Dear friend,
This week, we went to TNW Conference, an awesome tech conference/festival in Amsterdam.
You're probably wondering what we were doing there. Well, as our patron saint Mathys explained on Kinder.World, TNW's jam-packed conference agenda includes at least ten people who are clearly working hard to make the world a kinder place.
My personal highlight was the talk given by Dutch astronaut André Kuipers. Aside from his space missions and astronaut duties, he has also embarked on a philanthropic endeavour joining Spacebuzz, a Dutch nonprofit.
Spacebuzz' moonshot aims to let children, aged 9-12, experience the so-called “overview effect”, a cognitive shift in awareness reported by many astronauts. Which they say makes them experience our planet as a boundary-less “tiny, fragile ball of life."
Since the logistics of shipping throngs of mini Buzz Lightyears to space might get a bit arduous, Spacebuzz figured out a nifty workaround.
They created a solution that combines VR and AR technology to give children a first-hand (or first-eye...) experience of the overview effect. And since this wasn't cool enough they set up the VR/AR experience inside a real looking space rocket mounted on a truck. Now, this is cool.
We were already familiar with Spacebuzz and, over the past couple of months, we wrote two articles about them:
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First, on how it could help raise a generation of kids cognitively better equipped to face global challenges such as climate change
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And, then, we interviewed Hidde Hoogcarspel, one of the minds behind the project

Three more reads for the weekend
If the Spacebuzz story isn't enough to keep you busy over the weekend, here are other three handpicked reads from the world of doing good:
- How a "Netflix model" for philanthropy could fix the problem of disaster relief donations [Kinder.World]
- The Good Food Institute, an American think tank that promotes clean and plant-based meat, published two "first-of-their-kind" reports on the state of the alt-proteins sector [The Good Food Institute]
- Could aviation ever be less polluting or we should simply fly less? [BBC News]
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That's all from me, to infinity and beyond!