I recently attended a fascinating conference sponsored by DARPA and NASA called the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium. The premise was to bring together scientists, researchers, government officials, entrepreneurs, economists, sociologists and futurists to discuss how to go about creating a plan for a “100 Year Starship” – how can we send humans to another solar system within the next 100 years?

The collection of intellect and ideas was amazing. Sessions ranged from the technological challenges of creating adequate propulsion engines to historical comparisons with the colonization of the Americas to the type of business model needed to fund such a huge endeavor.

A session I particularly enjoyed was on how to market the idea of a “100 Year Starship” to the public, presented by Gordon Gould. After all, the public needs to buy into this in order for it to be successful. He explained that R&D-focused companies can (and must) be “marketing-led”, citing Apple, GE and Google as three examples. Likewise, the 100 Year Starship organization must lead with marketing, which really means it must focus on communicating its vision to get people engaged and excited.

DARPA will be awarding $500,000 in seed money to an organization to get the 100 Year Starship idea going. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years with this effort.

(Here’s a great write-up from the New York Times about the conference – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/science/space/18starship.html?_r=1&ref=science).