Alex Lightman

Executive Director, Humanity+

The Rise of Citizen-Scientists in the Eversmarter World

Knowledge may be expanding exponentially, but the current rate of civilizational learning and institutional upgrading is still far too slow in the century of peak oil, peak uranium, and "peak everything". Humanity needs to gather vastly more data as part of ever larger and more widespread scientific experiments, and make science and technology flourish in streets, fields, and homes as well as in university and corporate laboratories. In this talk, H+ Executive Director Alex Lightman will give an introduction and overview of the big picture of H+ the organization, the magazine, and the conference, and how the participants can make the most of their experience and relationships at the conference. The case for ending embargoes and other beaver dams in the rivers of potentially global knowledge will be made. Lightman will offer a vision of a properly functioning Eversmarter world, ending with a call to action to become a citizen-scientist, and a recruiter of other citizen-scientists.

Alex Lightman is the Executive Director of Humanity+ and the chair of the H+ Summit @ Harvard and of the inaugural H+ Summit held December 2009 in Irvine, California. He is a director of Fortune Nest Corporation (Bahrain, Beijing and Beverly Hills, CA) and of Inova Technology. He is an award-winning educator, an inventor with several US patents issued or pending and the author of over 800,000 words, including 12 articles in h+ magazine, and Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and The Infinite Internet, the first book on 4G wireless. He has advised NATO, the US Dept. of Defense, and a number of governments on Internet Protocol version 6, the 128-bit successor to the current Internet, IPv4. Lightman's advocacy led to the only Congressional hearings held on US Internet Leadership, conducted by The Government Reform Committee and at which Lightman testified, leading to implementation of Lightman's recommendations to mandate IPv6 for the US government and require IPv6 as part of government information technology contracts. Lightman studied Civil and Environmental Engineering, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983 (Course I-A), and attended graduate school at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Santa Monica, California, where he runs marathons, and attempts his first Ironman triathlon, in the UK, on August 1, 2010.