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Google's secret research lab has quietly shut down projects building lighter-than-air floating cargo ships and automatic vertical farms, according to its director Astro Teller.

Teller, 45, whose business card calls him "Captain of Moonshots" at X, formerly Google [x], told the TED conference in Vancouver that shutting down projects quickly was as important to his team's culture as dreaming big in the first place. "We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory, but enthusiastic scepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism," he said. "It's optimism's perfect partner. It unlocks the potential in every idea."


Last year, he said, X killed a project in automated vertical farming -- even though it met X's requirements of combining a huge problem that affects many millions of people with a radical solution and a breakthrough technology "that could actually be built". "One in nine people suffer from malnourishment," he said. "This technology uses ten times less water and one hundred times less land than conventional farming, and you don't have to transport the crops large distances." The team working on the project in Mountain View made progress on automated harvesting and efficient lighting. "But we couldn't get staple crops like grains and rice to grow this way, so we killed the project," Teller said. "But if anyone knows how to grow dwarf rice, let us know."

He also said that X had been developing "variable-buoyancy cargo ships that are lighter than air" -- and had binned what was looking like a promising technology. "This has the potential to lower the cost time and carbon footprint of shipping without needing runways -- it's a real moonshot," he said. "We came up with a breakthrough -- helium cells. But it would cost $200 million to design and build the first one. That was way too expensive -- because X is structured with these tight feedback loops of making a mistake and creating new designs." $200 mlillion was too much for X to spend to reach the next point of iteration. "So we killed this project too."

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Quoting President Kennedy's 1962 call to put a man on the Moon, Teller explained that visions at X must be coupled with workable solutions. "Great dreams aren't just visions -- they're visions coupled with strategies for making them real." X's innovation secret, he said, was a willingness to confront the toughest problems early on in a project's life, and quickly decide when to shut down those that faced excessive obstacles. "The Silicon Valley hype machine has created a myth of the visionary who effortlessly builds the future," Teller said. "Don't believe the hype. The moonshot factory is a messy place. But rather than avoid the mess, we try to make that our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove we're wrong. That's it -- that's the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first, get excited and cheer: 'Hey, how are we going to kill our project today?' "We've got this interesting balance going where we allow our unchecked optimism to fuel our visions, but we also harness enthusiastic scepticism to breathe life into those visions."

Hybrid thinking is central to X's methodology. "At X, you'll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer, and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts. Inventors, engineers and makers are dreaming up technologies that we hope will make the world a wonderful place: we use the words 'moonshot' to remind us to dream big, and 'factory' to remind us that we need concrete plans to make them real."


One promising moonshot that X is taking to the next stage is Project Loon, its balloon-powered internet that works by sending balloons into the stratosphere from where they beam down a connection.

Since 2012, Teller said, the Loon team has prioritised the work that seems the most difficult and the most likely to kill their project. "Here comes the crazy part: what if we let the balloons drift and we taught them to sail the winds? Turns out the stratosphere has winds going into quite different speeds and directions. We thought, using smart algorithms and wind data around the world, we could manoeuvre the balloons.

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"The first thing the team did was try to create a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere to the ground. It worked, so we kept going. Could we create a real internet connection? Now we can do up to 15MB a second? Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky? Check. Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up more than 100 days while costing less than five per cent of what traditional long-life balloons cost to make? Yes. "We made round silvery balloons, giant pillow-shaped balloons, balloons the size of a blue whale. Since the one thing most likely to kill the balloon project was whether we could guide a balloon through the sky, we put a balloon inside a balloon -- one filled with air, one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make it heavier or out to make it lighter. That allows it to rise or fall. It floats up and down hoping to grab winds. "Our latest balloon can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can navigate to within 500 metres of where it wants to go from 20,000km away. Last year a balloon built inexpensively went round the world 19 times over 187 days -- so we're going to keep going." X is in discussions with telco partners throughout the world and will fly over countries such as Indonesia this year for real service testing.

Getty Images / Noah Berger

Finding a major flaw in a project does not necessarily kill it, Teller explained. "Sometimes it sets it on a more productive path. The self-driving car prototype had no steering wheel or brakes. With 1.2 million people dying on the roads a year, it's a natural moonshot. Three and a half years ago we gave retrofitted self-driving cars to other Googlers to find out what they thought of the experience. Yet our plan to have the car do almost all the driving proved a really bad plan: it wasn't safe, as users didn't stay alert in case the car needed to hand control back to them. So we sent the team back to the drawing board. "They came up with a beautiful new perspective -- they aimed for a car where you're truly a passenger, where you tell the car where you want to go and push the button and it takes you from point A to point B by itself. Now our cars have self-driven more than 1.4 million miles, and they're out every day on the streets of Mountain View and Austin, Texas. The cars team shifted their perspective -- and sometimes shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart."


X has also used perspective-shifting to tackle wind energy. "One of my favourite examples of perspective-shifting is wind energy," Teller said. "There's no way we're going to build a better standard wind turbine than the experts -- but we found a way to get up higher in the sky, to get access to faster, more consistent winds, and so more energy without needing hundreds of tons of steel. Our energy kite spins up using propellers -- and those propellers that lift it up become flying turbines, sending energy back down the tether. We haven't yet found a way to kill this project. And the longer it survives that pressure, the more excited we get that this could become a cheaper and more deployable wind-power source for the world."

He said that X had also discovered how to engender the mindset that lets employees aim high despite risk of failure. "Being audacious and working on big risky things makes people inherently uncomfortable," he said. "You can't yell at people and force them to fail fast. They worry. The only way to get people to work on big risky things, audacious ideas, and run at the hardest parts of the problems first, is if you make that the path of least resistance for them. We make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as evidence is on the table as they get rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. they get hugs and high fives from their manager, they get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that have ended their projects."

TED's curator asked Teller how long it would be until Loon enabled five billion people to come online and enjoy bandwidth fast enough for video streaming. "Sometime between five and ten years I'd expect it to happen," Teller said. "It will change the world in ways we cannot possibly imagine. There are a lot of people who don’t have regular access to electricity, to food, and have a smartphone. It's the internet that's in between them and literacy, economic development, democracy. It will change the world very profoundly."