It describes the world what it really is.Professor Smila devour Zuckerberg and Bill Gates Forbes<

Forbes celebrates its tenth birthday in November. Reminisce with us about some of the extraordinary stories and interviews we've published over that time—and then find twenty-one more in our Forbes 10 print special.

Mark Zuckerberg was in a great mood that evening. The head of Facebook waited a long time for this news - the number of statuses sent by people on his social network in a day exceeded one billion for the first time.

However, the white-haired man who was sitting on the other side of the table, and whom Zuckerberg had invited to dinner at the end of September, did not quite understand his enthusiasm. He doesn't use Facebook and actually considers it somewhat useless. "I also told him: Mark, it's only one number!" laughs Václav Smil.

The seventy-two-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, can afford this slight defiance. In 2010, Foreign Policy magazine included him among the hundred most influential people in the world, he is the holder of the second highest Canadian award, the Order of Canada, and after all, in addition to Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also invites him to dinner.

The price of green technologies must be reduced. Bill Gates calls for an industrial revolution

Smila is hardly known by anyone in our country, yet he is perhaps the most inspiring Czech today. He was born and raised in Pilsen, graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague and still speaks Czech well, although it takes him a while to remember his native language. During the conversation, after two sentences, he always switches to English, in which he is obviously more confident.

He has been living in the United States and Canada for almost half a century, where he emigrated in 1969. Because of this, he lost his Czechoslovak citizenship, but that was the only way he could fulfill his dream of writing and lecturing about how the world works. He is interested in all areas from energy, history, environment, global issues to the question of how much meat we should consume to feed the planet.

He has already written thirty-seven books about it, in the thirty-eighth, which will be published this year, he is devoted to steel. You won't get an answer to the question of how long it will take for us to run out of oil, but that's not Smil's point either - he wants to make you think about it. Using the numbers he loves. Did you know that China used as much cement in three years as the United States did in a century? Or another figure: humanity consumes only seventeen percent of what the earth's biosphere produced in one year.

Smil's books are full of similar information. "People are willing to sleep on the street for two days in order to be the first to buy a new mobile phone, but none of them know that without the invention of ammonia synthesis, almost half of humanity would not be alive today. And I was always interested in what was really important. I want to know how individual things are related to each other," says Smil.

That's why it's still torn apart. Like now, sitting together at the Parc des Eaux Vives hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. Smil has had a fifteen-hour journey from Canada, and although he says he is already trying to limit his travel and mostly rejects offers from various conferences, he couldn't miss this trip.