During their 20th event, the co-founders of Café Scientifique gathered the minds of scientists, engineers, businessmen and students in a comfortable setting designed with libraries and books to start collecting the gadgets they will be placing in their 2020 Time Capsule.
In the time capsule, the team of Café Scientifique is putting current gadgets including laptops, iPhones, microchips, newspapers and people’s hopes and ambitions for 2020. They will seal it and put it on display in the Dubai Astronomy Group new exhibitory.
This initiative by Scifest Dubai and Cafe Scientifique was built on the idea of creating a friendly environment, where people from all ages and backgrounds to talk about different themes such as artificial intelligence, physics and astronomy.
Café Scientifique co-founder Raya Bidshari said,
“People don’t usually talk about science. Maybe they do if they are in scientific careers, but we felt it was important for the general public to talk about it because science affects our everyday lives.”
This month’s focus was on the time capsule, thinking about future technology and exploring where humanity is right now with intelligent optimism.
Raya Bidhsari and Rohan Roberts started the initiative of intelligent optimism two years ago to get people excited about future and technology, but base it on reason, evidence statistics.
Intelligent Optimism initiator and Café Scientifique co-founder said
“The world is getting better, by every objective measure. Currently, we are in a period known as the Long Peace, including Ukrane, Syria and Iraq. War is a technical term defined by the United Nations as any conflict with over 1,000 deaths on average per year, so by that definition, in the 1990’s we’ve had about 12 wars, but today, we are down to 7.”
Founder and CEO of Scifest Dubai Lara Matossian also thinks we should have a positive, yet rational outlook.
She said, “With intelligent optimism, we show you that, yes, there is a percentage of us who is horrible to the other, but there is another percentage of us who is striving to solve problems.”
If you want to explore the world with Intelligent Optimism and also think, “science is beyond just some nerdy, geeky thing” as Roberts defines it, follow Café Scientifique on Facebook to know when their next event will be.
Have you been to any Cafe Scientifique’s events? What did you think? Tell us in the comments below.
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