A week in Silicon Valley - Day 2 @ NASA + Stanford University

The best thing about spending some time in Silicon Valley is meeting truly remarkable people who're doing incredible things. Like Jonathan Trent - he's a lead scientist for NASA and the inventor of something called OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae) Basically, Jonathan's vision is to grow oil-producing algae on municipal wastewater and thus create energy in a sustainable loop. Check out his TED-talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_trent_energy_from_floating_algae_pods

Crammed inside a NASA conference-room - what's more cosy than that?

Here's my notes from our facinating talk with Jonathan:

• 93% (200.000 years) of the time in human history, we have been hunters and gatherers
• 6% (10.000 years), man has been farming
• .1 %(250 years), man has been industrialist
• .025 % (70 years), man has mastered computers
• In other words, mankind has never had to deal with exponential growing C02 in the atmosphere as a result of us staying in the same place and polluting it (when we were hunters and gatheres we were constantly moving around)
• Everyone seems to think off-planetary missions are the next logical move for humanity, however no one fully understands the extreme complexity for people to survive in long-term life supporting habitats
• In either case, in the future, human waste must be the foundation of sources for food, energy, and water. We must get better at recycling, or we will deplete this planet of it's natural resources at a phase that is non-reversible.

Next up was Stanford University where we met with Pedram Mokrian who lectures around innovation, technology and disruptive business models. Some of the discussion points were around how why big companies fail to innovate, which is a very relevant topic for our visiting Nordic executive.

What fitting place to hold a off-script, random lecture