The Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant Tencent summoned its annual conference, the WE Summit, in Beijing on Sunday, attracting the world’s top scientists, including Stephen Hawking, and thousands of audience members.
Themed “Future and Nature,” the 2017 Tencent WE Summit invited dozens of scientists to share their knowledge about some very advanced topics, including immigrating to another planet, bringing youth to seniors, immunity from cancer and artificial intelligence.
It was the fifth WE Summit held by Tencent with the aim of exploring and sharing the most cutting-edge technologies and ideas.
This year’s conference was introduced by the world’s leading scientist, Stephen Hawking, in a video speech produced prior to the summit. In his speech, Hawking elaborated on the long-term research project, Breakthrough Starshot.
The great physicist believes that the project will eventually help humans realize the dream of making journeys to other planets and finding an ideal planet to live on in the future. Hawking said in his speech that the project started by working with the European Southern Observatory to further explore planets in Alpha Centauri that are suitable for human habitation in the future.
Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of paleoneurology at Stanford University and an expert in aging diseases, shared his experiment that shows how introducing young blood plasma into aged animals can improve their brain function. The finding suggested a possibility that this might help solve problems in people brought on by aging, such as the Alzheimer’s Disease.
With a speech focusing on humanity’s future, the chief exploration officer of Tencent, David Wallerstein, called for people to pay attention to urgent global issues like climate change, animal extinction, food shortage and imbalanced resources allocation. In his eyes, technological innovation can help to solve these problems.
Wallerstein said in his speech that his job is to find the most amazing innovation in the world and apply these technologies to our real-life to solve problems.
