Camden, Maine -- X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis kicked off the PopTech conference here with a lofty goal on Thursday: "Our mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs," he said in his opening-day address.
Technology's impact on people across the globe results in some "grand challenges," the theme of this year's PopTech, and those were certainly not in short supply during the first two days of the event.
How do we spur the invention of a 200-mpg car or promote genome sequencing for $1000 or less? How do societies contend with the accumulation of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, the accompanying global warming and the rapid acidification of the world's oceans? How can the media be transformed into a forum where scientific discovery is heralded as it was during the Apollo program's glory days?
Perhaps the biggest hurdle-clearing solution offered up came from Diamandis, whose recent announcement of a NASCAR-like Rocket Racing League intends to spark America's love of spaceflight anew.
Those "radical breakthroughs" Diamandis hopes to incite may come from a new generation of X-Prizes Diamandis' organization is now putting together. "The X-Prize worked, and it worked so well that we have decided to build the X-Prize Foundation beyond space into other prize areas," he said.
There will be X-Prizes, Diamandis said, for education, genomics and energy. The energy prize, in fact, should be off the blocks soon. "We're trying to completely rework the automobile industry. It's a broken industry," he said. "There is no good reason why we don't have cars right now that are getting amazing performance at 200 miles per gallon or greater."
And just as the original X-Prize motivated renewed public interest in the final frontier, one PopTech presenter took the conference on a voyage to another remote and utterly foreign region: To the mid-water ocean, the largest living area on earth.
Marcia McNutt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute pointed out that that vast region between the ocean's surface and the much-explored seafloor is home to "more biomass and more biodiversity than all of the rainforests combined."
Her research team, she noted, finds not only new species regularly but often entirely new families and genuses as well.
One recent discovery, of a deep-sea microbe that consumes methane and produces elemental hydrogen, represents a novel form of energy generation that could tap into the largest remaining source of fossil fuel on earth, methane clathrate deposits on the ocean floor. But unlike oil or gas, the carbon-dioxide exhaust this fossil-fuel consumption would produce would -- because of pressures at the bottom of the ocean -- remain in liquid form and remain sequestered in the briny deep.
Fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and global warming formed the core of Mark Lynas' presentation on his three-year globetrotting adventure to the Peruvian Andes, the Mongolian plains and to the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. All destinations are veritable canaries in the coal mine, according to Lynas, currently experiencing irreversible consequences from global climate change.
Lynas wrote about retreating glaciers, melting permafrost and island paradises lost to sea-level rise in his recent book High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis.
Explorations through the most populous regions of the globe informed three of PopTech's Grand Challengers.
Two trained their focus on China, professor and author Oded Shenkar and Harvard Law School Berkman Fellow and former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon.
Shenkar, author of The Chinese Century, cautioned against disturbing the now-awakening bear across the Pacific. The United States, he said, is much like Great Britain during the mid-19th century: A nation that farms out its manufacturing to a developing superpower but arrogantly presumes the developing nation is incapable of assuming the role of world leader.
"The British woke up in 1880," he said. "They realized this former colony is now making new things. Even the new jokes were coming from America!"
MacKinnon, a specialist on the internet in China, observed that while the Chinese have taken to the democratizing influence of blogging and podcasting, this acceptance is primarily in the realm of popular culture. The Chinese government still retains a tight control over political speech.
And she said this institutional censorship -- symbolized by the absence of any hits in a Chinese Google News search for the words "Tianamen massacre" -- is becoming increasingly hardwired into the Chinese internet by western companies such as MSN and Yahoo.
What she termed the "great firewall of China" could be readily spread into the non-Communist controlled world. "We must prevent censorship from being baked into the code and into the business model," she said.
By contrast, conference participants got an inside glimpse at the world's largest democracy: India.
Author and journalist Suketu Mehta, whose first book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, described his father's native city Mumbai (Bombay) as "the future of urban civilization on the planet, God help us."
While India has a lower population density than the Netherlands (385 people per square kilometer), Mumbai is the most densely populated region of the planet. At 45,000 people per square kilometer, Mumbai contains more than seven times the concentration of humanity than does the bustling city of Singapore (6000 per square kilometer).
Yet despite the ever-more teeming masses, Mehta still finds cause for hope in India's most populous city. "In India, the poor vote," Mehta said, adding it's a bloc that has occasioned one of the greatest transfers of power in world history. "In 1997, an untouchable became president," he said of Kocheril Raman Narayanan, India's leader from 1997 to 2002.
"There are reformers," Mehta said, "waiting in the wings."
