MONTREAL — Guy Laliberté is a billionaire, founder of an entertainment company with a global reach, and the first Canadian space tourist.

Yet he has one more big dream: that everyone on earth has access to sustainable safe water.

Laliberté, the usually-reclusive CEO of Cirque du Soleil, humbly shared his vision of a better world with international supporters of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and many of its scientists at the four-day Science and Savoir-Faire Weizmann Global Gathering.

More than 300 delegates from 10 countries sat hushed in Marché Bonsecours overlooking the Cirque’s blue-and-yellow tents at the Old Port as Laliberté spoke extemporaneously.

Laliberté has personally committed $100 million to his One Drop Foundation, which aims to raise awareness of water issues. He was not asking for money, but for passion.

Ample clean water for everyone is first about saving lives, he said, noting that every 20 seconds someone, most frequently a child, dies from lack of clean water.

But access to water is also at the centre of all social, political and environmental issues facing the world, he said.

At the outset, Laliberté lightened the mood by asking everyone to don the red clown’s nose on their seats. He did the same and took a photo of the audience.

Laliberté, a Quebec City native who began as a street performer, was introduced by Weizmann Canada board member Anne-Marie Boucher, wife of Mitch Garber, a former Montreal sportscaster and now an entertainment industry executive.

Cirque du Soleil will perform in Israel this summer, for the first time in its 28-year history.

“I’m asking you not to give your money, time or expertise, but to work together with us to find new ways to touch, not people’s minds or reason, but their hearts,” Laliberté said. “We must educate people; many do not understand yet that water in not an infinite resource. There is a sense of urgency.”

He said his 2009 journey aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station was his way, as an artist, to gain the world’s attention to his cause. He hoped the poetic production broadcast from the stratosphere would touch people emotionally.

Laliberté was awed by the knowledge and vision of the cosmonauts and scientists with whom he travelled.

“What this little kid who came from nowhere had in common with them was a belief in a better world, a planet where all people live in harmony.

“I’m not here to preach generosity or the importance of science – you know that already. I’m saying participate with us in this vision.”

Laliberté’s talk was one of many enlightening offerings at the event, hosted by Weizmann Canada and held every other year.

Weizmann vice-president for resource development and public affairs Israel Bar-Joseph announced to delegates that the university will soon embark on its own modest space program.

As part of a multilateral effort, Weizmann plans to launch a mini-satellite into space. The LIM (Less is More) Transient Explorer, which measures one metre across, will explore the cosmos for new planets, black holes and supernovae, he said.

LIM will hitch a ride with a NASA mission, and McGill University and the University of Toronto are among the academic partners in the project, along with the Israeli government and industry.

Bar-Joseph said researchers hope LIM will record such events as the explosion of a supernova as it happens, relaying the information to earth immediately. Telescopes can then be trained in the right direction to collect data.

Planetary science is a new field for Weizmann, which has made three important recruits recently, including, in October, Oded Aharonson from Caltech.

Aharonson, a presenter at the Global Gathering, gave a talk on Titan, one of 62 known moons orbiting Saturn. It’s remarkable for the fact – recently discovered – that, even though its temperature hovers between -200 C and -100 C, it does have rivers and lakes, composed of liquid methane, not water. Titan’s mountains are rock-hard ice, he said.

To Aharonson, this proves that a hydrologic cycle can exist without water, lending credence to the belief that there may be life elsewhere in our solar system.