This TED Talk features entrepreneur Sebastian DeHella, recorded live at TEDx, San Francisco, 2017.

We know more about other planets than our own. And today, I want to show you a new type of robot, designed to help us better understand our own planet. It belongs to a category known in

the oceanographic community as an unmanned surface vehicle or USV, and it uses no fuel. Instead,

it relies on wind power for propulsion, and yet it can sail around the globe for months at a time.

So I want to share with you why we built it and what it means for you.

A few years ago, I was on a sailboat making its way across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii.

I just spent the past 10 years working non-stop, developing video games for hundreds of millions of users. And I wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture and get some much-needed thinking time.

I was the navigator on board.

And one evening, after a long session analyzing weather data and plotting our course,

I came up on deck and saw this beautiful sunset.

And a thought occurred to me.

How much do we really know about our oceans?

The Pacific was stretching all around me as far as the eye could see,

and the waves were rocking our boat forcefully,

a sort of constant reminder of its untold power.

How much do we really know about the oceans?

I decided to find out.

What I quickly learn is that we don't know very much. And the first reason is just how vast oceans are, covering 70% of the planet.

And yet, we know they drive complex planetary systems like global weather,

which affect all of us on a daily basis, sometimes dramatically.

And yet, those activities are mostly invisible to us.

Ocean data is scarce by any standards.

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