Video Transcription_

As you can see, with technology, technical problems appear during all of the conferences, so it depends on us how we fight with technology, because everything depends on our heads, not the technology.

Let me start with my thoughts on new technology, but I was wondering how to start my speech.

What is freedom for us?

How can we develop without our freedom?

What is freedom – not only freedom of all the nations globally, but the freedom of our mind?

How can we be creative without freedom? How can we build new ideas without freedom? It is impossible.

What I was wondering: all generations, older and younger generations, have always argued.

We often repeat after our parents: “Oh my God, this young generation, it is hopeless, what can they achieve? How will they survive?”

And we’ve heard the same, all the people in this room heard the same. Because parents are always thinking about their children and this is what we sometimes don’t believe to be possible to achieve because we are older, we are smarter, we are more advanced in our thinking, but the world depends on the next generation.

Only the young generation can move the world, move countries, move smaller societies into the future!

Without the young generation it won’t be possible. As you saw on these slides from the Minister from Bulgaria, who was young, when he fought for our freedom, who wanted to change our life – and now it’s the time for us!

Because it’s only the next generation that can change this world.

What is your aspiration? What is your ambition? How can you inspire each other to find new breakthrough ideas?

How old was Alexander the Great when he died, after having conquered almost all of the world? 33 years old. Today we are thinking – he was quite young.

It is a huge challenge for all of us, how do we want to build the next technology, the next generation, based on freedom and only through connectivity, not only by roads, rail, but how we connect our minds to build new ideas which allow us to move and move forward.

Do you know this rather old movie “Apollo 13”? Perhaps some of you might know this movie.

Could you imagine the very advanced technology at that time was less advanced than we now have in our mobile phones?

And when the people on Apollo 13 try to survive and come back to our globe, who supported them?

What was the success of Apollo 13? The small, advanced technology, smaller than in our mobile phones? No. The heads, communication, and smartness of people.

Everything depends on us. The internet was the biggest game changer in our world. It changed everything: communication, business, and many, many areas of our lives.

It is probably impossible to imagine right now that in one moment the internet could disappear.

We’re already a bit afraid when we see that something is happening with our mobile phones!

Every single minute we check our mobile phones – that’s because of the internet.

In 1999, when every single programmer started to think that something was wrong with our computers; we were thinking too slowly, short-term, because the 2000s appeared immediately and the computers were prepared only for 2 digits in one year.

It was a huge challenge for every single company, especially power plants, to avoid switching off the entire world from electricity.

So, we have to think in a longer run, longer perspective.

I know, for the young people, they might think “Why do I have to think about the long run? Tomorrow, I will have a very nice party, I have this very nice plan for the holidays, so this is my life,” but the aspirations for the long run, the communication and the connections between the young generation can build something additional for the future, and everything depends on you. Not only from your hands, but everything is in your heads.

We are thinking about the next challenges in technology right now. The internet was one point, and now we’re thinking what the next step would be, what will be the big challenge for the future and which technology will be the main thing of the world.

What types of challenges do we have in our world? Water, new energy sources like hydrogen and carbon. Everybody has focused on how to reduce the world’s use of carbon.

Can you imagine that carbon is everywhere? Our clothes, our food – everywhere! We even use a specific type of carbon to calculate how old dinosaur fossils are for instance. Carbon, water, and hydrogen are the main industry assets, as they are cornerstones for our life.

That’s why we want to focus on these three very important aspects.

Water – how much land is there globally compared to water?

29% is land. The rest is water.

But how much of this water can we use as fresh water for our life, for 8 billion people around the world? Only 1%.

Only 1% of water globally is the type of water that we can use to sustain our lives.

It is a huge challenge and a huge responsibility. How will we use this water?

What is retention and other techniques that we can use to reuse the same water many times?

Many of you might remember the movie – I think only about old movies, I’m sorry for that – “Mad Max”.

“Mad Max” was a movie about fights between troops about petrol, fuel.

Nowadays we can observe the fight between people, in Bolivia for instance, about water.

If we don’t find a quick and better solution on how to manage water for people, it won’t be possible to survive. Even fantastic ideas disappear without water.

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. You probably already heard about it from many places, everybody is talking right now about hydrogen.

It is the future of energy, especially if we’re thinking about green energy, renewable sources of energy, and hydrogen is the new source of energy.

How will we use this? How well can we… thinking about the new technology, which can help us to use hydrogen.

It will be better for our life, it will be easier to survive and maybe even combine water and new sources of energy, like hydrogen, can help us to use water by using engines based on hydrogen.

And now third: carbon. In Poland, we have the same word “węgiel”, which we use for both, coal and carbon.

So, in many places when we start to talk about carbon, coal or “węgiel” in the Polish language, some people might say: why do you organize this type of conference about coal?

They say, “we have to reduce coal, we have to reduce carbon, low emissions” and so on, and so on. No!

Because we don’t want to burn coal, we don’t want to burn coal – “węgiel” in our stoves. We want to use carbon, as a new technology, for the future.

Carbon fibers, which are much more advanced than metals and other materials. Big constructions can be built, using carbon fibers.

Amorphous carbon, used for filters and other things, to clean water and air by using carbon.

And how can we build nanostructures, like graphene, to build a package from carbon, graphene and put hydrogen in there? So, these three assets are very important in our existing world.

It is something that we treat as our future and only through the cooperation, widely between our scientists, our businesses and also the public sector, will it be possible to achieve and develop these ideas about how water, hydrogen and carbon can cooperate together.

And do you know what is important nowadays? How you, as a young generation, can use your smartness, your accumulated IQ to develop these ideas and take us, the older generation, on a fantastic journey to the future. Thank you very much.