It’s been a while since our last virtual event, and we just had a great first one under tightened restrictions. While there might be a lot of screen fatigue with almost 1.5 years into COVID-19 times, a virtual event does have its own upsides too! We welcomed over 50 scientists in our first A*Star/Audacity exchange, which would not have been possible in the case of a physical event. Alternative Universal Designs for Cities – Exponential Agritech & Terraforming, was co-organised by A*Start central and Audacity to facilitate the exchange between entrepreneurs and scientists.
Jayden shared her views on Exponential Agritech and Soil Social’s vision to play an important role in building up Singapore’s food sufficiency. While there were few scientists in the audience who believe that Singapore can be self-sufficient in food, it was heartening to find that the best scientific minds of Singapore are excited to discuss the importance of soil. The technical discussions ranged from life cycle analysis of different urban agriculture and composting systems to how we can best identify the beneficial microorganisms that are great for our soil. Shuen shared on Terraformers, which aims to decentralise ecosystems restoration efforts and build better human-earth relationships. A large portion of the audience resonated with the belief that Terraforming should not be left to governmental efforts. We ended the session with great optimism from the audience where majority believe that human civilisation can be saved! Good to also find that our most academically inclined demographic are aware of the cracks in our system and awareness is the first step to change! We are at least on track to creating more impactful start-ups, supported by deep tech and scientific research.
It was a great start to our first monthly A*Star – Audacity events. For future events, we look forward to a more interactive event, where we could get to know the scientific community with a dynamic, two-way discussion. Perhaps, the Q&A segment could be less of a question and answer but more of a matchmaking/networking style. It was nice to see some scientists offer their technology for our application and pointed us to other great resources. We can’t wait to meet the scientific community at A* in-person, but if we can’t do that for awhile, a more unstructured format would be great to encourage deeper conversations beyond theoretical science.
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