information is a great example.
 The whole digitization and ironically, that's what I'm working on now.
 The detour I made was I tried to work on biofuels for a while, harking back to my marine days
 and started a project to look at whether we could grow algae, micro algae, marine micro
 algae, which are responsible for 80 to 90 percent of all the oil that we currently harvest
 from the deep Earth.
 Really so oil comes from algae.
 It comes from most of it, 90 percent of it, 80 to 90 percent.
 So that's the biomass, huh?
 That creates the oil?
 Yeah, not only the biomass, they actually produce the oil.
 So algae, they store starches the way a normal plant would do, but when they're going for
 a long-term storage, they store oils, higher energy density, a little more difficult,
 metabolically to make, but a lot bigger bang for the buck.
 So these algae, which were incredibly abundant, got buried during the course of time.
 And they're the ones that ooze their oil out into the sediments that we harvest now,
 for the most part.
 So I thought, well, maybe we could grow micro algae in a way that wouldn't compete with
 farming, wouldn't compete with agriculture to make biofuels.
 And the idea I came up with, which I called the Omega Project, was offshore membrane enclosures
 for growing algae.
 So here's the plan.
 Algae farms?
 We do algae farms, offshore, freshwater algae growing on our freshwater wastewater from our
 community that we currently dump into the ocean and don't utilize the nutrients, causing
 algae blooms locally.
 And we capture that wastewater, it's freshwater, and we grow fresh water, oil producing algae
 in floating bio reactors.
 If they escape into the ocean, they die because they can't cope with a marine environment.
 They don't like salt.
 Yeah.
 They're fresh water creatures.
 I did a TED talk about this.
 A lot of people watched my TED talk about it.
 And I raised $10.8 million to do a feasibility study.
 Is that the woman at NASA, the scientist that helped approve your budget, I think it was
 mentioned in your biography.
 Yeah, Laurie Garver.
 Yeah.
 That was a wonderful story.
 She came to visit NASA Ames when she was first appointed by Barack Obama.
 And I was presenting to her this idea.
 And she said, "This is a wonderful idea.
 What do you need to do it?"
 And I said, "Well, I need $10 million."
 She said, "How do you know that?"
 And I said, "Well, I just wrote a DOE grant proposal that was turned down."
 And she said, "I'll see what I can do."
 And a few weeks later, I had $10 million from NASA headquarters.
 Wow.
 And so have you been promoting it?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So I did that project and I kind of proved that it's really going to be difficult to
 compete with the oil industry, given its maturity and how relatively easy it is to harvest these
 bodies of oil that are under the earth.
 But it really kept me working more and more on this project towards sustainability.
 What can we do with NASA technology?
 Well, how long does it take to make oil from algae if you could speed up the process?
 It doesn't take millions of years.
 No, no, no.
 We can actually use the algae even just as a biomass and through a process with pyrolysis,
 we can make oil.
 Very, very, very matter of ours.
 Really?
 And scale that could have village have their own.
 Well, it's sand crews have our own gas stations from algae off the ocean.
 Failing and price are the two...
 High parts.
 Are they?
 We had to.
 Water forms.
 If we use all of the wastewater in San Francisco and we put it in a big floating bioreactor
 system in the San Francisco Bay, we would need about 1200 acres of floating algae pods
 or tubes to be able to produce enough oil to make fuel for about half of the trucks and
 cars that the city of San Francisco runs around San Francisco.
 Alright, so in a hundred universe, it might be an
 interesting source of salt.
 It's not trivial.
 It's not trivial.
 No, but it had to be a major need for something like that and it's much cheaper just to use
 regular oil right.
 At this point, although nobody actually calculates the real cost.
 The real cost in terms of the environmental impact.
 Oh, and in terms of the lack of sustainability and what's going to happen a thousand years
 from now when we've mined everything there was on the planet to begin with.
 Maybe a hundred years from now.
 But we have a lot of options down there.
 Okay.
 I suppose you know you're down at Scripps, you probably know about Craig Vettner and his
 own approach and being able to re-engineer some of these microorganisms to eat our waste
 and create useful gases from the, like I think you're talking about bio digesters would
 be a key to that.
 Yeah, yeah, so you know one of these, I should tell the people out there that the organisms
 that live in these extreme environments, some of them are bacteria.
 They look like bacteria.
 If you know what a bacterium looks like, they're tiny, tiny, tiny spheres of life.
 They look like that, but on a molecular level they're really different and they've been
 characterized as a separate group of organisms called archaea.
 And among the archaea there's an organism called a methanogen.
 And a methanogen is probably some of the most primitive life forms because they don't require
 oxygen to grow.
 In fact, they're poisoned by oxygen.
 They live in what's called an anaerobic condition.
 And the interesting thing about them is if you give them organic material without any
 air present, without any oxygen present, they produce a gas called methane.
 Yeah, it's a sort of methane.
 And methane is natural gas.
 It's the same as, it's just two different words for exactly the same thing.
 Biogas has got methane in it.
 It also has some other gases in it that are considered detrimental to the atmosphere.
 Yeah, methane is terribly different.
 It's about 83 times worse than CO2 in terms of heat.
 And that's where we're at these days.
 And the short term and on a longer term is about 25 times worse.
 It has a different resonance to the cap.
 And capers and parts and the cow issues come from the cap.
 Yes, about 30% of the methane release.
 Are you saying you're going to make even more?
 Yeah, good.
 The tundra is another source of methane.
 Yes, it is.
 All the bogs, the tundra, every place where you can get a situation where you can seal
 the atmosphere away, use up all the oxygen as the gas permeates through the soil.
 And then as you get deeper, you get to this black soil where the blackness is caused by
 the precipitation of metal sulfides and such things.
 And this all done by methanogenesis.
 And methane seeps out of those places and you can actually light it on fire.
 So the deep earth where oil is producing is often producing methane at the same time.
 So you can get liquid oil or you can get methane.
 And when they pop into those wells and they drill the wells into the deep earth, you often
 see them flaring off, lighting the methane so it doesn't release into the atmosphere because
 it's such a bad greenhouse gas.
 And so they turn it into CO2 by burning it.
 But we have a better idea.
 How much?
 The reason we're here to talk about it today is this better idea.
 Right.
 So let me cut to the chase.
 Yeah, we only have 15 minutes.
 Yeah, about that.
 Yeah.
 Let me quickly tell you what's going on here.
 So let's talk about methane.
 Okay.
 Now it's already, we're thinking bad.
 Methane's too much of it and it's being released everywhere.
 That's a problem.
 But you're saying that methane is actually useful.
 But he just pointed out the methane's coming out of all these natural places.
 But it's also coming out of places like landfills where we're bearing all our organic
 waste.
 And there too, it loses its contact to the air and it becomes methane.
 And it seeps out into the atmosphere.
 So Governor Brown back in 2015, who was quite conscious about environmental issues said,
 Hey, wait a minute, we should stop putting all this organic waste into our landfills and
 making methane for the atmosphere.
 And that was like 2015.
 And by 2022, a law called Senate Bill 1383 got passed.
 And that law went into effect in 2024.
 And this means that in all cities in California, we will no longer put organic waste into our
 landfills.
 So what are we going to do?
 All right.
 So we've forbidden it.
 Have we come up with an alternative strategy?
 What are we doing with it?
 There's two things you can do with it.
 Okay.
 One thing is you can put it into a pile of dirt and other organics and keep it aerated
 by turning it or compost it and a compost.
 Right.
 So as long as the earth's present, you compost it.
 Or you can put it into a big tank and let it go completely anaerobic, no oxygen, use
 up all the oxygen and make methane.
 But don't let the methane out into the atmosphere.
 You use the methane for something positive.
 So that could be methane is natural gas is what we burn in our stove.
 So we can burn it in a stove and like an internal combustion engine could run on methane.
 Exactly.
 We have buses running on methane, natural gas buses, right?
 And they call them renewable natural gas buses if they get the methane from biology.
 But we also have another source for power.
 So the other source of power as you can turn a generator from that internal combustion
 engine and still another source is called a fuel cell.
 The fuel cell is something NASA is a pioneer in.
 Yeah.
 Standing back to the Apollo program.
 Right.
 Fuel cells have actually were invented in the 19th century.
 They're really old.
 But the idea that they are really developing now to be efficient.
 So for the uninitiated, how would you quickly describe a fuel cell?
 So a fuel cell does the chemistry of taking the methane at super high temperature and
 breaking it into hydrogen and carbon.
 And the carbon in the presence of oxygen turns into CO2 and the hydrogen makes water and
 the system runs a charge of electricity at the same time that it's making this chemistry
 happen.
 So generating electricity.
 Generally electricity with no combustion and no moving parts.
 Wow.
 We're not using them more these days.
 Yeah.
 Because for a while they weren't very cost effective.
 But the technology has really, really improved a lot and they can be used now very effectively.
 And they have some difficulties.
 You can't throttle them up and throttle them back very easily.
 Right.
 So we use energy very episodically.
 And you can't do that very well with a fuel cell.
 So fuel cell energy should go be stored in a battery.
 So a battery fuel cell combo would be perfect.
 Would be perfect.
 Right.
 Use a place which requires a lot of energy and make electricity for that.
 Or just need power.
 That needs a constant power.
 Like our data centers?
 Like a data center.
 Or a data center.
 Wait, I just want to add to the list also a future like when we go for all the electric
 cars and you know the way that yeah charging centers so that batteries can just be sitting
 and charging centers and people can drive in and swap out the batteries and try it out.
 Absolutely.
 Self charging systems.
 Yeah.
 Alright, but let's talk about your data centers.
 So data centers, first of all for the uninitiated data centers is really what's going on with
 the cloud right now and artificial intelligence.
 Yeah, when people talk about the fact that Bitcoin is using city's worth of electricity.
 We're talking about data centers running computers basically.
 So thirst for power is increasing practically exponentially.
 Yeah, it's amazing.
 And by the way, it doesn't stop where you just mentioned all those things are in the
 news, but it's your cell phone goes for a data center and all those pictures you put
 on the cloud are stored in a data center.
 Right.
 And when you go to the bank and you use a credit card, you're using a data center.
 And when you look at Netflix, you're looking at data centers.
 And this podcast is using data centers.
 Yeah, right.
 And it's replacing normal radio on TV.
 We want more.
 Yeah.
 There are data centers to invade really every part of our digital society.
 So if you go into a data center, it is kind of an alien environment for humans, right?
 Oh my God.
 Yes.
 It's just walls and walls and CPUs are their racks.
 They're called racks and each has a server or 20 servers piled up in a rack that's 24
 inches by 47 inches by 67 inches tall.
 And they're filled with hundreds or not thousands of these racks.
 And they use a lot of electricity.
 I bet.
 They produce a lot of heat.
 Yeah.
 You have to vent the heat out.
 Well, either vent it or capture it.
 Oh, yes.
 Instead of throwing it away.
 Let's use it for something.
 Yeah.
 Use it for something.
 So what can we use it for?
 And that was the question.
 Well, it turns out-- Well, heat is a big part of many biological processes.
 Including that anaerobic digester that we just talked about for turning organic material
 into electricity, that happens at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
 And the temperature coming out of the data center usually cooled by water is water at
 about 100 to 120 degrees.
 Oh.
 So it's not hot enough to really heat your house because you can't put it through a
 pipe very easily.
 But if you had your data center built near your digester, then the data center heat can
 go to heat that digester.
 Okay.
 So I'm imagining a building full of servers that's got a giant compost ring around it that's
 getting fed the heat from the building in the middle.
 Well, it's meant to have to be a battle.
 It's a good idea.
 It doesn't have to be a donut ring.
 It could just be a little tank alongside.
 Yeah.
 And the data center doesn't have to be a huge football size 200, 300 megawatt scale.
 It could be one megawatt.
 And it can be in a shipping container.
 All right.
 So they built modular deeps.
 And how many people?
 Is that a neighborhood, a megawatt?
 How many people can you imagine?
 About 25 households, something like that, 40?
 Maybe less.
 Yeah, that could be a pretty big.
 Yeah, it could be.
 And I'm just thinking of following the curve here.
 You're going to a digester with all this heat.
 Now what's in the digester that's being heated, is it the microbes that are...
 We're putting our food waste.
 Yeah.
 So you're putting in all the...
 Okay.
 So waste management picks up the green bucket and those trucks dump all that green bucket
 waste into a pile somewhere or into a container, into a shipping container?
 No, they're putting it into a big tank.
 It'll be a concrete tank.
 You're organic waste of various sorts.
 So like a grass clip.
 I'm calling it a digester.
 It can be stuff from restaurants.
 It can be left over food from...
 It can be cellulose markets.
 It can be cut grass from the...
 Can be to some degree, not just that, cow's eat grass and they make loads of methane.
 No, you have different microbes for different...
 You could use apple pulp from martin always.
 Biological basically.
 Anything biological can be broken down.
 Okay.
 And do you have specific combinations of microbes to deal with different...
 Then they come up pretty spontaneously.
 Both of you add a little cow dung or cow manure.
 There you go.
 And it's 100 degrees, so it's not really an extreme environment in my world.
 So you don't need extreme files to make this...
 There are extreme files by the way.
 You can make the digester function all the way up to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
 So there are so-called thermo-philic temperature loving anaerobic low oxygen methanogens that
 generate methane.
 But we don't need to go there.
 We can do it at a lower temperature.
 All right.
 So then we digest this bio waste and then we harvest the methane and then what happens?
 Methane and you still have a potable water comes up.
 Well wait.
 We have to cool the data center.
 Oh.
 So we're harvesting the heat from the data center by cooling it with water.
 And the water goes into the data center in what's called a heat exchanger.
 And the heat from the data center is dumped into the water and the water comes out of
 the data center pretty hot.
 That's what goes into the bio waste.
 And that's what goes into our digester in the temperature control loop that heats up
 the digester.
 Yeah.
 And the digester exports...
 The methane.
 Methane.
 And we use it in a fuel cell.
 And a few...
 To make electricity for the data center.
 Yeah.
 Back to the data center.
 Oh, it's a circle.
 But it's still the input from the outside as well.
 Wow.
 Totally sustainable.
 Yeah.
 We can make a megawatt of energy for our data center with a hundred tons of organic material
 a day.
 And that's about what we produce in Santa Cruz.
 So it can power itself?
 Yeah.
 All right.
 It has access to share with the community.
 It would.
 It would have plenty of access depending on where we built it.
 Yep.
 And how much stuff we put into it.
 And by the way, what we're doing right now in the city of Santa Cruz is we're exporting
 our organic waste.
 We're grinding it up and we're putting it in tanker trucks and we're driving it up to
 Oakland to go into a digester.
 They have one already in our...
 Oh, so they're on the left hand of us.
 Oh, we need to do as a tattoo.
 Oh, you know, waste water treatment.
 Most wastewater treatment plants have got digesters.
 And they put human solid waste, so-called bio solids into these digesters and turn it
 into methane.
 And they use the methane in generators to generate all the power they need for their
 water treatment plants.
 So using the generators with the methane and you're suggesting that the fuel cells are
 more efficient use of the energy than generators.
 And the other good thing about what I just told you unlike using human waste is that when
 we take the food waste into the equation, what comes out of the digester when you muck
 it out is perfect fertilizer.
 But to use human waste, then you run into the difficulty that that human waste can't go
 on food crops officially.
 Right, because it needs to be sanitized.
 It can't go on food crops if it's been heated and pasteurized.
 Well, we have plenty of other waste.
 But it has to go a higher temperature.
 It has to go to cotton or some other not food.
 Right, more of a good issue.
 But here we have a food waste which can be organic fertilizer and be used extensively.
 So we get methane and we get compost out of our food waste at the same time and we get
 electricity and we have a data center.
 And we have salty water going into the ocean that isn't polluting the ocean.
 Oh, well that's another part of the story.
 Yeah, like where would you locate this?
 So I'm thinking you see Santa Cruz, possibly, or Watsonville wastewater treatment plant just
 near the Pahr River.
 Yeah, and it's an ideal location in many ways because they already are exporting water to
 the farmlands near there.
 And the story about the salt water is interesting but we probably don't have time to go into
 it.
 But it's an interesting side story about seawater intrusion.
 Because it's part of our sea water intrusion.
 Yeah, we have, that's a big issue here.
 Oh, the seawater intrusion.
 Yeah, our underground water is getting polluted by ocean water, right?
 Yeah, forming brackish water, a mixture of fresh water and seawater.
 And so what we initially proposed is that we would use this brackish water to cool the
 data center.
 And the reason for that is the warm water coming out of the data center saves a lot of
 energy and purification.
 So if you purify brackish water, that's hot.
 It uses half the energy of purifying that same water when it's cold.
 Oh, so we can distill water and have potable water out of that?
 Yeah, you do reverse osmosis, you don't distill it.
 Oh, okay, filter it.
 You could distill it, a vacuum distillation.
 Oh, cool.
 Wow, well, how many legs do you have for this project?
 It sounds so wonderful.
 Well, I've talked to the Chancellor's office and to the engineering department at UC Santa
 Cruz and we're in the process of thinking about whether we could do something at UCS
 - Very early stages.
 - As a demonstration project.
 And the city of Watsonville, I've been talking to the people in the public utilities office
 and they need to upgrade their wastewater plant.
 And this may be a good way to upgrade it because we can get some money for innovative,
 new re and really biological.
 Fantastic.
 All right, Jonathan Trent, everybody, where can people find out more or keep track of
 you, Jonathan?
 This is wonderful.
 Well, we haven't put a website up yet because we don't want to fill the data centers with
 more dark data.
 So but we're in the process of making a website so that once this project gets traction and
 we see a clear way forward, then we'll have a website for everybody to go see.
 You guys can post it on your web.
 And this project name?
 The project's called upcycle systems.
 Upcycle systems.
 So if you Google search on upcycle systems and you find something.
 Well, now you won't.
 Now you'll find a company called upcycle technology.
 But upcycle systems shows up in my interview that I did with NASA.
 So if you Google my name and NASA interview.
 On NASA interview, Jonathan Trent.
 Thank you, Jonathan.
 Appreciate it.
 Thank you.
 Thank you, son.
 Have a great future now, everybody.
 Thank you.
 All right.
 We can't get out of here for the next show.
 Love you guys.