The Answer: They were all talked about at Day one of Brainstorm. The theme of this conference is "Life in a Connected World." The conference thus has dedicated itself to explore both the promise and perils of connectivity. There was one fascinating moment illustrating of the promise (or perhaps the peril?) of connectivity this morning during the opening session when the word spread that the two rows in the back of the tent had wireless and a power outlet--causing all of the bloggers to immediately get up from their seats and move there to plug in. But it was the moment just after that was more interesting, when a venture capitalist next to me commented (to Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn) that the bloggers in the back row were old fashioned. He blogged right on TypePad directly from his Blackberry. At that moment, there was no more connected tent in the world with (by rough anecdotal estimates) about 25% of the audience with a Blackberry, 10% with a Treo, and 15% with a laptop.

The opening session featured Sandra Day O'Conner. She made some great points regarding the intent of the framers of the Constitution, her view of the Supreme Court's role in the 2000 election (that the Supreme Court could have done things better but that their decision in the end did not change what would have been the final result anyway), and about the attacks on activist judges by certain legislators (she made a great point that an activist judge is simply a judge who made a decision that a legislator didn't like). She expressed worry that important decisions that were unpopular at the time but history held to be right, like Brown vs. the Board of Education, might not be made in today's environment.

After the group session, we split up into five concurrent sessions. The one I attended on Global Warming was fascinating. There were 25 people around a roundtable. In the room were Sandra Day O'Conner herself, billionaire Stelios Haji-Ioannou, actress Glenn Close, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems and KPCB gave a great presentation on why ethanol (and butanol) is the fuel of the future and should replace petroleum in the next 25 years. He indicated that the information out there about ethanol taking up too much farm land or taking more energy to produce that it creates is just plain wrong and not based on the facts and becomes especially untrue when you take into account the technological progress that is taking the output of ethanol per acre from 400 gallons to 3000 gallons over the next few years. He mentioned a company called e3 Biofuels that he is heavily backing and noted that if we can get celluosic ethanol perfected that we will be able to reduce greenhouse gases from fuel by 80% compared to the average 20% reduction with regular ethanol today. With ethanol available at $1.76 per gallon (and available at $0.71 per gallon if we were willing to import ethanol) he sees ethanol as a much less expensive source of energy that is of course much friendlier to our atmosphere.

Much more will come tomorrow... I'd write more about the second session and the dinner tonight with Madeleine Albright, but am exhausted. I'll try to get the internet access working on my Treo in the morning so I can blog right from there rather than waiting until the night to post a summary.

Thanks to Paulo Gomes, Executive Director of the World Bank in Africa and Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup for some great advice and insights this evening. I will share them tomorrow.

Here are some pictures from the day.

- Ryan Allis