After Earth Day Hangout brings Will Smith and Elon Musk to live chat

At the time this article is posted, a live video chat is taking place between actors Will Smith, Jaden Smith, and digital citizens of Google's social network. Also invited to this conversation were Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Alexandra Cousteau, and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams. This conversation took place the day after Earth Day, this allowing the conversation to be cleverly titled "The After Earth Day Google+ Hangout", with topics ranging from the conservation of our collective environment to the action-adventure genre in which the film "After Earth" is set.

Of course while Will and Jaden Smith were part of the conversation to speak about the state of the planet, they sat in front of a poster for the film they'll be starring in soon: After Earth. This movie takes place in a future where the human race has left the planet in an effort to survive the future in which our Earth has become wild with untold masses of beasts and threats to any humanoid who would dare set foot in their domain.

Because the film wrestles a bit with the idea that our planet might one day be relatively uninhabitable by humans, this opportunity was sought by those involved in the chat to expand the public understanding of the threats we're under here in real life. Will Smith began the chat speaking a bit about the difference between having grown up in real life Philadelphia where concrete is 80% of the environment and the locations they went to film this movie.

Ray Kurzweil spoke of how humans have recently been shown to have changed biologically in the last 1,000 years, but that his interest was in how we'll be changing technologically in the next 50, 100, or 100,000 years will bring. Will Smith responded to this saying that even in his career in music, the amount of change that's happened has been "extremely powerful" – his first two albums were only on vinyl record and plastic cassette tape, for example.

This conversation will continue for a short while this afternoon – join in on the fun! A group of 8th grade students and Google+ users have been offered the chance to speak with each of these advanced minds today – don't skip this rare opportunity to see these folks speak their minds! Let's chat!