Hello everybody, thank you for having me here and thank you for the nice introduction, it helps me lighten the mood here. So, let's start. What do you think when you think about a car?  I guess someone would draw the mechanical aspects of a car, someone would be interested in the body and the chassis of the car. The answer is yes, it depends on your personal interest. There would be a lot many perspectives. I'm sure though that this would not be one of the answers. This perspective would not be thought about. Now, what is this?  So, what are they? These dots that you see are digital computers spread across the car and these lines that connect them are digital networks. And the question is, I mean, automatically curiosity should come into play. Why do you need this? Why do you need digital networks inside a car? The answer would be that computers and digital networks are the best way of doing two things. A, information transmission. Second, information processing.  So, you could ask, okay, why do cars need to do information processing and information transmission and exactly what do they mean? So, to go into examples now, let's say that you apply your brakes. Okay, you're driving down the road, you apply brakes and so the brakes, the brake pedal is located near your feet. The brake discs are actually located near the wheels. That's one thing. You want to turn on the lights, you turn on the knob that's located at your dashboard and the lights located at the extremities of the car, they turn on or turn off depending upon what you want to do. Another thing, when the car hits the obstacle, let's say you're driving down and it hits the obstacle and the airbags need to deploy. So, you see that the car is not a point object, it's spread in space. State changes from one part of a car need to be transmitted to the other parts of a car and that too, within a real-time guarantee. So, let's say, I mean, your brakes come into play 10 seconds after you actually hit them. That's going to make the difference between life and death. So, now the second part that was information processing. So, you just don't blindly transmit information from one point to the other. You actually act upon the contents of the information. So, depending upon how hard the brake pedal was pressed, okay, how hard to apply the brakes, depending upon how much did you turn the knob, the intensity of the lights. So, the action depends on the contents of the message that you receive. So, now you know that cars need to do information processing and information transmission and that's the focus of my talk, to make you look at the car in this new perspective, not just as a mechanical entity. By the way, one thing to say about this new perspective as we go more into the future. This perspective would eclipse every other point of view that you have about the car. To give you an example again, think about the Tesla, okay. I know it's a super cool car, but take away its digital features and it's still a nice car, but that's the thing that generates the maximum amount of publicity and public attention towards the car. At the same time, you do not realize the value of something good unless it's taken away from you. So, that being said, let's now travel back into time to see that when cars started out, okay. How was point number one, information transmission and point number two, information processing done inside these cars? So, you had these super high-tech cars from 1886. The first car came out by Daimler. It was in 1886. This is how it used to be. So, the processing systems were completely, I mean, sorry, I used the wrong word, the information transmission systems were completely mechanical or hydraulic. So, yeah, there would be some kind of, I don't know, I'm not so much of an expert on this, but some kind of a rod or a fluid pipes system that would communicate the information that you've applied the brakes or the brake disc would come into play. And information processing, well, with mechanical systems, you could use a complicated sort of gears, levers and so on, but it was pretty much non-existent. So, you see, there are many problems with this. Mechanical systems are heavy, bulky, they need fluid replacements every now and then and so on. So, like, there are a ton of problems with them. If every single system in your present day car was mechanical, your car would be heavier than a battle tank. So, lots of problems, we don't know what to do. So, let's go back into our time machine and travel slightly into the future. Now, we come out again of the time machine. We see that, okay, your Michael Faraday, your Thomas Edison's and James Clark's. Maxwell has been born and they've worked there. Magic and people know that, okay, you can transfer information from one point to the other using electrical wires and they become the next generation of information transmission processing inside of cars. So, you do stuff with electricity. Automatic advantages are your car loses weight, it becomes more fuel efficient and wires occupy way less space than bulky mechanical rods. So, yeah, all good. But then there were still problems with electrical systems. So, to give you an analogy, think of the post, okay? So, you want to deliver a parcel to someone. What you do right now is, okay, you go to a central authority that is Deutsche Post, DHL, or something, you hand over the parcel to them and they are the ones who give it to that person that you intended to send it to, yes? But think about this, if that did not exist, so everybody who had to deliver something, you had to implement your own personal service, everybody delivering their parcel. So, with one person, it's okay, but trust me, if everybody starts to do this, your roads would be super clogged with traffic all the time. That's the problem with electrical systems. If you have like, I don't know, 100 different entities inside a car that all want to talk to each other, everybody has to be connected to the remaining 99 entities and that leads to this, which is, sorry, this, which is really, really bad. So, again, we have some problems and we don't know what to do. As usual, go back into the time machine and travel slightly into the present. So, we come out into the present right now and what has changed? Digital. Digital technology pretty much when it came out revolutionized every single industry that we know. So, obviously, people were using it to communicate with each other at speeds that were unheard of. So, let's do the same thing with cars as well. So, information transmission and processing now was done by digital computers. I mean, the computers did the processing part and the information transmission was done by digital networks. And the best thing about digital networks is that computers actually can work only with digital networks. They cannot work with mechanical rods. They cannot work with wires. I mean, electrical wires, they can only work with digital networks. So, that's one good thing. And the second best thing, which was the solution to the problem that we just talked about, was that you actually have a nice postal system now. Digital signals, when they travel from point A to point B, they can share the same wire. The same physical media can be shared by these signals. So, you basically have Deutsche Post. Now, if you want to send the packet from point A to point B, you all go to the central routing, this big tick line that you see in the center, and this takes care of forwarding your message to the right endpoint. Yes. And now you see that everything is good. There are pretty much normal problems. Cars seem pretty good. Information processing and transmission is being done in the best possible way. But we also have to travel now into the future. So, I mean, if something's not broke, why fix it? But therein lies the key. Think about the car of the future now, okay? You would think about stuff like autonomous driving. You can talk to your car and stuff. Now, when a car is doing autonomous driving, it needs a high definition crystal clear video feed of what's going on around it. So, this data involves a lot of bandwidth. Unfortunately, these digital networks which were designed around the 1980s and so they were never designed keeping these kind of applications in mind. So, they were just not fast enough. And it's not their fault. They did the job they were supposed to do. And technology in cars does not change as fast as your smartphone. So, the technology upgrade cycle in cars is really slow. It's going to take time for them to be replaced because you keep a car for five or six years or so, unlike your smartphone. Now, before we travel into the future now, so we know that the problem is networks are slow. What to do? So, yeah, you could spend a ton of money on research and stuff, but then a bunch of smart people who work at major automotive companies like BMW, FOWA and GM and so on. And researchers at renowned universities, they said that there is already a solution out there in the consumer electronics domain for such a long time. Ethernet.  It's super fast. It's been doing video streaming for so long. And Ethernet is literally the backbone. Okay, now it's fiber optics, but at one point of time Ethernet was the backbone of the internet. So, and it's fast enough. So, let's put this in the car as well. So, you had computers inside the car now and you got Ethernet. And one key point, technology and talent reuse. Companies, automotive companies do not have to train people again on this new technology. You would just hire people from the IT domain and you save a ton of cost. So, now we are set to travel into the future. We have a solid basis in terms of hardware. To support this, you have super fast computers that are going faster every year and you have a high-speed network as well. So, what do you do? Until this point of time, we have seen that, okay, cars are now extremely well connected on the inside. So, what's the next logical step? You connect to the world outside and what's the biggest digital network outside of a car? It's the internet. So, you can hook up your car to the internet now. That will be the next cool thing to do.  That will be super weird. So, what do you do? Again, consumer electronics always had the answer. Your smartphones, they don't carry... I mean, they don't have Ethernet wires coming out of them, right? So, you have Wi-Fi, you have LTE data, Bluetooth, NFC and so on. And these things already work nicely with Ethernet. Consumer electronics guys have solved that problem a long time back. The car guy said, let's just copy again. So, pretty much in the near future. And when I say future, I don't mean like the Jetsons era or something, I mean 2029 or so. Your cars would start to have LTE data. Some of them actually the higher ones, I guess, already have it. You would have LTE data, you would have Wi-Fi in your car. Now, think about your smartphone now. It has a nice screen, it has a sound system and it has connectivity, it has compute power inside of it. The same checklist, apply it to cars now. Your cars have computers, I just told you. They have larger screens than your phones and the sound system of a car, pretty much no smartphone can beat that. And now you have Wi-Fi, Internet, Ethernet and so on. So your car becomes a smartphone on wheels. Actually, consumer electronics companies like Google, Baidu, Apple are actually now porting their software, Android, iOS, to work inside of cars. And at some point of time, it is the software that runs inside of your car which would be the selling point. Like people choose Android versus iOS. I know it's hard to believe this day will come. You will choose your cars based on the technology that's running inside the software, the brand that's running inside these. The name stuff, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay and so on. Now, at the same time, this does not mean that your cars are competing against your smartphones. They are actually complimenting them. And how is this possible? Because all of them, I mean your smartphones and your cars, they talk the language of the Internet. That is Wi-Fi, Ethernet and so on. To give you an example of how this would be nice, I mean how do your cars and phones compliment each other? Let's say you are on your smartphone, you are walking towards your car.  Maybe it's a nice restaurant that someone recommended and you want to go there. Okay, so you search for it on your smartphone today. What would happen is you would dock this phone inside of your car or if you don't have a dock, you would clumsily put it somewhere and start driving. What would happen in this connected car is, okay, you search for it, you are on your Google account, you get into a car. It also has Android Auto. They are both being synchronized in real time by the cloud.   And now let's see how this works the other way around as well. So your smartphone also benefits from the data that comes from your car. So you are driving down the road and you find this new piece of music that you are really into, you put it on repeat again and again and again. Now, these days you would go back to your smartphone, you would try to search for it. No need, say if your car has the same music player app which it would have as your smartphone right now. So you just go onto your smartphone and it would be in your recently played tracks. And that's it. Now, you see that there is data that is being shuffled around from point A to the cloud and then point B and so on. This data is private. The places you drive to, they should be known only to you. And okay, even if it's stored on the cloud, it should not be used for advertising purposes to target you. So if you want to know more details about this, so German companies that actually offer cloud synchronization services with cars right now, that's the key USB that we do not do data analytics on the data that would be created out of your car. Data privacy in a nutshell would be essential when you choose this. So we just saw that cars can talk to your personal devices. They can talk to your smartphones, laptops and so on. Next thing is they talk to each other. So I just told you cars have Wi-Fi and there's a standard called V2V, vehicle to vehicle communication. So it's basically cars swapping stories and sharing info with each other. Why is this useful? This is going to be implemented in the next, I would say, 5 to 10 years in some states in the United States. So California, I guess there are test runs of this going on. So cars have Wi-Fi. They don't need the internet for this. So if a car is driving down a patch of road, and it sees there is some kind of obstacle which would block it, what you do using Vaze right now, so that's being done without the internet. Okay, there is a problem here. This car would transmit this information across the mesh. So the car behind it would get this. It would relay this information back and back and back. So everybody knows that you can avoid this patch of road. Another thing is this standard states that, okay, cars at all time would broadcast their speed, the direction they're moving, if brakes are being applied or not publicly. So any car that's nearby would come to know this. And why is this useful? When autonomous driving cars come into the picture, apart from the video data that they have around them, it would be nice to know what cars nearby are doing so that they can act on this data in meaningful ways. So everything that we talked about till now, you see this car, I mean you see that the driver is not actually doing anything. He's reading a book, okay? The car is driving on its own. You just get into the car and you say, hey, car, drive me to work, drive me to home, drive me to whatever destination you want. All of these super cool technologies were made possible because of the powerful computers and digital networks inside of a car and the wireless technologies that they enable. And this would be the features that you look for in the future when you would buy this connected car of the future. Right now, it's a highly tedious job to drive, especially when you drive frequently in city traffic. But in the future, you just get into a car, you tell it where to go using voice commands so you don't need to push a set of buttons thanks to artificial intelligence. Again, you can just pretty much talk to your car. You just tell it where to go and then you do whatever catches your fancy. After your workplace, after your home, the car would be the place where you spend a lot of time. So it would become your third living space. And with that, I'm done for the day. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you, Kartik. So someone have a question? Please. Thank you very much for the talk. A question about reliability more. So reliability, for example, if your smartphone hangs, you probably will just reply in a minute or two later. But in this terms, car is more like your cardio or not yours, but someone's cardio stimulator. You don't want it to hang and be rebooted while you're driving 200 kilometers in the highway. So how to deal with that kind of situation? Very, very good question. And I'm really happy that you asked it. The point is, this is a 15-minute talk and there was actually a slide in my initial thing about it. There is an entire industry inside the automotive, software, hardware sector that focuses on nothing but safety. So to give you a simple answer, every function. So I am in the business of making automotive chips and frequently I have to answer this. So how is automotive computer different from your standard smartphone computer? Every function that happens inside an automotive chip is replicated three times. It's actually a legal requirement and when you take this concept to the aerospace domain, it has to happen five times. So everything that you do, I mean Steve just gave a talk about redundancy, right? So you have five computers doing the same thing in lockstep. They all do it at the same time and every single output is compared at every clock cycle. Even if one of them is different, the entire system comes to a halt. And there are standards about this, but then the talk becomes slightly techy and it's not so interesting. But yes, this is a big, big industry. Cars that would come out in 2025, the features that we are working on right now, the cars would come out in 2026 or so because it's actually a legal requirement that you test every single possible use case before it comes out into the market. So yes, you are right. This is a big thing in automotive software and hardware. Great answer I think. So we had another question there. My question is a little bit similar. Well, if the car basically has computers running so many different systems in the car and the car is also connected to the outside world, isn't it possible to hack it? Absolutely. That's the hottest thing going on right now. Why are you so happy? We have to keep business for ourselves. If the car becomes super secure, then probably so many security researchers would go out of business. But I'm just joking. This is the system. You can find vulnerabilities in them. The car is way more locked down. Yes, but then at the same time, it's always a race between two opposing forces. You, everybody here, I think if you're interested in cars and you would have seen videos on YouTube that cars being hacked, you can unlock the doors without even having the key using some equipment that you get off radio shack and stuff. But yes, this is a continuously evolving topic and as cars get more and more software, this topic becomes even more significant. Let me just state one thing. I don't know if you know the names of some popular automotive companies here, Bosch, Infinium, Continental and so on. These guys have separate entities. They spend billions of dollars in ensuring that the software that runs inside of cars is secure. Again, as I said, there are legal standards that have to comply to these standards before it can be deployed into a car, which I guess the consumer electronics industry does not have. As he said, your smartphone can hang. It's okay, not the software inside of your car, especially critical functions like breaking and stuff. By the way, these days it's also done in software. Thank you. I think we had a question here. Hello. If you have the self-drive mode, I think city traffic is going to be smoother and denser. Therefore, can you give a guess and estimate on how much more load city roads will take, be able to take by this automatization? To be honest, this is slightly out of my scope. I've never talked about this, but yes, I do agree that when you drive on city roads and all of the cars are automated now, the technically efficiency of the network, of the people transmission network should go higher. When there was this famous case of the Uber automatic car killing someone in the United States, it was repeated all the time that the fatalities caused by human blunder still are way, way higher than caused by automatic driving cars, although they are in the stages of infancy and I hope that this number would go down in the future. I mean, it's actually possible. Maybe it depends on your point of philosophy. How do you think that automated systems just might be better at not making mistakes than human beings? This is a hope, at least, right? Unfortunately, we don't have more time, but if you would like to ask more questions, you can approach after the event and ask Katik directly. Thanks a lot again for listening. Thank you.


In the late 1950s and early 1960s, so little was known about how humans would react to spaceflight that researchers had to get pretty creative. And one interesting moment of creativity was recruiting deaf participants for various motion sickness studies. This series of tests was done cooperatively between NASA and the US Navy, and it might sound a little bit weird, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider where motion sickness comes from within the body. It all comes down to the vestibular system, which is the system inside the inner ear that's responsible for balance and all kinds of sensory information about movement and orientation in space. Sensitive nerve and hair cells react to the movement of fluid inside the inner ear to give our brains information about motion, balance, and even spatial orientation. Some scientists still think there might be multiple causes for motion sickness, but one of the most commonly agreed upon causes is called sensory conflict theory. Think about when you read in a car if you get motion sickness. Your eyes, looking at the book, don't see any movement, but the fluid inside your inner ear is aware that you're moving forward. This sends conflicting information to your brain, you get nauseous, and then you throw up, which is deeply unpleasant for anybody. A similar thing happens in space when astronauts get space sickness. The vestibular system suddenly doesn't have the same cues of up and down or motion because they're weightless, but the eyes see things as being quote-unquote normal and that you can still read a book. So you still get that conflict of information that can lead to nausea and vomiting, which is what nobody wants in space. Not only can you not exactly air out a spacecraft very easily, but if that liquid clumps up and gets into a control panel, that can be a very bad day for electronics. Not to mention means that you can't do space walks and it means that you'd have to shift around the schedule to account for a sick astronaut. NASA knew this could be an issue, so it's said about trying to understand how people react to stimuli that can involve motion sickness, things like high gravity acceleration and then zero gravity. To understand the broad spectrum of how people might react to motion sickness or the situations that could invoke motion sickness, NASA tested 11 deaf individuals. The way they became deaf is really important here. Of these 11 deaf men between the ages of 25 and 48, all but one was deaf after childhood bout with spinal meningitis. Spinal meningitis can, among other effects, cause lasting damage to the vestibular system of the inner ear by killing those sensitive nerve and hair cells that we need for that sensory information about balance, motion, and spatial orientation. That meant that these men had the vital system involved in motion sickness, the vestibular system damaged, and they were, theoretically, completely immune to motion sickness, so NASA tried to make them motion sick. There were a series of tests done with these men throughout the 1960s, and some of them sound really pretty awful. In one test, four men were put into a room where the walls spun at 10 revolutions per minute for 12 straight days, and not one of them got motion sick. In another test, a number of the deaf men were put on board a boat with 20 men who could hear, so their vestibular system was intact, on a boat that was sailing in very choppy waters off the coast of Nova Scotia. The men played cards and generally felt fine, while 15 of the 20 men who could hear all got violently ill. In fact, the deaf men had no motion sickness. Not even when the choppy waters got so scary that they all feared shipwreck. Even the panic couldn't induce any kind of nausea in these men. Another test had them floating around in the infamous vomit comet, the plane that flies parabolas to give you short bursts of weightlessness.  But these men didn't throw up, and when researchers tested their urine after the flight for the presence of stress hormones, they found none, whereas the men who could hear who did the same test did have raised levels of stress hormones in their urine. So it really did seem like these men were just completely immune to motion sickness. It was a very odd and very unique and very interesting series of tests that NASA did in cooperation with the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in the 1960s. And ultimately, these 11 deaf men played a massive and unsung role in helping get humans off the earth. If you love learning weird little tidbits about space history, be sure to subscribe to this channel because I do regular videos telling you all the things you never thought you even wanted to know about old-timey spaceflight. And of course, as always, I have a little bit more about this story on my companion blog post over at Discover. The link is in the description below if you are curious. I also want to remind you guys that you can now sponsor Vintage Space to help make the content that you love possible. There's a video about how that works right up here. So of course, leave me any questions, comments, and concerns that you have in the comments down below. Is there anything you'd like to see covered in a future episode? Any question that I didn't quite answer? Let me know all of your thoughts. And of course, you can follow me across social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram for daily Vintage Space content. As always guys, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.