How religion and science intersect, or whether they can, is a subject worthy of a conference like Pop!Tech, a venue for dangerous topics.

Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, he of the Selfish Gene and Memetics, doesn't have much use for religion. He sees it as unscientific and dogmatic. The current attack on evolution – a theory accepted by most scientists as extremely well-grounded – by some religious groups has highlighted differences. The cover story in the November issue of Wired magazine ("The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the crusade against religion.") lays out his position.

But neither technology nor religion is going away, says Martin Marty, a religious scholar and ordained Lutheran minister. We have to find ways to have them live together, he says.

After hearing their presentations, I wonder if Dawkins may have had more in common with Marty than it seems.

Marty spoke of religion exploring mysteries, not with the idea that they are unanswerable, but in the sense that as one answer is obtained it only leads to more questions, more mysteries to unravel.

That seemed to be close to Dawkins's view of the scientist as humble explorer, always ready to give up positions outgrown when new evidence suggests new truths.

We live in a "middle world," Dawkins says, in which we experience only a limited part of reality. We see a rock as a solid object, not as mostly empty space with atoms whizzing around, because it has been a useful way for us to see it. We may have trouble getting our heads around quantum mechanics, the quite different set of laws that govern the world of the extremely small, because – as he puts it – our brains haven't had to evolve to confront those ideas.

In other words, he explains. if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The universe is "queerer" than we can imagine.

What we call science and religion may be different paths to unlocking these truths that, for now, seem beyond comprehension.

Thanks to the Internet, media (news, entertainment, advertising) is undergoing a Darwinian change. It's evolving a Long Tail.

That's the mental model that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine and Wired.com, evokes as he explains the new opportunities the Web offers to people who want to inform or entertain others, sell them things, or all of the above.

Actually, Anderson used a chart, not a picture of a beastie with a tail, to illustrate his point. At the pinnacle, on the left, are major media outlets – newspapers, magazines, TV networks – who have large online audiences. The trend line then plummets like a steep ski slope, but doesn't zero out. The "long tail" extends on and on, with lots of smaller media sites, sometimes one-person operations, who are getting considerable audiences out of scale with the kind of fiscal and physical investment that "old media" has needed.

Case in point: Kent Nichols, a digital storyteller whose comic AskaNinja.com video website is bringing in 300,000 to 500,000 viewers per episode, as many as some cable TV shows. Nichols and his partner started the site by investing $6 in a black ski mask (to create the Ninja costume), some paint to create a "green screen" backdrop in his apartment, and an old laptop computer and video camera they already had.

The cost of entry is low, low, low. Abundance, not scarcity, is the model on the Web, Anderson says, and that makes all the difference for media there. For example, Wal-Mart, as huge as it is, represents scarcity. Customers must buy what it decides to put on the shelves. Amazon.com offers many, many more choices online. Tower Records can put only a limited number of CDs on its racks (and recently went bankrupt); iTunes and other online music sellers can offer a much broader selection and are booming. And so on. You get the idea.

"The audience is flocking to choice," Anderson says. "There's latent demand for niche products out there." Old video, like 1950s TV shows, and music, that Rosemary Clooney album, can be rediscovered; new artists and their work can find audiences more easily than ever before.

Scarcity of choice is oh-so-20th century. This century is about abundance of consumer choices.

The Long Tail is also changing the way Anderson edits his publication. For the print magazine, he makes decisions about what readers will see. The number of pages is limited and distribution of copies costs money. "I control the horizontal, I control the vertical," he jokes (referencing the old "Outer Limits" TV show). "I have to be careful about what I have in our pages."

But the Web is about abundant shelf space, abundant pages of content. If his magazine is a beautiful jewel, a Faberge egg, the website a scrambled egg. On the magazine, his job is to say "no" to crazy ideas. On the website, it's to say "yes."

That can work, he says, because the cost of trying new ideas has become so low. The "scarcity model" at the magazine is based on "we know best." The "abundance model" at the website is "the audience knows best."

This all sounds great, but Anderson did allow that he doesn't plan to turn his highly popular website wholly over to its visitors. Some stories on the entry page may be chosen by reader vote, but others are likely to remain the editors' choices. Or perhaps each reader may set up an entry page that combines editor input with his or her own tastes and interests.

Much has been said about the Wisdom of Crowds, exemplified by Digg.com, whose readers vote for what stories are seen. But others worry about the Tyranny of the Crowd and want some filters other than sheer popularity. (Digg has been plagued by contributors who learn how to manipulate the site to reflect their selections.)

Is anything legitimately scarce on the Web? People's attention, maybe, Anderson says. There's only so much of that to grab. But it's also being expanded as we consume media more hours per day and simultaneously (think of the teen watching TV, doing homework, and text messaging with friends at the same time).

"It's not about the technology anymore," Ninja Nichols says. Do you have an idea? Put it out there. If you can stand the pain of hearing the answer the market might give you, you can learn and adapt until you find your winning concept.

Some 500 people drive or fly to the Pop!Tech conference on Maine's scenic midcoast from all over the US, and a few from overseas. They burn a lot of fossil fuels to get here. To make up for that, the conference is sponsoring solar power projects by the Solar Electric Light Fund that it says will save twice the amount of carbon emissions that will be expended by the conference and its attendees.

Climate change and where tomorrow's energy will come from after fossil fuels are spent has to be on any agenda grappling with the great issues. No exception here. As one speaker put it: Al Gore was wrong about climate change and clean energy: It's much more serious a problem than he says.

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of "The World Is Flat," used his 20 minutes to basically sound out the themes in his book and columns. They're powerful themes. We have to redefine what we mean by "green," he says. It's not all granola crunching and "girly men," he says, it's not something "vaguely French." Green, Friedman says, is the new "red, white, and blue," patriotic and capitalistic. If we don't solve our oil addiction, he says, we're going to "heat up, choke up, burn up" this planet. The Chinese are already recognizing they can't follow the US model. A Green China, he says, is going to pose a greater challenge than Red China ever did.

Friedman knows how to create memorable images with words, giving his ideas intellectual muscle and mindshare. So do nearly all the presenters, which make them not only thinkers but impressive communicators as well.

Stewart Brand continued the green theme later Thursday by outlining where the environmental movement may be headed. Those with a romantic attachment to Mother Earth will still be on the front lines, but increasingly they're being joined by hard-headed scientists and engineers. New and better data is pushing everything. The scientists and engineers, many of whom still feel uncomfortable being ID'd as "green," are more likely to recognize that humans are already "Terra forming," or changing the natural world using science and technology, to meet their demands. (So we better do it right, he adds.) They're going to be more open to nuclear power if the alternatives are really worse. (Maybe we don't need a 10,000 year solution for nuclear waste, but a few-hundred year solution will do. Presumably the world and scientific knowledge will be much more prepared to deal with it by then.)

One billion people now live in squatter cities, the vast slums that surround cities, especially in the developing world. Two billion more are expected. That's trouble in some obvious ways, but surprisingly, perhaps, there's another side. In the slums, everything is recycled, much less fossil fuel is consumed per person, and underneath the chaos, entrepreneurs come up with innovative ideas to make it all work.

Seeing what's happening clearly is always the first step. But follow-up sessions from people sharing innovative ideas, like environmental journalist Alex Steffen, show there's no excuse not to go beyond hand-wringing. "Junk tagging," for example, is just one idea for an Internet-connected world. Why not point out online the location of one person's junk to everyone? It might be someone else's treasure, he says. Technology can "dematerialize" some of the damage done by an industrialized society. Netflix, the mail-based video company, not only has a profitable business plan: It also eliminates car trips to the video store and the video store itself, along with all the energy and materials that are needed to build and maintain it.

We gain status and identity from possessing objects, but services like car sharing programs in big cities show that the need is really something else, he says. We need to get someplace. Could dishwashers be shared too? Power drills? "We want the hole, not the drill," Steffen says.

Better product design can play a part, too. What if old cellphones could be put in a 350-degree oven for a few minutes and simply pop apart into their constituent parts for easy recycling? With the one billion cell phones expected to be sold worldwide next year, that's a compelling idea. (Get used to recycling going mainstream. "Virgin" raw materials will be used up in the next 30 to 70 years, says materials researcher Blaine Brownell.)

Sometimes no new technology is needed at all, only a better understanding of human nature. Homes use less energy when the electric or gas meter is put INSIDE the house where residents see what's happening. Same thing for cars: Drivers whose cars show how many miles per gallon the car is achieving actually drive in a more fuel-efficient way.

Apparently, knowledge IS power.

Kevin Kelly is a big thinker on technology and culture, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Marianne Weems is artistic director of The Builders Association, a New York-based theatrical group. Hasan Elahi is a performance artist. What were they all doing on stage together at Pop!Tech Thursday morning?

Each, I think, was telling us in his or her own way how we live within a cloud of technology all around us. It's up to us to decide what use to make of it, and we'd better understand what it's doing if we're going to do that.

Try getting your head around a few of these ideas from Kelly: The basic computing power of the Web is going to exceed that of all 6 billion or 8 billion humans sometime between the years 2020 and 2040. Technology wants some of the same things evolution wants: to be everywhere, to become more complex, to become interdependent with other technologies. There are no bad technologies, Kelly says, only bad human parents who don't teach them the right rules of behavior (cue Asimov's three laws of robotics.) "Our job as humans is to parent our mind children."

With technology everywhere, we're more defined by what technologies we choose not to use. We have extraordinary choice and freedom in that way.

While Kelly cogitates, Weems is looking at how our encounters with technology can be expressed in theater. One video clip from a stage performance shows call center answerers in India, who learn American accents and cultural references by watching US television. But that makes for a strange life in which they develop two personae, one Indian and one American. Simple fiber optic phone lines have made them electronic American immigrants – sort of.

Elahi lives to embrace technology. An American citizen who was grilled by the FBI after 9/11, he struck back by making his life an open book. He wears an ankle bracelet that lets viewers see where he is at any moment. He records his airplane flights, his meals, even the restrooms he visits. And, just for fun, he sometimes flies to a country and then stays in the waiting area for several days, never actually passing through customs. What a puzzle that must present to anyone watching and trying to figure out what he's up to!

Airports are like the Guantánamo Bay holding area for American detainees, he says. Nowhere. A limbo land without a country. His reaction as a "technology artist" to the issue of privacy in a world with more and more electronic eyes and ears is to let them watch and listen all they want – perhaps the flood of banal information will make its own statement about watchers and watching.

That's a pretty provocative group to end the first morning at Pop!Tech. And all of them well worth learning more about and following their future projects.

What is Pop!Tech? We’ll let the institute's website toot its own horn.

Suffice it to say, if you’re interested in how science and technology are changing the world, hiking up to Camden, Maine, in October (this year Oct. 19-21) for the three-day conference is akin to Christmas coming two months early. Many of the presentations dazzle and delight, others are merely intensely interesting! And as always there are plenty of surprises – nearly all of them pleasant! Last year I headed home energized with lots of topics I wanted to learn more about.

This year Andrew Zolli, the conference organizer, has put together a lineup of presenters that includes some big names, including Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose book on 21st century global economics, “The World Is Flat,” is extraordinarily popular and influential. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, has popularized one of the fundamental concepts of Web commerce, the “long tail” that allows myriad tiny niche markets to prosper. It’ll be interesting to see whether they rehash their ideas or share new insights. I’m guessing the latter.

Other big names include genetics pioneer Craig Venter and Silicon Valley's John Sculley. But many presenters are less famous. I’m looking forward to hearing from Losang Ragbey, “who is leading a one-woman educational revolution in Tibet,” and Fatima Gailani, “who helped coauthor the Afghan constitution and runs the Red Crescent Society in that country,” according to preview materials.

This year’s theme is “Dangerous Minds,” and, if last year is representative, one or two speakers will make attendees squirm in their seats. Last year Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" painted all religions and religious believers as antiscientific and basically responsible for what ails the world. A Christian woman sitting next to me was troubled that no one was presenting a counter-perspective. This year Mr. Harris’s mentor, Sir Richard Dawkins, he of the "selfish gene" theory, will speak. But I see that Martin Marty, a respected theologian, is also on the bill, so perhaps calls for more balance were heeded.

This is only my second visit to the Pop!Tech conference, so I’m a newbie. It is also a first: My initial blogging experience as a Monitor journalist (readers are urged to be kind and patient!). Attending last year led to several stories I wrote for the Monitor. But I also realized that much more happened that was pretty darn interesting, the kind of “notebook items” that don't fit easily into the paper's print edition.

Once the meetings start, Pop!Tech plans to make nearly everything that happens available free on video (if you have a broadband connection) at live.poptech.org. So if you can't be one of the few hundred crowded into the beautiful Camden Opera House Oct. 19-21, you can still experience a lot of what happens. There’ll be plenty of bloggers weighing in, too, and maybe even some print coverage. I'll point you to any that catches my eye. And I hope you’ll drop back here for my take on the action starting Thursday.