IF THE NAME Bertrand Piccard sounds like the stuff of science fiction, that's because it is. Well, partly. For Star Trek geeks at least, the surname has been immortalised in the captain of the Starship Enterprise: it was the exploits of Piccard's grandfather, Auguste, that led writer Gene Roddenberry to name his character Jean-Luc. Nerds the world over have him to thank, therefore, for their spiritual captain.
And yet to this day, the Swiss family is still having a seismic effect on the reality we all inhabit - an effect to rival the likes of astronaut Neil Armstrong or the imagination of Jules Verne.
The combined achievements of three generations of Piccards, are worthy of a movie. Grandfather Auguste brought mankind a step closer to space in the 1930s by taking a hot air balloon 10,000 feet higher than collective human imagination had previously conceived and inventing the pressurised cockpit in the process; his son Jean went the opposite direction - a Jacques Cousteau of his day who revolutionised submarines, taking them to previously unfathomable depths with the Ben Franklin in 1960.
In short, they have enabled us to change the way we perceive and explore our planet - which all sounds awfully Star Trek. But with your grandfather exploring the space above and father adventuring into the depths below, it leaves quite a legacy for a child growing up, to contend with. For young Bertrand, family dinners would frequently include guests ranging from astronauts to deep-sea divers. And so Piccard decided that if he was going to drift in life, he'd do it purposefully, and make the first round-the-world flight in a hot air balloon. In doing so he'd be travelling the only direction his family hadn't yet put a stamp on: horizontal.
When his Breitling Orbiter balloon scuffed down in the Egyptian desert on March 21, 1999, after 20 days in the air, Piccard also found himself with a metaphor. He'd just spent 20 days being blown forward in the breeze across a world that, in all directions environmental and spiritual, seemed to be going backwards.
'If you're in a balloon you're put in the wrong direction, you change your altitude to find better wind, better direction,' says the explorer during an interview at the Swiss Consulate in Wan Chai. 'It's the same in life - when we're pushed in a bad direction we need to change our altitude in our minds, in our vision of the world and our vision of other people. In life we're like the balloon, in that we have to drop ballast to climb. We have to drop certainties, paradigms, definitions, habits, dogmas, all these things that keep us prisoners of the wrong direction. You have to be ready to change your mind, your patterns of thinking and behaviour. If you are ready to change that then you will meet your opportunities. If not, you will miss them.'