Clarke Conversations

There are challenges today that will dramatically change the world that our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren will inhabit. If today were tomorrow, what do we wish we had done now to prepare? What are the synergies between the arts, sciences and technology, fired by imagination, that will help forge a better world?

​The Clarke Conversations on Imagination will be an on-going series of live and live-streamed, curated “conversations” between highly imaginative solution finders. They will seek to open new pathways in addressing the challenges of today and tomorrow. They will start from the point of departure that our core challenges can be addressed through imagination—that act of seeing in distinctive and fresh ways how human history, choices, and actions shape our present, that in turn allow us to envision new futures.

Through an intimate, structured exploration of issues that challenge our planet’s future well-being as well as explore human’s relationship with its future and space, the Conversations will reveal how recognized and creative experts in their own fields or disciplines have sought broader engagement across disciplines and, by venturing “a little way…into the impossible” have developed big ideas and new approaches to problem solving. The aim of each Clarke Conversation and collectively will be to create a community attuned to ways in which we can understand our most urgent challenges and think constructively about shaping our future. The first Clarke Conversations were launched in 2017 as part of the Arthur’s Clarke100th birthday celebration. They will be continued at the November 8, 2018 Unleash Imagination – Shape the Future conference in Washington, D.C., focusing on “Reimagining Our Lives on Earth; Will we be ready?” and “Reimagining Our Lives and Space: Will we be ready?”. Each sets up a stream of issues that will be pivotal to our future and will be featured in subsequent Clarke Conversations.