Episode 9: Oh Print Me A Home


Female Voice:	00:00	(Doorbell ringing) Hello Steve.

Steve    K.:	00:10	I was that random kid who was going around to all the neighbors and saying, “Do you have any old broken electronics? Can I take it apart?” My parents, both accountants, incredibly supportive but they had no idea what I was doing and they basically just as long as I was following my curiosity, they would support me. I did all these things that unfortunately were terrifying for them, such as making the smoke bombs that accidentally went off in the house. And my mom thought the whole house was on fire to all kinds of just weird things, making Tesla coils and rail guns and chemistry stuff.

Steve    K.:	00:46	And I was that weird kid. But luckily it all worked out.

Mick Ebeling:	00:51	I'm fairly sure that saying it all worked out for Steve Keating, is the understatement of the 21st century. Steve survived his smoke bombs, homemade disasters and as you'll hear far more than that, to end up at the MIT Media Labs. It's a place that collects geniuses in mathematics, music, art, film, science, biotech. Puts them all under one roof and then basically lets them do a deep dive into their curiosity. They bounce around the boundaries, they disrupt technology, and today we're going to tell you about one of the coolest inventions he pioneered there.

Steve    K.:	01:28	So it can do 3D printing. It could do milling, it could do sensing, it could do excavation.

Mick Ebeling:	01:33	Now I know a lot of you listening might think, “3D printing, that's not that new.” There is some insane stuff that's going on out there. There are some 3D printed beaks for eagles injured in the wild, 3D printing sushi that you can actually eat, 3D printed custom clothes. But what if I told you that Steve imagined a giant robot that could 3D print an entire building by itself anywhere. And not only that, but it could figure out how to supply its own materials, so you don't have to feed it any filament or plastic or any other materials.

Mick Ebeling:	02:10	And what if I told you that's only the second coolest thing he's ever done. I'm Mick Ebeling and this is Not Impossible. This is a podcast about inventions that tackle seemingly insurmountable problems and the creative minds behind them, the people who ignored it when someone said their idea would never work, and then went ahead and did it anyway and succeeded. And in doing so just happened to change the world. This podcast is brought to you by Avnet, a company dedicated to helping creators of all types find whatever they need to get their idea to product, and then their product to market anywhere in the world.

Mick Ebeling:	03:01	So when Steven Keating was five, he was playing around with a Commodore 64 computer in his closet, and he came across the very first video tour of the MIT Media Lab. And let's just say he knew it was the place for him.

Steve    K.:	03:18	My first experience walking into the media lab, it felt like I was in the Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. There's this glass elevator and as you go up this elevator, you see robots, you see furniture that's moving. You see all of these incredible scientific and interesting things as you're riding up this glass elevator. I was in the mediated matter group, which is led by Professor Neri Oxman and she has this amazing, incredible architect designer and Neri's work covers this incredible span of taking biological ideas and combining it with design and fabrication.

Mick Ebeling:	04:01	And if the name Neri Oxman rings a bell, it might be because you've seen her on the cover of some of the supermarket tabloids in some kind of romantic link with Brad Pitt, but that's not the focus here. The reason that you should know her and the rest of her team is because they're doing amazing, amazing, brilliant stuff. Professor Oxman is a genuine radical thinker, an architect who is inspired by the perfect designs found in nature. Her work is in MoMA and so many other cool places. Have you ever seen those death masks that Bjork wears in concert? Yup. Those were designed in 3D printed from her own facial features by professor Oxman.

Mick Ebeling:	04:42	Then you get Neri and Steve Together. And these are people who in their spare time, well I don't know, create a vest with live cells, actually 3D printed into the fabric and biologically engineered so that it might, for example turn pink when you walk into a room to warn you of a carbon monoxide imbalance. Just kind of crazy, right? But when Steve joined professor Oxman's lab, they started talking about creating a robot to go out on its own and 3D print entire buildings. That seems like something completely impossible even for them.

Mick Ebeling:	05:17	You've got this brilliant idea called the Digital Construction Platform, the DCP. Walk us through like tell us, walk us through what DCP is. Where did the idea come from? Just walk us through it.

Steve    K.:	05:30	So coming into the project we had this idea of can we actually scale fabrication using robotic systems based on biological principles? So for example instead of our current process in manufacturing buildings, which is basically done by mass manufacturing of standard components that we ship to a site, what if we can actually have a self sustaining system? So kind of like a tree. A tree grows with its environment mind. So it's growing towards the light, it's taking in environmental variables and one of the amazing things about a tree is, it's self sufficient so it gathers almost all of its materials from the air.

Steve    K.:	06:08	So it's pulling carbon dioxide and other materials from the air to grow and it's getting its own energy from the sun. Could we do the same thing with construction? So actually having a totally autonomous system that drives out on site, scans the environment, designs the system based on the environmental variables and actually gets its own material. So gathers say dirt, gathers say ice or other materials and fabricates it on site.

Mick Ebeling:	06:35	Okay. That's just mind boggling.

Steve    K.:	06:37	We're just scratching the surface of what's possible. What if buildings in the future could be dynamic. So you could actually have systems that can change over time, or what if you can use these robotic systems autonomously to create structures in dangerous environments. For example, what if you wanted to send this to the moon or to Mars? And it could actually use materials that it finds on the moon or Mars to make structures.

Mick Ebeling:	07:04	Okay. So think about that. Not only was this robot going to go off by itself, maybe someplace dangerous, some place humans couldn't go or shouldn't go. It was going to go there, find what it needs and then use those materials to make buildings, buildings that would be perfect for that particular environment. And not only was this robot going to be able to do this here, but on Mars? Crazy right? Maybe crazy but Steve decided not impossible. So for his PhD project, Steve actually builds this robot.

Steve    K.:	07:40	To give listeners an idea of what the platform looks like, the DCP, it's actually an 8,000 pound robot on tank tracks. So just like a tank moves round, it's got those tracks so that can go on rough terrain and it's got a 50 foot robot arm. So it actually has a hydraulic arm that's linked to a smaller robot arm on the end uses it like a compound arm system. So it's just like your finger on the tip of your arms. So if you're writing a letter, your fingers are controlling the pen and allowing you to write letters, but your shoulder's making the bigger movements that let you cover the page.

Steve    K.:	08:18	And so that's what we've done for our systems. We call it a compound arm system and it's the first large scale mobile platform. And we actually 3D printed a 50 foot dome structure in under 14 hours as part of the final work of my PhD.

Mick Ebeling:	08:35	So. All right. Just so everyone understands what Steve just said is that he's basically created a giant robot arm on tank tracks that's 3D printed a 50 foot dome. I'll pause there for a second, let that one sink in. And while you're pondering that, ponder this. Steve says the possibilities for this new technology are limitless. And I'm not talking about Mars, I'm talking about the construction project going on right around the corner right now.

Steve    K.:	09:10	Well, there's huge, huge potentials in so many different areas. For example, construction is one of the most dangerous industries we have today. In terms of human safety so we can ... By putting in robotic and autonomous processes, we can reduce human risk, we can improve safety of construction sites. The possibilities for new functionalities are huge and then you can also imagine there's massive benefits for time material usage and cost based this is.

Mick Ebeling:	09:42	There's a lot of fear of people talking about the robots are taking over the world, the robots are taking over the world. How do you play that into the world that you're looking at now?

Steve    K.:	09:50	Every technology will change how we do things, and people always worry, we get this question sometimes of aren't you worried it's going to reduce human jobs? But no, it just changes jobs. Instead of workers having very dangerous conditions on site. It makes new jobs for example instead of them manually putting things together, they can be at a computer and controlling the robotic system. It allows all of these new possibilities for saving cost, for reducing danger and for producing new functionalities.

Mick Ebeling:	10:26	Talk a little bit about I guess the efficiency that this creates, especially on drawing off of things that are around it. Because I think that's really the novel concept. When I first started researching about this, I anticipated this thing that was just spitting out concrete or spitting out and metal. But what you've now shared is this could spin out anything and everything around.

Steve    K.:	10:49	For us, like you said one of the big factors was this flexibility of control to use environmental properties in part of the design. So for example in the large dome that we printed, at about 50 feet in diameter, the radio reach of the arm is around 30 feet or so. So we printed by rotating in place about 50 foot dome. So right now for example, you've got your printer at home, you're printing out a piece of paper, but you're limited to printing out a letter sized piece of paper because that's the size of the printer. What we're talking about is if we make a mobile printer or a mobile construction platform, it can drive around and have a limitless scale.

Steve    K.:	11:30	And that's what we've done here with the system, and it's actually got a flexible solar panel. So in the future it could actually be completely autonomous even for power by laying out a flexible solar panel and charging from the sun, and then continuing to fabricate.

Mick Ebeling:	11:48	That's amazing.

Steve    K.:	11:49	So this notion is that we really wanted to make it, you could send this ... I'm from Canada, so send it up to the Arctic and we actually did some small scale printing tests using ice. So this idea of if you have snow all around you, say you're in the Arctic, you've got snow and ice all around you, you've got solar energy powering the digital construction platform. It can gather ice and snow, melt it using the energy from the sun and then reprint it and basically create giant structures out of ice.

Mick Ebeling:	12:23	What you're describing is a self contained Robinson Crusoe machine, and the things that you've proven already in their very pragmatic execution as well as your conceptual execution. I don't think you have to think, this isn't teleportation. You can see very pragmatically that this is a natural extension and this is a question of scale.

Steve    K.:	12:49	Exactly.

Mick Ebeling:	12:50	Okay, so we're going to leave that Robinson Crusoe machine aside for a second, just as Steve had to in 2014. Because I told you it was only the second coolest thing he ever did. So if that story didn't bend your mind, this one definitely will. In 2014 Steve Keating had to refocus his superpowers on solving a very personal crisis.

Steve    K.:	13:13	In college you go up to the Bolton boards there's lots of posters looking for study participants, and I would often do them because I was just curious and it was interesting to help science and fun to do. And one in 2007 was a brain study and I volunteered because I always wanted to see my brain. So I went in and it was looking at fear actually. I was looking at pictures of spiders and things like that while they were doing an MRI study. So they were scanning my brain and it was for research. And so I asked afterwards, I said, “Oh, can I have a copy of the data?”

Steve    K.:	13:44	And they were like, “Oh sure. Here's your picture.” I actually made my Facebook profile picture of the time, a picture of my MRIed brain because I was like, “This is so cool. I'm seeing my brain and I'm helping science at the same time.” And they said, “Oh, by the way, there's a small abnormality here in your Mri scan. You might want to get it checked out.” So I had the scan originally in 2007 I got a re scan in 2010, no changes. The kind of statement was, “Oh, you're all good.” So I said, “Great.” Go on with the rest of my life. Go to MIT. And I start to smell a faint vinegar smell for a few seconds a day.

Steve    K.:	14:22	And after about the second or third time, I totally just thought it was just vinegar in the air. It happened late at night and I went out to the kitchen and none of my roommates were up or cooking. And I went back and I thought, “That's so weird.” And I remembered I had that brain abnormality and I went back to the data from seven years prior. This is 2014. Went back to the scan and was googling around and realized, holy crap the abnormality is right near where the old factory center of the brain is. That's the smell part of the brain. And I thought I was just being over reacting, but I thought, “You know what, I'm going to go back to the doctors. I'm going to ask them if this is an issue.”

Steve    K.:	15:04	They book the scan for a month later because they weren't concerned at all. So actually in that month's time, the smells actually had stopped. And so I'm going into that scan thinking I'm a total idiot and I'm on my way out of the room from the scan, and the technician stops me and goes, “You cannot leave. You have a massive brain tumor."

Mick Ebeling:	15:29	So Steve Keating has just had the worst possible diagnosis that he could imagine, brain cancer. And yet he was about to turn that terrible moment into an idea that could create a revolution in medical treatment for all of us. We'll tell you how that happened after the break. You, yes you, are invited to the 2019 Not Impossible awards. Join us on June 1st in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate the inspiring work of people and companies, who share in Not Impossible's mission of creating innovative technology to improve the wellbeing of others. For tickets and information go to notimpossible.com/awards.

Mick Ebeling:	16:16	This is a podcast dedicated to technology for the sake of humanity, but it's also about the people behind that technology. If that's you, Avnet can help no matter what you build. Why? Because they are the first company ever to offer true end to end solutions for product development in house. That way creators in any corner of the world can take an idea from prototype all the way through mass production. Are you a startup, an established OEM? Do you need help designing your product or organized in your workflow or getting stuff to market? Avnet has got your back.

Mick Ebeling:	16:51	You're world is one that's always changing and that's why Avnet is here to help you reach further. And we want to give a special shout out to Avnet's engineering communities, Hackster and Element 14. Who help creators vet and invent the technology of tomorrow. Want to do more than just listen to this podcast? Maybe something like taking on the next Not Impossible challenge. Go to podcastnotimpossible.com to find info for you and for anyone who wants to take their project one step further.

Mick Ebeling:	17:27	So picking back up, Steve Keating has just gone in for a brain scan that he thought was just a precaution, and found out that he had a brain tumor the size of your fist. For most people that would just be debilitating emotionally, physically, spiritually, but as it should be clear by now, Steve Keating is not most people.

Steve    K.:	17:51	I truly believe if I was not at MIT, I wouldn't be here today because I had access to this incredible minds of MIT, these research geniuses and scientists who I could talk to about my mutation. And we actually ended up sending out all of my medical data, which was online, to different neurologists and different neuro oncologists around the US asking who is the best surgeon for this? What is the best approach?

Steve    K.:	18:16	Then three weeks later I had a 10 hour awake brain surgery and I again wanted-

Mick Ebeling:	18:21	Awake?

Steve    K.:	18:22	Yeah.

Mick Ebeling:	18:22	Hang on. Just so I'm clear, you said a 10 hour awake brain surgery?

Steve    K.:	18:27	Yeah, so brain surgery is one of those weird things where they're not really pain receptors in the brain and so you can actually have an awake brain surgery if it's beneficial. For example, my tumor was near the language center, so what they didn't want to do is cut out the wrong part of the brain and affect my ability to talk. So throughout the surgery I was awake and talking as they were cutting out about 10% of my brain. How are you guys doing?

Doctor:	18:56	We're doing good. We have your brain exposed. We're actually measuring [inaudible 00:19:05]

Steve    K.:	19:05	And for those of you with a strong stomach that want to see this, it's all online. So if you Google my name, you can see and you can see me talking and asking how the doctors are doing and telling stories while they're literally cutting open my brain. Which was a weird experience to watch afterwards.

Doctor:	19:25	Talk to us again.

Mick Ebeling:	19:30	It's hard to hear him through the oxygen mask, but as he said, they wanted to keep him talking. So Steve's talking about how he met his girlfriend Wendy and stuff like that, while the surgical team removes pieces of his brain. That is pure Steve Keating. So the surgery went great and afterwards Steve started radiation therapy and of course Steve being Steve, he couldn't keep his curiosity out of the room with him.

Steve    K.:	19:55	So get this, I'm literally in the radiation room at the Massachusetts General Hospital and this is where they do proton radiation. So they have a particle accelerator where they spin up protons and they shoot those protons at the patient. And that goes in to the skull, into the brain and causes mutations that can help with the cancer treatment. But it also makes you radioactive. And so being the huge geek that I am, I would actually take a guy to counter to my head after the Proton radiation and I could detect I was actually radioactive for a few hours, but it wasn't a dangerous level of radioactivity.

Steve    K.:	20:35	It was just a very small amount.

Mick Ebeling:	20:37	A small amount. Unless of course you happen to get an invitation to meet President Obama.

Steve    K.:	20:45	When I got invited to the White House, it was on the very last day of my proton radiation. And as a Canadian, I'm standing in the foreign line to get in to the White House and they have Geiger counters. Then I'm standing there, super excited to be done with proton radiation and going into the White House. And then I have this horrible realization that I might not get into the White House because I'm actually radioactive. But luckily it all worked out. I was not at any dangerous level. And I went in and ended up serving on the precision medicine task work, working on policies for healthcare and patient data access.

Steve    K.:	21:23	And it's been quite the interesting ride since.

Mick Ebeling:	21:27	An interesting ride indeed. Because Steve wasn't just satisfied with getting rid of the cancer. He wanted to get to the root of it, figure out what caused it, but that's turned out to be very difficult. Maybe even more difficult than building a robot to construct houses on Mars.

Steve    K.:	21:46	I was collecting my own data and it was incredibly useful for me to help make these decisions, but I was so surprised at how hard it was to do. For example, after the surgery, they cut out literally about 10% of my brain, if you were to make your hand into a fist. It's about that size of what they cut out of me. And so they asked, of course, “Would you want to donate that tumor to research?” And of course I said yes because I want to help out science.

Mick Ebeling:	22:12	In order to get answers about the cause of his brain tumor, Steve wanted to have a peek at the information the research had turned up about his brain. You know the one that he donated for scientific research, his brain, but the lawyers said-

Steve    K.:	22:27	No, because there's a lot of gray legal policies around data access for patients in the US, particularly for research data. The researchers that MIT could see my genetic data, but I could not, and it was my own brain tissue. The only way they said that the tumor could be accessed is by medical researchers. So I said, “Oh, how do you become a medical researcher?” And I was in the middle of my PhD at MIT, and so I actually switched and applied to med school. There's a joint Harvard MIT Med School Program that I applied to, got into and took a year of med school classes.

Steve    K.:	23:07	I took a few different classes, including pathology, and at the end of that year, I could then apply through the pathology class for research access to my tumor. And it worked, then I got a very, very small chunk of my brain. I've got it here. I know you can't see this, but I'm holding it in my hand here. It's a little piece of my brain.

Mick Ebeling:	23:28	He's holding a little piece of his brain. So Steve then goes ahead and sends a sliver of his brain to be sequenced. And you know what he found? He traced his brain cancer back to a single point mutation. A G turned into an A. Random, unlucky, but as you can imagine, Steve is one of those lemons to lemonade kind of guys.

Steve    K.:	23:51	Because my background is in digital fabrication. Of course once I had a lot of the different types of medical data, I wanted to visualize it and one of the things I looked at doing is 3D printing it. So I would get my MRI and CT scans and I would actually 3D print the data so I could see how the skull part was cut out when they did the surgery. I could see how the CT scan shows the different structures inside the skull and the brain.

Mick Ebeling:	24:22	That's right. Steve Actually 3D printed his own brain tumor and that set a whole sequence of events in motion. He worked with researchers at MIT and others to develop a whole new method of 3D printing medical data. It's going to revolutionize how we visualize the body. Think of med students 3D printing their own bodies to dissect instead of cadavers. Now we can devote a whole nother podcast to this, but suffice it to say it's all part of this mission that Steve has been on since his own diagnosis, to democratize medical data so other people can get the info and the tools to be part of their own medical decisions.

Mick Ebeling:	24:58	And what he did with his own info, in addition to revolutionizing medicine of course, is classic spoiler alert. This is a guy who's favorite holiday is April fool's day.

Steve    K.:	25:10	There's not that many benefits of having brain cancer, but one is that if you forget something, you can just say, “Well it must have been in the 10% percent of my brain that got cut out.” But also, I took and 3D printed my brain tumor into all kinds of weird things. So bottle openers and salt and pepper shakers, and for my family for Christmas I gave her them all brain tumor Christmas tree ornaments, which the look on my mom's face was one of shock and hilarity at the same time. And I posted it on all of those files online and other people have now downloaded my brain tumor and actually printed it and sent me pictures.

Steve    K.:	25:49	And so that's pretty fun to see the silver lining to that all.

Speaker 3:	25:54	Happy brain surgery Steve.

Steve    K.:	25:56	One of my favorite TV shows is Modern Family. And one of my friends organized a video. She actually got a number of people that I admire to actually send me video notes, sending their support.

Speaker 4:	26:13	Happy brain surgery Steve.

Steve    K.:	26:18	It was a huge surprise to me and it's those types of things, that I as a scientist I never would thought could act as a treatment, but really the support itself is as a powerful medicine.

Mick Ebeling:	26:32	Amen. And I guess one of the reasons I'm so touched and so inspired by that story, especially coming from a scientist, is that in my own work collaboration, human sharing with one another is usually if not always, what makes the difference when you're trying to make what seems impossible, not impossible. It happens to me again and again. In fact, it was a huge factor in my own 3D printing adventure. I had read an article in Time Magazine by Alex Perry about a young boy named Daniel. He was caught in the middle of a civil war in Sudan. And one day he was out tending his family's goats and cows and he heard a plane overhead.

Mick Ebeling:	27:19	This was a Russian Antonov cargo plane. These things would come every single day and they would bomb the people of the Nuba Mountains. And so he heard this plane and he went and he hid behind a tree and he wrapped his arms around it. The tree protected his body, but both of his arms were blown completely off. And in the article, I remember Daniel saying, “I saw blood, I looked and I saw my hands weren't there and I couldn't even cry.” I cried when I read about it. And then suddenly I remembered another article I had seen a couple months prior about a man in South Africa named Richard Vanass.

Mick Ebeling:	27:58	And he was this gruff, really passionate carpenter who was in Johannesburg and he accidentally lost four fingers to a table saw accident. And it turned out this guy who I ended up meeting had one of the darkest senses of humor I'd ever come across. He said to me that after the accident he was in so much pain, but he wouldn't take painkillers. He told me he barely slept and the more pain he felt, the more ideas he got and I remember him saying, “Sometimes you just have to chop off a couple of fingers to start thinking.” That was classic Richard Vanass.

Mick Ebeling:	28:38	What Richard was thinking about was how to use a 3D printer to make a new hand for himself and one that didn't cost the $10,000, or some ridiculous amount that the hospital was quoting him. He wanted to make one that he could build for $500 or less and that would work when he flexed his wrist. It would then cause the fingers to move and they would move in a way so that he could grab things like a coffee cup, or a hammer or a ball. In short, it was a hand that would let him be himself again. So we hatched this crazy plot. What if we could bring a 3D printer to Sudan and find that boy Daniel, and then prints and arm for him?

Mick Ebeling:	29:20	And what if we taught the locals how to use that 3D printer and left it with them and they could continue to print more arms, for more boys and girls who lost arms in the war. And believe it or not, two months later, I was in Johannesburg in the home of Richard Vanass. He invited me there to teach me how to print those Robo hands as he called them. And it wasn't just him. Hackers and makers from all over the world had gotten wind of our crazy scheme and started to print Robo hand parts for us to bring along, just in case the printers didn't work right when we got to Sudan. But they did work. We ended up finding Daniel.

Mick Ebeling:	29:58	We printed a new arm for him and in the middle of a war zone, in the middle of this 70,000 person refugee camps in Sudan, one boy, one beautiful innocent boy whose only crime in life was hiding behind a tree that was too small when the bombs fell. That young boy picked up a spoon with a 3D printed hand that I made him. We gave him a bowl of granulated sugar because it was the lightest thing I could find. And he picked up a spoonful and ate it and he cringed because it was so sweet, and everyone in the camp started applauding and laughing and crying because that moment was just that sweet too.

Mick Ebeling:	30:46	When I think back upon that story now, the thing that stands out for me the most was how willing so many people wanted to help us, the companies that funded us, the hackers and makers around the country who jumped in to try to help. And especially Richard Vanass, who inspired me and made me believe that I could do the impossible. Well as it turns out, Richard Vanass inspired a whole lot of people. One of them was a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, John Shawl. So John and he admits this himself was totally procrastinating one morning drinking coffee, and surfing the Internet when he came across a youtube video about Richard and his 3D printed hand.

Mick Ebeling:	31:32	And he has an idea and he spends an hour making a digital map of the world and posted under that video.

John    S.:	31:37	And I put a comment on the youtube video saying, “If you have a printer and you want to help put a pin on this map, and if you know someone who needs a hand, put a pin on this map." And to my surprise that evening there were seven pins on the map. Six months later there were 70 pins on the map.

Mick Ebeling:	32:00	And that was the birth of what John called e-NABLE, an online volunteer community. And soon those numbers grew into thousands. People saying that they needed a 3D prosthetic hand and people saying that they had 3D printers and could make them, all finding each other through this open source network. It was fantastic.

John    S.:	32:18	It's not all about 3D printers per se. It's enabled by Internet communications and it's a goodwill pay it forward network, which I think has demonstrated in the five years that there are probably tens or hundreds of thousands of high tech. High touch volunteers who are willing and able to do things in this kind of a loosely organized movement, that are not being done by our traditional institutions. Not being done by governments, not being done by NGOs, not being done by the institutional nonprofit sector.

Mick Ebeling:	32:58	And the e-NABLE group, all these hackers and makers and dreamers and schemers are taking the 3D printing of limbs to whole new levels. And that's what I love about these communities, these forward thinking makers and rebels. They don't just invent something to solve one problem. They keep going with it. Like Steve's Robinson Crusoe machine. It's not just enough that it 3D printed an entire building. It needs to get better, it needs to work on its own, it needs to find its own materials. So like if you're going into an erupting volcano and repair a fissure or 3D print an entire refugee village in the wake of a tsunami.

Steve    K.:	33:38	Yeah, the concept around self sufficiency is a much longer exploration but has immense possibilities for remote locations for extremely dangerous locations.

Mick Ebeling:	33:50	Steve Keating again.

Steve    K.:	33:51	For example, NASA is very interested, and we're in discussions with them around the notion of printing on other planets. Instead of having to carry all the weight of construction material to the moon or Mars, what if you could send a self sustaining system that can actually gather its own materials, that can make structures at a moon dust or out of martian dust? What if you can use this in extreme environments, say Fukushima or disaster relief sites for from hurricane damage. Or extreme environments where it's dangerous for humans just because of say extreme temperatures such as fabrication in the Arctic or Antarctic.

Mick Ebeling:	34:33	Where you're going with this. You can see the future. It's not a future that seems too science fiction. It seems science fiction, but it seems very possible. So I get that.

Steve    K.:	34:42	Well we haven't sent it up to the Arctic for its year yet, but yes the system we've shown with this work that it can run off electricity and it can self charge using photovoltaics, and it can actually gather local material and fabricate. Now these are all early experimentations and I do want to stress that. We have not sent it yet to the Arctic for it's one year of fabrication.

Mick Ebeling:	35:06	I got you. I appreciate the disclaimer. I appreciate that disclaimer. But what you're saying is for the future, because this is a forward thinking show right?

Steve    K.:	35:14	Yeah, absolutely.

Mick Ebeling:	35:15	Is that ... I'm going to put you on the stand. Mr Keating, can you please take the stand? So I just want to be clear that you have proven thus far in your early steps that conceptually very, very, very feasibly, that should this robot be deployed someplace that this robot could live alone right?

Steve    K.:	35:36	Yes, we have shown that. But I do want to emphasize, this is just the beginning. What we have shown is lot of very small scale experiments of how different tools can be used, how welding can be used, how excavation of earth can be used, how ice can be 3D printed, how photovoltaic charging can be used. And we've shown how in depth study of 3D printing of 50 foot hemispherical dome structure, using construction ready materials.

Mick Ebeling:	36:06	Steve is pretty confident about the future. I mean here he is living with brain cancer and he's like the most optimistic guy I've met in a very long time.

Steve    K.:	36:16	Yeah. So I'm doing very well. I got extremely lucky. Brain cancer is unfortunately one of those things that often does come back. So I will be monitored at least every year to see if it comes back. But so far I'm doing well and has not come back to our knowledge. And fingers crossed for the future.

Mick Ebeling:	36:35	Fingers crossed. He's so low key about it all. But think about it. Here's a guy with a brain tumor, asked to be in a medical study and his response is, “Heck yeah, I've always wanted to have my jeans sequenced.” He's the quintessential, not impossible hero, Steve Silver Lining Keating. And before we let him go, there's this letter that Steve wrote to his family and friends before he went into surgery. It's about the things that he finds most important in life, I asked him to share the ending with you.

Steve    K.:	37:08	So here's the last three bullets. Perspective is everything and switching shoes yields most powerful thoughts. Family and friends are what remain when the world blurs. And the next one was about open data. It was, gather data as often as possible and share it with the world. It could save your life one day, even just to have it yourself as important. And then the very last point of the email, I said, “The world is a lovely, splendid and fascinating place, but most of all to me is beautifully curious.” And that to me kind of emphasized how I felt about the whole thing. I was on a rollercoaster ride that I didn't sign up for, but I was strapped in.

Steve    K.:	37:52	I wasn't going to get out, so I thought might as well enjoy the views.

Mick Ebeling:	37:56	So there you have it for all its ups and downs, the horrors that he lived through, the triumphs behind him, the triumphs yet to be. Steve Keating has lived a life as he said, of beautiful curiosity. So maybe we can all learn a little from Steve. We're all strapped in here together, right? We might as well enjoy the view. Thanks for listening to Not Impossible. Shout out to our sponsor Avnet, a company that provides true end to end technology to help people who make anything, anywhere in the world reach further. Go check out their communities Hoxter. The world's fastest growing developer community for learning, programming and building hardware.

Mick Ebeling:	38:47	Element 14, the biggest designer engineer community on the planet. You can find links to their websites on ours, podcastnotimpossible.com. We're also posting links to e-NABLE and to Steve Keating's website, where you can see all those crazy inventions and even watch his brain surgery. And don't worry if you don't have 10 hours to watch his brain surgery, he's accelerated it to two minutes. Again those links are on our website podcastnotimpossible.com. Lydia Stroll produced this episode, edits and mixing by Lizzie Peabody.

Mick Ebeling:	39:24	Our associate producer was Vicki Shire, our development director, Erin Sullivan, our director of partnerships, Joe Babarsky. Special thanks to Steve Keating, John Shawl, Tore Myron and Julian Leland for helping make this episode possible. And our executive producers are Phil Lurman and me. I'm Mick Ebeling. Until next time, remember, put your goals out there, think big. Think huge, imagine. Just take the leap, then it will appear. It might be tough, it might be hard, but it's not impossible.