(FORTUNE Magazine) – Freaked out about China becoming the world's largest economy? Relax--you just need some perspective. "China was the world's biggest economy in the 1820s," says Goldman Sachs managing director Robert Hormats. So the Chinese, inheritors of a 4,000-year-old civilization, don't see their current ascendancy as anything new. "They just see themselves as coming back," he says. And when China was No. 1, India was No. 2. Deja vu?

I've known Bob Hormats for years, but I never knew that. I learned it and much more last month at the Brainstorm conference produced by FORTUNE and the Aspen Institute. It was so mind-expandingly good that we're bringing you parts of it in this issue and additional reports in other forms (at fortune.com/brainstorm2004 and in future issues of FORTUNE).

The big idea behind Brainstorm is that you don't know what you don't know. We all have our favorite topics, and the great danger is that we'll just keep mining that same plot of land, learning more and more about less and less. Brainstorm to the rescue: Senior editor David Kirkpatrick corrals blisteringly smart people who might not normally cross paths, leaders from business, government, science, philanthropy, and the arts. We put them in rooms, assign them topics, and listen to what happens. I don't know how often Queen Noor, Michael Eisner, Gen. Wesley Clark, Ralph Reed, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Meg Whitman, Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Paul Wolfowitz, and Carly Fiorina talk to one another. Maybe they hang out together all the time, although I doubt it. Yet they all mingled in Aspen among the 254 attendees at Brainstorm 2004--some of whom you may recognize in the photos above.

The rich harvest from Brainstorm begins overleaf. Our dependence on foreign oil was a key topic; senior writer Nicholas Varchaver offers a detailed, doable plan for how to kick that dangerous habit. It's followed by profiles of seven of the most impressive innovators at this year's conference. It's all intended to open your mind, enrich your life, and remind us all that the world is bigger--and more full of possibilities--than we think.

--Geoffrey Colvin