Overcoming the fear of the unknown

Bertrand Piccard flew around the world in a balloon and developed the world's first solar aeroplane. His father and grandfather were world-famous adventurers but, he says, this does not mean that adventure is in his genes: "It was the way I was educated [guided] by my father that made me adventurous." The education system and parenting should be changed to prompt children to overcome fear of the unknown and try innovations, he adds. Piccard is the founder and chairman of Solar Impulse, an organisation committed to the cause of renewable energy. A few months ago, he spoke to Weekend Review at his office in Payerne, Switzerland. The Swiss Embassy in Abu Dhabi had organised the visit to Solar Impulse as part of a media tour for a group of UAE journalists to Switzerland. The first ever nonstop balloon flight around the world brought Bertrand Piccard fame as the "scientist-adventurer". He was born into a dynasty of explorers and scientists who conquered the heights and the depths of the planet. His grandfather, Auguste (1884-1962), a Physics professor, paved the way for modern aviation and the conquest of space by inventing the principle of the pressurised cockpit and the stratospheric balloon. In making the first exploration of the stratosphere at 16,000 metres in 1931, he studied cosmic rays and became the first man to see the curvature of the Earth with his own eyes. Applying the principle of the stratospheric balloon to oceanographic research, he invented and constructed the bathyscaphe. This made him the man of extremes — having flown higher and dived deeper than anyone ever before. Piccard's father, Jacques, continued the work of Auguste, with whom he dived several times. He executed the world's deepest dive (10,916 metres in the Marianas Trench, the deepest known ocean depth). Piccard is also well known as a psychiatrist, aeronaut, public speaker, president of the Winds of Hope humanitarian foundation and UN goodwill ambassador. The conversations with him led to the problems in the existing education system. Adventure, he says, "is more in my education than in my genes!" It is also the spirit of his family. "The spirit was to explore the new things ... explore new dimensions of the technology," he says. "In my family, if somebody says something is impossible we don't listen to it!" Piccard's father always showed him he could make incredible things happen. Do certain values or the spirit then have to be deliberately inculcated in the children although the family may have those qualities, as otherwise they are not passed on automatically? "Absolutely right!" he says. That is why he believes education is very important. "You have to educate the children and give them a taste for curiosity ... for exploration ... for trying new things. It is important not to be afraid of failing. You need to be open to try new things. And maybe you will fail once or you may succeed another time. But you must try things," he says. However, he adds that people want to cling to their habits and their common assumptions, which is a pity. "We really need to educate children to explore all the different ways of thinking and behaviour," he says. Asked how he does that with his own children, Piccard says: "I have three daughters. I try also to bring them up in the same spirit — explore the world, understand the way people are thinking. [They are into sports, they dive and they fly.] Because people think differently in every region of the world, you cannot just have your Swiss mindset [everywhere]. You need to understand all the continents, all the cultures, religions, and all the different scientific explanations. And then you have many more preferences in life. Because you have more tools!" So what do we have to do in the education system to help people overcome the fear of doing something new? He cites the need for the education system to include opinions which are not "official. So people have the possibility to realise how many different realities there are! For example in medicine, Western medicine is official, even in your country [the UAE]. Then there are people who say we can do acupuncture [Chinese traditional medicine]. We have to teach why people say that acupuncture works: It is about how energy is circulating in the body! You should also teach why homoeopathy is supposed to work in the view of other people. And then the Indian medicine, ‘ayurveda'! For students, it is fabulous ... you have official opinion and you also have an understanding of the other things. In science, too, it is the same — you have to learn different approaches. And for energy it is the same! Abu Dhabi's Masdar [the proposed zero-carbon city] is showing a beautiful example of this. There are many people who teach that energy means nuclear and fossil energy and rest of the energy [renewable energy] sources are just a half per cent in the world, so it's not interesting. So if you have people believe that solar energy and wind energy are good, then you have a much wider understanding and you can form your own opinion. That makes you a real professional." Is the system responsible for people not trying something new? Or does he think the system is immaterial and whoever wants to explore new things, they can? "No. I don't think so," he says. "I think we have to encourage people to explore. I was encouraged by my father, mother and grandfather. If you are not lucky to have a family to encourage you, you need to have teachers that encourage you, you need to have an official system — the policy of the country — to encourage you." He finds a "beautiful example" in Shaikh Zayed, the father of the UAE. "The existing belief about the country then was a British colony in the desert. He might have stayed in the desert. But he had a vision. He changed the country and made it rich with available technology. You have an interesting spirit in the Emirates. That is admirable." Asked whether he believes that an individual has certain limitations and something around them must encourage them to overcome it, he says there needs to be a good equilibrium between individual quest and support of the system. "In the university it is very important to open the minds of the students to doubts and questions. In our world, people want exclamations and certainties. They close the mind ... We have to teach many things for which we don't have any explanations," he says. "When somebody has cancer, the doctor says you are dead in six months [based on the proper medical examination]. But after that, the patient is fully cured. How will you explain the fact that the same patient lives for 20 or 30 years? The medical science might say the diagnosis was wrong. But they would like to avoid question marks. We have to teach people that we don't know how it works, but we can just observe it." What we teach and observe are big, very frequent occurrences, he explains. "But here we have very rare or small occurrences too … those with the question marks [such as the cancer patient being cured]. This will make the students curious. It is very challenging because we don't know why [it happens]. If you teach only exclamation marks, we will not find the truth." He says he never thought about these things before: "Your questions ignited these thoughts!" He has had his own experience of the system sticking to the official line. "You have to teach mysteries of the world. They are out of the system. I have never seen it in the normal education system. You are not pushed to think out of the box … out of the paradigm. I studied medical science. I am a medical doctor. I was told not to care about spirituality and about other medical systems, because they don't work. You have to stick to the official way! For me, it was a nightmare. If there is anything that is interesting in my life, it is exploring new things. "I went by my own. I went to take training in hypnotherapy, acupuncture and ayurveda. It was my education [from family] that pushed me to do it. The university did not push me to do that. It is a pity. Universities should push people to explore." That changed his medical profession: "It showed me … the place of human beings in life and in the world and in the cosmos. You cannot feel somebody independently from his relations to the world, to the Earth and to his life. We should not heal the symptom, we should heal the origin of the symptom! "I also believe in surgery, vaccinations and medication. But I also believe in the other types of medicines. It means a much bigger frame. You have more tools available. It can be more useful." According to Piccard, diversifying knowledge is key: "I don't say we have to learn everything ... Diversify the teachings; we have to teach the students there are other ways to think! "If you believe very strongly in something, you have to understand the mindset of the people who believe the opposite. Then you have bridges between people, bridges between cultures!" He cites the debate in America on the origin of life: "There are two big movements — on evolution or creation. A group says everything was created 6,000 years ago and there is no Darwinian evolution. But other people say there has been an evolution over millions of years to what human beings are today. I don't care who is right and who is wrong! What would be interesting is if each one understands the other, the state of mind of others." However, that is not happening, he says. "It is a war. You have some schools teaching Darwinian evolution and others the theory of creation. Everybody is absolutely certain that they are right." Bertrand Piccard was born on March 1, 1958, in Lausanne, Switzerland, into a family of explorers and scientists. His grandfather was the first person to explore the stratosphere, and he invented the bathyscaphe (navigable diving vessel), with which Piccard's father dived to the deepest point in the oceans. The father of three children, this scientist-adventurer, psychiatrist and aeronaut also explores the human soul. After a classical education (Latin/Greek), he studied medicine, became a senior consultant in a psychiatric hospital, and specialised jointly in psychiatry and psychotherapy for adults and children. An expert in hypnotherapy, he is a lecturer and supervisor with the Swiss Medical Hypnosis Society. Always interested in the study of human behaviour in extreme situations, Piccard was one of the pioneers of hang gliding and micro-light flying in the 1970s and, in 1985, he became the European champion in hang-glider aerobatics (1985). After qualifying as a balloon pilot, he won, with Wim Verstraeten, the first transatlantic balloon race (Chrysler Challenge, 1992) and then initiated the "Breitling Orbiter" project. Captain of the three attempts, he completed with Englishman Brian Jones the first nonstop round-the-world balloon flight, achieving the longest flight in terms of both duration and distance in the history of aviation: 45,755 kilometres in 19 days, 21 hours and 47 minutes (capturing a total of seven world records). After this circumnavigation, considered the last great adventure of the 20th century, Piccard and Jones have won worldwide recognition. Piccard was appointed goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Together with his co-pilot and their sponsor, Breitling, he created the Winds of Hope humanitarian foundation to use the financial and media impact of the round-the-world flight to fight rare afflictions. The first action, implemented in conjunction with the World Health Organisation, is the fight against Noma, a little known illness which disfigures the faces of thousands of children in very poor countries. Piccard has become a highly sought-after speaker both with the general public and the business world. He has decided to launch into a new futuristic enterprise — to fly around the world in a solar-powered aeroplane. The objective is to re-enact the history of powered flight using only solar energy, in an aircraft capable of remaining airborne without producing any polluting emissions. With this project, entitled ‘Solar Impulse', the Swiss explorer wishes above all to demonstrate the key role played by high technology in sustainable development.