Utopia begins with "you"

I just received an email directed to all graduate students at Canadian universities, inviting us to submit an abstract for an upcoming conference on Utopia. I immediately deleted it. My research has nothing to do with Utopia - that is a "soft" science research topic. My research is based on hard and concrete science.

What is Utopia? A perfect place. Usually the connotation is social/political/moral. To us well-off Westerners, Utopia is an ideal state of mind, a philosophical ideal. But, to the rest of us, maybe Utopia has more to do with clean water and free education for children. Maybe Utopia is a place where there is a low burden of disease. Maybe Utopia is a place where HIV is not infecting and killing millions of people each year, where AIDS is not causing entire countries to be filled with orphans and the life expectancy of adults to decline to pre-vaccine era estimates. And, maybe we have the power to make a Utopia out of this world, for other people, if not for ourselves.

I would like to think that is true. And, at the end of it all, I would like to look back and see that I have tried.