Bill Stone

Why you should listen

Explorer Bill Stone has spent nine years of his life on exploratory and scientific expeditions. He has logged more time working from remote subterranean camps in the world's deepest caves than any other human being, including two years at depths of more than 1,000 meters beneath the surface. He is a serial inventor and holds 33 patents on applications ranging from lasers that can propel objects into orbit to methods of recovering autonomous vehicles from beneath Antarctic ice sheets. His company Stone Aerospace designed and built a series of robotic systems that will be used to search for life in a sub-surface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Stone's Shackleton Energy Company is planning to use raw materials that have been trapped for billions of years deep in craters on the Moon to create and sell derived products, including propellants and other consumables. In doing so, they hope to open up the inner solar system to human exploration and commerce. 

Stone is the author of Beyond the Deep: The Deadly Descent into the World's Most Treacherous Cave, a riveting tale of exploration of the Sistema Huautla cave system in southern Mexico, the deepest cave in the western hemishere.