In the 2010 Oscar-winning Social Network film, there is one famous scene. It takes place in a Harvard dormitory in the room of Mark Zukenberg (Jesse Eisenberg), where a party is supposedly portrayed. A group of young people is sitting around the table. Without taking their eyes off their laptops and their fingers from the keyboard, they constantly tap something, washing it down with all their glasses of alcohol. They have too little time during which you need to have time to crack the code before they are noticed. Students gathered around loudly and cheerfully support them. In the end, they succeeded, and the winner heads the new start-up, which will later be called Facebook.
What Zuckenberg did then was just a small part of the “Hackathon,” so to speak for 5 people.
“Hackathon” or “hacking” immediately causes the appearance of those faceless cyberpunks that violate the security of the system in order to ominously steal confidential data. It can also immediately remind someone like David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), a brilliant first-class schoolboy in the movie “War Games” of 1983, which accidentally breaks up on a military supercomputer during a game.
In fact, everything is no longer so.
The word has acquired a completely different meaning in our time. It became the personification of a creative carnival sitting on caffeine, where businessmen of various stripes come together and solve various problems at a hectic pace in order to come up with a piece of new software, a new device, a completely new business, or even a new industry. It is also fertile ground for recruiting talent, networking, and in some cases returning home with prize money.
Even more than that, the concept has spread beyond the silicon base of start-up technology. Interstellar Icarus is a non-commercial space for research stars. That is, it is one more step to turn the “Congress of starships” into the hackathon form.
Starting on Friday, September 4, the campus of Drexel University of Philadelphia will have a conversation with the collective energy of the galaxy (pardon the pun), that is, space mavens, futurists, technologists, engineers and enthusiasts. This whole company will gather for a brainstorm so called.
For the whole weekend, a special convention will be held. A huge number of teams will go deep into the topics of interstellar space and fight with serious problems as actively as if they mastered it all in a new video game.
Only the players are celebrities, starting with such an area as archeology in aerospace technology and ending with urban planning in science fiction. And here they do not earn their game points, but make important decisions that affect the future of the Earth.
This event (I think that at the Comic-Con you can meet astronomical scientific conference) seeks, which may seem impossible for many, to send humanity to the nearest star neighbors located at a distance of about four light years (for you to understand, one light year is almost 6,000,000,000,000 miles) And they dream to be in time by 2100 AD er In a sense, it seems a premature desire to go beyond the solar system, when we did not even return to the moon a second time and did not visit Mars. But every story of human intelligence somewhere took its beginning. The West would still not know about the existence of China, if it were not for the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who went on an epic journey, swam across the Levant, went over the pyramids and along the hot sands of the Gobi desert, and did not get into the Mongol Empire, describing everything .
After all the conversations, the speakers are divided into groups and communicate with students. They speak on interesting topics, as it seems to them: they discuss theorems, various equations, do technical scribbles, summarize and analyze tables, make them write down reflections on moleskin trousers. In their free time, they carefully consider the prospects of becoming the most powerful star state.
By the end of the closure, no one expects that the ship will be built immediately, meeting the parameters and requirements. The purpose of interstellar Icarus is to push people in this direction. No one should immediately swallow the “red pill” as in the Matrix. But when everything is over, and people go to the exit, then there is hope that their perception will remain open even wider. And that we still took another step towards the dawn of the “Interstellar Century”.
