The man who discovered Tetris now wants to save the Earth

This story is part of Road Trip 2019, profiles of troublemakers and pioneers who conceive our future.

The road to Mars is bumpy and rough. Through the window of the 4×4 in which I roll, I see only sterile landscape and volcanic rock. As the wind rises and howls through the windows, the environment seems even stranger.

We climb a hill and approach the only sign of civilization for several kilometers: a white dome that looks like clouds in the sky above. We are not really on Mars – or not yet anyway. We are on the Big Island of Hawaii, at the top of Mauna Loa, a working volcano located at 8,200 feet above sea level. The dome is HI-SEAS, or analog simulation of Hawaii's space exploration, a simulator that prepares future astronauts for life on the moon or on Mars.

When we get close to it, the reason why Henk Rogers chose to go to Mars sounds to my ears: "We need to have at least one other place where life as we know it exists."

Rogers, 65, is the charismatic Dutch technology entrepreneur and owner of HI-SEAS. But he is passionate about more than just space exploration. He is also working on developing sustainable energy solutions for the Earth, starting with Hawaii. The moment could not be more appropriate – 2019 is on its way to becoming the hottest second (or third) year ever recorded. With the abundance of sun and natural resources in Hawaii, the island state is the ultimate testbed to show just how effective and profitable renewable energy solutions can be.

In 2007, Rogers launched the Blue Planet Foundation, a non-profit organization, to end the use of carbon-based fuels in Hawaii and promote clean energy solutions in the United States and in the world. He also removed all his properties from the grid as part of his plan to show people how easy it is to get away from fossil fuels. Or, as he puts it so well, "I have to clean my own room before I can ask other people to clean theirs."

His room, as I discovered, is pretty cool.

Blue Hawaii

The Big Island of Hawaii is full of contrasts. While my plane arrives at Kona International Airport, the aquamarine ocean suddenly gives way to a black lava sea. Once on a firm ground, the rock suddenly turns into a verdant green hill with tropical vegetation. It's almost as if someone is painting a line between them.

The Rogers Ranch is a 25-minute drive east of the airport and a 50-minute drive from HI-SEAS. Pu 'u Wa' awa '(which roughly translates to' mountain canoe '), located on a 28-acre lot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, emerges after three kilometers of the road nearest main. To reach the ranch, I first had to cross the Pu 'uwa Wa' awa 'forest reserve, filled with native flowers of ohia lehua in full bloom, with their bright red stamens guiding the path. Goats and cows roam freely in the fields. It could not be more different from the arid and Martian landscape of Mauna Loa.

Smiling broadly behind his beard, Rogers greets me with a warm hug. I have never met him before, but he treats me like a family, with the true spirit of aloha. He wears a white blazer and taupe suede shoes with mismatched laces. Both are decorated with his own drawings, drawn with Sharpies; we say "Save our planet". His hair is pulled in a ponytail.

Although he looks relaxed and at home in Hawaii, Rogers, 65, has always been looking to the future. In a previous career as a video game developer, he introduced in Japan one of his first role-playing games with The Black Onyx in 1984. Then, in the late 80's, he negotiated and acquired the rights to A game then unknown, called Tetris. In 1988, he fell on it at the beginning of CES. (The game was designed by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian computer programmer, who co-founded The Tetris Company with Rogers in 1996, which is now the exclusive source of all Tetris licenses.)

It was a literal blockbuster, selling for tens of millions of copies after conceding to Nintendo for the Gameboy.

But it was not his Tetris fortune that directly led Rogers to his philanthropic efforts. In 2005, he had a heart attack, just when he had more money after selling his cell phone gaming company, Blue Lava Wireless, to a $ 137 million deal. Looking up at the ceiling at the back of the ambulance, he decided that it was not his time to leave. In the weeks that followed, he found what he called two of his missions in life: put an end to the use of carbon-based fuels and save life on another planet.

Rogers was born in the Netherlands and arrived in the United States at the age of 11. After falling in love with computer science at Stuyvesant High School in New York, he pursued a major in Computer Science at the University of Hawaii. He joked that his minor was in Dungeons & Dragons because he loved role-playing so much. "People were telling me how much it was a waste of time," he says. But it is video games that have finally earned him a fortune.

The Dutch cowboy

We jump into a golf cart (electric, of course) so that Rogers can show me around his ranch. There is a workshop where he entertains and builds DIY projects (he goes to Burning Man almost every year). I meet some of the animals that live there, including donkeys, horses, pigs and Obi Wan, the dog po – a mixed breed dog. The addiction allows you to enjoy a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean while relieving yourself.

Going up the top of the property, we stop towards the main house, Pihanakalani (translation: place of gathering of supernatural beings raised). It is a modest and comfortable house located at 2,700 meters above sea level, with a vast terrace overlooking the ocean in the distance. Inside, the fireplace is adorned with pictures of Rogers and his family, including one of him and his wife with the Obama. He offers me water from the well of the property that feeds the ranch and the 130 neighboring houses. This water has not been on the surface for over 2,500 years and its taste is incredible.

It's a hot and humid tropical day, with the trade winds acting as a natural air conditioner. The ranch is completely off the grid, so even though the property needed some real air conditioning, it could make it work itself through solar power.

"I thought it was going to be expensive and it would be difficult," he says, describing his experience that has propelled the sun across the ranch. "But that's not the case, the change begins with yourself."

You could say that it's easy for a multimillionaire to move all its properties off the grid and promote the virtues of renewable energy, but what about the others? Is sustainability a luxury that only the rich can afford?

Rogers does not think so. "When flat screen TVs first came out, they cost $ 10,000, you buy them now for $ 600 at Costco," he says. "Everything we talk about [on the ranch] will go through there. "

For the moment, Hawaii still has some way to go. The state produces the bulk of its electricity from imported oil, accounting for 68% by 2018, and has the highest electricity prices in the United States. But with a lot of sun, it is good to switch to renewable energy. And in any case, it's a change that the state must now make. In 2015, the Blue Planet Foundation successfully lobbied for state legislation to oblige utilities in Hawaii to use 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2045. The Foundation is working now with eight other US states to help enact similar legislation.

"Henk Rogers has been a staunch advocate in the quest for a 100% renewable energy future in our state," said Hawaii Governor David Ige. "His leadership in creating the Blue Planet Foundation has had a significant impact on state policies."

Rogers hopes (and hopes) that Hawaii will reach the goal well before the 2045 deadline. It's already well on the way. In Oahu, one in three houses is equipped with rooftop solar panels, vast solar parks spring up across the islands, and a geothermal power plant is gaining ground.

The year 2045 is also significant. "What better result than 100 years of the United Nations existence to curb climate change?" he says.

Build a better battery

The Blue Planet Research Energy Lab, the first building you see on Pu & # 39; u Wa'a awa, comes off the landscape as a corner. This is a test bench for renewable energy systems. The 360 ​​solar panels installed on the roof capture enough energy to power the entire ranch. Inside, you will find a workshop with an electric powered kayak and a portable hydrogen fueled barbecue. Although they are only experiments for the moment, everyone could easily become a commercial product.

"We are literally trying to try everything and see how it works," said Vincent Paul Ponthieux, Director and Chief Technology Officer of Blue Planet Research.

At one end of the energy lab, I spot a row of black cabinets with bright blue LEDs around the doors. They look so elegant, at first you could confuse them with wine refrigerators. But these ferrous lithium iron phosphate batteries are an integral part of the ranch's sustainable energy network. As the Big Island is renowned for the fluctuating weather – the mornings are usually sunny and the afternoons can be cloudy – anyone who totally uses solar energy must be able to store excess energy for later use .

While iron-lithium ferrous phosphate batteries can easily be confused with the cobalt-based lithium-ion batteries that power your phone and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Ponthieux explained that lithium iron was more stable and also volatile than lithium-ion cells. (The 787 was briefly grounded in 2013 after some of the aircraft's batteries overheated and Samsung recalled its Galaxy Note 7 in 2017 after the batteries of two phones caught fire.) Indeed, when I spend the hand on the surface of the batteries of one of the units, I am surprised when I do not feel heat.

Ferrous phosphate chemistry also does not discharge the current as fast as lithium-ion batteries used in a Tesla, for example. And that Rogers, it is said, is wanted. "I do not need a ridiculous mode for my house," he said, referring to the Tesla driving mode that accelerates the electric car from 0 to 100 km / h in less than 3 seconds. In addition, ferrous phosphate batteries can be recycled when they reach the end of their life, or about 25 years.

Blue Planet Energy (another company named Blue Planet Blue, owned by Rogers) sells exactly the same battery system for home energy storage. Called Blue Ion, you can install it exactly as you would with any other home system such as the Tesla Powerwall. Once installed, a standard Blue Ion system captures excess energy from solar panels with a power output of 16 kilowatts / hour, enough to power a 2,000 square foot home. The batteries charge at 90% of their capacity in an hour and you can monitor the battery status from your phone.

These batteries are not just used to power standard homes. Following the power outages caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017, Blue Planet Research has deployed a system in Puerto Rico to support various projects, including a cancer treatment center. The Foundation is also upgrading 125 schools with batteries to keep them running in future failures, as they also serve as community shelters during a disaster.

According to Rogers, Hawaii is also exposed to hurricanes, so it's a great place to use battery technology. "[Hawaii is] will be touched, "he says. There is nothing different about the infrastructure we have here in Puerto Rico – a lot of wires on wooden poles that fall when the wind blows. "

During a natural disaster, it is also useful to have a backup to the backup – in this case it would be hydrogen. Excess solar energy from the panels is automatically turned into hydrogen at the laboratory, which can then be used to charge electric vehicles or cook food (on this barbecue, for example).

"We do not like to waste anything," says Ponthieux. "We use hydrogen fuel cells with hydrogen that we made from the energy we would have thrown in. So we have a back-up system without fossil fuel."

Having a variety of energy systems is important to meet the demand at any time of the day, regardless of the weather. But it is also essential to test and prepare these systems here on Earth so that we can feed our lives when we are off-grid, in space.

Safeguarding life

If there is a word to describe Henk Rogers, he is motivated.

After finding Tetris, he believed so much in the game. "I realized that I was addicted," he says – he asked the game rights to his Russian creator. It was apparently impossible for a foreigner to enter the Soviet Union and conduct business in the late 1980s, but he succeeded.

Today, Rogers is committed to becoming 100% sustainable by 2020, although it admits that it is still working on ways to offset the carbon of all its journeys. air.

It also focuses on integrating sustainability into space. In addition to attending conferences on space exploration, Rogers also founded the International Moonbase Alliance, a collection of astronauts (such as Buzz Aldrin), scientists and researchers. engineers working to establish a lasting human presence on the moon.

Although SETI, the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence, has so far found no clear evidence of the existence of life beyond our planet, this is not the case. not the main concern of Rogers. For him, going to another planet is not only about preserving life once we are in space, it also preserves what we have on Earth.

"I am a computer scientist," he says. "You make backups."

In 2012, Kim Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii, contacted Rogers to fund a space exploration project on the Big Island. This project turned out to be HI-SEAS and it was built in 2013 on the site of an abandoned quarry.

According to Ponthieux (who, in addition to working with Rogers at Blue Planet Research, also designed HI-SEAS), the team camped for three weeks at the Mauna Loa summit to set it up. They were still putting the finishing touches on a crew that approached to begin the first mission. NASA's mission was to test solutions to menu fatigue, or what happens when astronauts are bored with eating the same meals. The crew consumes only long-life (or instant) foods and must complete daily mood and health surveys, carrying arm indicators to track movements and use energy.

Since then, the habitat has hosted multi-month missions with space agencies and researchers seeking to simulate life on Mars, studying everything from psychological aspects of life on another planet to testing technologies such as RV to communicate with their loved ones at home. By the end of 2018, the dome became a base for shorter missions focused on the moon.

So why choose Big Island as a replacement for the moon? The rocks of the Moon and Mars share 96% of the same chemistry as those of Hawaii. If you are going to practice with new technologies from anywhere on Earth, this is the place.

"It is important to have similar habitats [a research station to simulate life on Mars] because it would be too expensive and too risky to try for the first time things on the Moon or on Mars, "says Rodrigo Romo, program director at PISCES, a public agency that promotes aerospace and economic development in Hawaii.

Make moonshots

Part of Rogers' mission is, by the end of the next decade, to build a lunar village that would not only help us better study the moon, but also serve as a base to help us get to Mars. Called Mahina Lani, he expects the robots will be able to complete much of the construction work. Humans will arrive later to finalize the finishes. He could be prototyped in Hawaii.

HI-SEAS is also seeking to expand by adding more systems designed to allow the reuse of finite resources, similar to those that would be used in space. This means being able to recycle water and making sure that excess solar energy is not wasted by converting it into hydrogen.

"We need people with the state of mind, passion and funds to get things done," said Romo about Rogers' contribution. "This will be the factor that will make the difference in space exploration from now on."

I ask Rogers what, in his opinion, are the common features between him and other technology entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who also aspire to space.

"I think the trait thinks big," he says, "I mean, really big, like," What is the future of humanity? " large."

For Rogers, life in space and life on Earth are inexorably linked. Although he preaches by example, he knows that a greater concerted effort is needed to prevent climate change from worsening.

"Let's stop looking for who the cause is or if it's really happening," he says. "We will solve this problem."

As I crunch the jagged lava rock surrounding HI-SEAS and immerse myself in an arid landscape, I can not help but dream of lush green Hawaii just a few miles away. Breathing is difficult and each step is a struggle in the space suit that I wear. Even if I'm just simulating what it's like to live on the moon or on Mars, it shows how fragile and precious our planet is – and what we could lose from climate change.