A community known for a mix of brilliant, accomplished people was called on Thursday to grant wishes to save life on Earth and find it elsewhere in the universe.

Undaunted folks at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference in Southern California got right to work.

Each year, TED grants prizes to three people with track records of doing good and visions of changing the world for the better.

Prize winners each get 100,000 dollars and a wish at which "Tedsters" can aim resources, influence and abilities.

For the first time, TED has set aside a million dollars to pay for "difficult bits" such as operational logistics to help the prize money stretch farther.

"We told them they have one wish to change the world, so wish big," TED curator Chris Anderson said.

TED Prize 2009 winners are ocean defender Sylvia Earle, SETI Institute director Jill Cornell Tarter and El Sistema founder Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu.

Earle called on Tedsters to use all means possible to rally support for a global network of marine protected areas, describing them as "hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet."

Earle shared tales of oceans being plundered by commercial fishing, polluted, and dangerously altered by climate change.

"We've eaten more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea, and coral reefs are dying," said Earle, who was born in 1935 and has devoted her life to undersea exploration.

"Fifty years ago no one imagined we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or what we took out of it. It was an Eden, but now we know we are perhaps facing paradise lost."

Software engineers, film-makers, Internet entrepreneurs and other TEDsters at the conference in California or watching on the Internet or in theaters at spots around the world responded quickly with offers to help Earle.

"She is the voice the world needs to listen to on the crisis facing our oceans," climate change battling hero, devout Tedster, and former US vice president Al Gore said while introducing Earle.

"I look forward to the TED community rallying around her."

Earle warns that the Earth's oceans are at a perilous point and that life on the planet depends on the seas.

"No blue, no green," Earle said simply. "Nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one."

Tarter wished for Tedsters to "empower earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company."

The SETI Institute scours space for radio waves or other signals caused by extra-terrestrial technology.

"We live on a fragile island of life in a universe of possibilities," Tarter said. "SETI doesn't presume the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence; it merely seeks evidence of it."

Tarter praised newly-elected US President Barack Obama for promising to revive government's support for science and said finding alien life could inspire humans to unite as a species.

"Her success could change our view of ourselves and our universe forever; in fact it would," Sir Richard Branson said while introducing Tarter.

Abreu's wish is in easier reach. He asked for help spreading his El Sistema program to the United States and other countries.

Abreu started El Sistema in a garage in Venezuela more than 30 years ago with a conviction that teaching children from poor, dangerous neighborhoods to play classical music can steer them away from gangs, crime and other evils.

El Sistema has flourished and is a proven success, with more than 700,000 children having been involved in the program.

A Tedster dean of the New England Conservatory of Music volunteered to build and run an El Sistema program at the school's campus in Boston.

In the TED audience was legendary musician Quincy Jones, who is heading a coalition of organizations including the famed Julliard School of performing arts in New York City to support Abreu's project.

"Art has become a social right for all the people," said Abreu, who revealed his wish in a live video link from Caracas.