Tedx Brussels

Register here for TEDxBrussels 2011

Dear Friends,

What does the future hold for us? What will the world look like a year or ten years from now? How about fifty years? This is one of the universal questions of humankind, and yet it’s so difficult to answer that the few people who dare answer it tend to get the answer horribly wrong. We can’t predict the weather three days from now, so how can we expect to predict human evolution on millennial time frames? We probably can’t, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Just as “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”, those who can’t be bothered to think about the future are doomed to be slaves of society’s evolution.

That’s why we decided to make TEDxBrussels 2011 a day when our speakers and you, our TEDsters, will be immersed in the fuzzy unknowable world of 2061 and try to make sense of life in the deep future. TEDxBrussels 2011 will be in Brussels at Bozar again, on November 22, for an audience of 2,000 TEDsters and expats. The day will be a fascinating battle of Big Visions.

Among our many speakers this year are Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier, famous for the discovery of the HIV virus, space entrepreneur and astronaut Esther Dyson, David Cuartielles one of the inventors of the famous Arduino microprocessor and Rudy Rucker, one of the main figures of cyber-punk and also a maths professor. New York Times bestselling author and futurist David Brin, X Prize director Eileen Bartholomew, world renowned conductor Charles Hazlewood (who is hoping to open the 2012 Para Olympics in London with his para orchestra) and Andrew Hessel, global advocate of open source for writing DNA code. We’ll be bringing you the world finale (and premiere!) of the Science Magazine contest “Dance your PhD”, Daniel Kraft, the medical chair of the NASA Ames-based Singularity University and Jacques Vallee, one of the builders of Arpanet and America’s chief ufologist who by the way served as the real-life model for the character portrayed by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Henrik Schärfe is bringing his Geminoid DK, an ultra-realistic android who will be interviewed on stage, Luc Steels is going to talk about fluid construction grammar, Hasan M. Elahi the FBI’s most wanted media artist, about surveillance and sousveillance, Mikko Hypponen, a renowned hacker profiler and investigator of stuxnet is coming and Paddy Ashdown, officer and gentleman, one of the most prominent figures in international politics and peacekeeping. He just released an autobiography revealing his membership of MI6 (so it does exist!). You’ll be able to see the first dance group in outer space throwing some zero-gravity shapes, Starlab Barcelona is going to beam someone up from Barcelona to Brussels as part of the ongoing European project called BEAMING, Raul Rojas, will speak about the car of the future, (just think yourself to where you want to go) and Sebastien de Halleux, Belgian Wunderkind, who sold two companies for 400m$ in the US and is considered one of the world’s experts on social gaming.

And just to be 2061-ish: Belgacom are bringing in their big guns, the best they have for internet connection. If you don’t come, we’ll download you and beam you back up when it’s all over.

Walter De Brouwer
Curator TEDxBrussels

This is just a small selection of our speakers, there will be many, many more. You can find out about them all and register on our new site www.tedxbrussels.eu, or contact .

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