The afternoon sessions had a much more TED.com-feel to them. A fascinating though barely understandable Serguei Krasnikov, straight from Tintin in the USSR on building time-machines (and explaining that you cannot go back to the past to kill your younger self and stuff like that). He was followed by the famous Conrad 'mathematics' Wolfram, rooting for a new way of teaching children maths. (Why does everybody always say they need to know the basics? They need to know how to calculate by hand, from the head? Do we need those basics when working with a pc or driving a car? Do we teach a todler that a cat is a fourlegged feline mammal with an aversion to water or do we let him play with a kitten? Why not teach our children how to use the tools that exist to understand math on a conceptual level?)
And he is , of course, the father of the Wolfram Alpha search engine that could perfectly answer the following question 'what was the weather like when John Brown was born'.
It got even more hilarious with Marc Millis, former head of Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project ... on stuff like colony ships, travelling for 120.000 years when looking for an habitable planet ('if homosapiens build a ship and left when they originated, they haven't arrived yet'), the need for energy to sustain the trip and other cool ideas. In short: @ one point we will really need to get off this planet so we should be getting on with it.
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