Former leaders, astrophysicists, Bianca Jagger, and a random assortment of experts, executives and thinkers ponder the big questions of the 21st century on France's north coast. 

DEAUVILLE, France -- If you want to mull the major questions of humanity's future, you could do worse than to plant yourself high on the green hill that rises above this coastal hamlet.

With the muggy arrival of a long-delayed Normandy Spring, the town's salt air and expansive vistas provide a perfectly suitable context for considering ranging world subjects: "the nature of the universe," "Africa's future," "how the genome revolution might transform the future," "coming democracies -- the impact of the Internet" and "the future of learning."

Keep your thoughts general and broad, enjoy your elegant surroundings, and don't worry too much about coming away with a specific point or radical conclusions.

Such was the physical and conceptual setting here last weekend at the first Forum 21 conference, where over 200 ambassadors, former state leaders, theoretical physicists, novelists, editors, film-makers, executives, architects, OECD policy-shapers, doctors, professors, human rights advocates, and other high-achieving attendees convened to toss around an impossibly wide range of topics confronting the current edition of humankind.

The "Big Picture" was the only focus at the conference, which was sub-headed "21st Century Society-Challenge and Choice in the Digital Age." Founders hope this "Anti-Davos" will become an annual, intentionally unfocused event. Loosely guiding themes like "rebuilding a civil society" steered lunch and dinner presentations held over forest mushrooms and filet de canard.

Two-hour panels were peopled with luminaries from human rights activist Bianca Jagger and ex-Apollo and Shuttle astronauts to former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

It had little practical agenda, but the conference did offer the chance for ideas to run cross disparate fields and the minds within them. A German ambassador may understand for the first time Napster as a new economic paradigm, while a particle physicist may learn a thing or two about the intricacies of transatlantic relations.

Harvard scientists like Dr. Robert Kirshner, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, came ready to explain to the befuddled mind of writers or activists the three-year-old discovery he helped make: that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Environmentalists argued with scientists who disputed their conviction that an almost irreversible state of global warming threatened their species very survival.

("I personally believe that we will not survive," said Ecologist magazine founder Edward Goldsmith of the effects of a warmer earth in the "future of the earth" panel.)

Despite the Dewey-decimal catalog of discussion topics, technology-based concerns and digital-age themes -- such as the Napster phenomenon -- threaded through much of the event: the digital divide, how cell phones are affecting small remote economies, whether the long boom in the new information age is still a possibility, the social dangers of the Internet.

"Technology is not destiny," cautioned Dr. Riel Miller, principal administrator to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "That's one of the most important conclusions of this conference."

Miller outlined the possibilities -- and potential obstacles to -- a long-term economic boom and the evolution of a "creative" society where the consumer takes on a greater role as producer of products. He asked his audience to imagine a future where a kind of "solid" Napster allowed people to share actual digitized, solid objects and a printer capable of assembling the atoms of finished sneakers or electronics.

"What's happened to manufacturing? What's happened to industry?," he asked.

Dr. Dorothy Zinberg, founding member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, positioned the first day's lunchtime presentation under the theme "What Price the Internet?" Zinberg highlighted the Internet's ability to reduce the time users spend with other people as they sit down for long hours at the keyboard. Though it has its benefits, the challenge of the 21st century may be to carefully balance the medium's positive and negative social effects, Zinberg said.

Fresh off its completion, the human genome was also a prominent subject at Forum 21.

Neurophysicist Nicole Baumann, director of research at the French National Health Institute, emphasized that it is not enough to have decoded the genes. Researchers are left with new frontiers to explore -- how the genes interact with lipids and enzymes that surround them; deciphering what environmental and developmental factors, such as stress and nutrition, affect the expression of genes and consequences like disease and disorders.

"Genetics are very important, but they are not the only factor," Baumann cautioned. "It's [limiting] to think only about gene therapy."

Meanwhile, the same panel on genetic engineering and health ventured that the investment in genome-based research may lead to very little return on a global scale. While gene therapy-based treatment of disease may eke a few more years for the average lifespan in developed countries, the world's real health problems are much less high-tech, panelists said. Much of the undeveloped world simply needs long-existing medical treatments that they can't get for lack of resources or barriers created by the developed world. Dr. John Murray, Professor Emeritus of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, said the effects gene therapy has on human health will affect only a world minority: the 14 percent of people who live in rich countries. "What is missing is something being directed at 86 percent of the rest of the world," Murray said.

While the issues were large, the nature of the conference and the range of expertise often precluded in-depth exploration. And no one was drawing any definitive conclusions or laying out bold new initiatives. Questions were asked, experts raised what they saw as the interesting possibilities or major concerns.

Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard called the major recent policy decisions of the Bush administration (U.S. intentions on missile defense and withdrawal from the Kyoto global warming treaty) possibly "terrible." Meanwhile, the former president of France, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had good news for stock markets: He predicted a second-half 2001 turnaround in the slumping world economy.

The thematic intent of Forum 21 was basically to have "one long dinner party" as founder Paul Weinstein preferred to think of his creation, and "start a dialog."

In the spirit of European Union forefather Jean Monnet, the hope was that the dialog would help lead to personal relationships between the powerful, the influential. Sharing ideas, camembert and the same brand of pillow chocolates, new friendships could lead to better decisions, common, cross-border interests, Monnet's thinking, and Weinstein's action in Deauville, roughly went.

Posed to either statesman or scientist at the conference, the question "have you ever been to a conference like this before," usually produced a ready "No." Are you enjoying it