Flash Forward

This episode we go to a future with pirates! There always has to be at least one pirate episode per season. This time it’s pharmaceutical pirates. 

 This episode was inspired by a new book by Annalee Newitz called Autonomous. It’s very good and you should read it. I am not being paid to say that, I just really like the book. 

 Autonomous tells the story of two main characters: Jack the pharmaceutical pirate, and Palladin the bot that is trying to hunt her down. A few cool links related to Autonomous:

 How to Write a Novel Set More Than 125 Years in the Future

 Robots need civil rights, too

 Sword and Laser podcast #306 - Indentured Robotude w/ Annalee Newitz

 Pirates and Robots Square Off Over Drugs in Annalee Newitz’s Debut Novel

 In A Future Ruled By Big Pharma, A Robot Tentatively Explores Freedom — And Sex: 'Autonomous'

 For our episode, we focused on the pharmaceutical piracy part of the book. And to talk to us about the nitty gritty of how pharmaceuticals are made, and how they’re protected by patents, I talked to Jason Kahana, the founder and president of a small biotech company called Integrity Biosolutions, and Charles Duan, the director of the Patent Reform Project at Public Knowledge. [Full disclosure: my father and Jason know each other and have worked together in the past.]

 These Aren’t the Patent Remedies You’re Looking For (No, Really)

 Teva Pharmaceuticals Antitrust Settlement is a Win for Competition

 Martin Shkreli Is Big Pharma’s Biggest A**hole

 Drug C.E.O. Martin Shkreli Arrested on Fraud Charges

 Yusuf Hamied, generic drugs boss

 The Treasure of Mumbai 

 Pharmaceutical deformulation

 The Role of Reverse Engineering in the Development of Generic Formulations

 The Impact of the US Food and Drug Administration Chlorofluorocarbon Ban on Out-of-pocket Costs and Use of Albuterol Inhalers Among Individuals With Asthma

 Do Patents Disclose Useful Information? 

 We Are Definitely Against Indefiniteness in Patents

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro and ad-break music is by Hussalonia. The pirate music from the intro is by Nerve Damage. The future voices this episode were played by Tamara Krinsky, Brent Rose and Stephen Granade. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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This month’s episode is about what it would take to sterilize the Earth, and why you might want to figure that out in the first place. 

 First we talk to the authors of a paper that tries to figure out this exact question. David Sloan and Rafael Alves Batista are the authors of a paper called “The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events” (along with Avi Loeb). No, they’re not evil scientists, just interested in what it might take to find life on other planets. 

 They explain their calculations, and how we mostly don’t have anything to worry about. Plus, cool facts about tardigrades!

 Then we talk to science-fiction author N.K. Jemisin who is the author of The Broken Earth trilogy. Which is very good! She explains her thinking behind the books, why the Earth is out to get her characters, and how humans banding together to survive is more interesting to her than the lone ranger making it on his own. 

 Further reading:

 What Would It Take to Completely Sterilize the Earth?

 The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events

 Did a gamma-ray burst initiate the late Ordovician mass extinction?

 NASA: Gamma-ray Bursts 

 Flash Forward: The Supernova Next Door 

 'The Fifth Season,' by N.K. ­Jemisin

 N. K. Jemisin on Diversity in Science Fiction and Inspiration From Dreams

 The Tardigrade: Practically Invisible, Indestructible ‘Water Bears’

 Tardigrades return from the dead

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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This episode is a little different than other episodes. As many of you know, Flash Forward is my second job. My first job is at ESPN, where I recently helped launch an audio documentary series called 30 for 30 Podcasts. Please go check that out, even if you don’t like sports I promise there’s something for you. My episodes are numbers three and four in the series, and they’re both out, and if you like the weird stuff I do on this show I think you’ll probably enjoy them.

 Trying to make two highly produced shows at once is hard though! So for my mental health, this month’s Flash Forward is a bit of a remix. The top of the show is new, it’s an interview with Kit Walsh, who is a staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation where she works on free speech, net neutrality, copyright, coders' rights, and other issues that relate to freedom of expression and access to knowledge. Then, you’ll hear a remixed version of an old episode about the future of the internet, and what it would take for us to abandon the world wide web.

 More information about net neutrality:

 Net neutrality explained: "Imagine internet is pizza ..."

 Throttling on Mobile Networks Is a Sign of Things to Come, Unless We Save Net Neutrality Now

 Dear FCC

 Ajit Pai’s anti-net neutrality plan gets the facts and law wrong, lawmakers say

 Am I The Only Techie Against Net Neutrality?

 The remixed episode after my interview with Kit is all about what it would take to lose the internet. And to figure that out I talked to two historians of digital culture at NYU. Laine Nooney studies the history of computers and video games. Finn Brunton studies how and why different technologies get adopted (or don’t).

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. Special thanks this episode to Lena Groeger, Sisi Wei, Colin Schultz, and my mom. Yes, that was my actual mom. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. I love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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This episode, we travel to a future where your romantic partners aren’t chosen by questions or swipes, but rather by your brainwaves.

 This future is based on an idea from Shelly Ronan and Ernesto D. Morales and their project Object Solutions. If you liked what you heard about Object Solutions you should check out their other work, and their Patreon page. 

 I also talked to Suzanne Dikker, who has used EEG headsets to study everything from education, to Marina Abramovic’s art, to compatability. 

 And to get a true expert position on dating apps, I talked to Andrea Silenzi from the podcast Why Oh Why. If you’re interested in the intersection between sex, dating, relationships and technology, check out her show. 

 Other things to read:

 The Mutual Wave Project by Suzanne Dikker

 ‘EEG Dating’ matches people based on their brainwave data

 This Tinder Hands-Free App Makes Dating Decisions by Reading Heartbeats

 This Tinder-Swiping Biometric Love Robot Knows Who Your Body Wants

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. By the way, check out Matt's new animated web series over at Topic. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. I love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to Apple Podcasts and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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This episode, we go on another vacation! Can you tell I need a vacation? Anyway, back to the episode. What would it be like if you could hop on a space cruise ship, and take a trip to Mars?

 This is a special episode because our little future intro is actually two real people playing real parts. Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich are the authors of a new book called Vacation Guide to the Solar System. The book is a spinoff of their long-running project the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a project of Guerilla Science and a place where people could really come inside and ask about trips to other planets. And they take us on a very fun tour of what you could do, as a tourist, to Mars.

 Along with Olivia and Jana, this episode features Ben Longmier, a former rocket scientist, and Rebecca Boyle, a science writer who has a true love for Mars. 

 There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to intergalactic travel, so in this episode we focus specifically on tourism. Not colonization, or research, or any of the other things that you could potentially try to do. And we’re also going to focus on a single planet, just because trying to cover all the planets would be really hard. So what would it be like, to take a vacation to Mars. Just… a trip for fun. Like going to Cancun. But instead of snorkeling you hike up Olympus Mons? Listen to find out!

 Further reading:

 'Intergalactic Travel Bureau' Wants to Plan Your Space Vacation

 Vacation to Mars

 Everything About Mars is the Worst

 Welcome To Mars! Enjoy Perpetual Jet Lag Under An Eerie Red Sky

 Mars Needs Lawyers

 Life on Mars time for JPL scientist and his family

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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Long time listeners of Flash Forward might feel like this future is kind of… familiar. And it is. It’s actually the first future we ever traveled to on this show. A future where humans have invented artificial wombs. And this is a special bonus episode of Flash Forward where we’re going to go back and revisit that future, because a new piece of research recently came out about artificial wombs. I’m calling this, a BACK TO THE FUTURE episode.

 Related reading:

 Fluid-filled ‘biobag’ allows premature lambs to develop outside the womb

 An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb

 Early Ectogenesis: Artificial Wombs in 1920s Literature

 The Man Who Ran a Carnival Attraction That Saved Thousands of Premature Babies Wasn’t a Doctor at All

 The World, the Flesh & the Devil An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul

 The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus

 Daedalus, or Science and the Future

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky.

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

 That’s all for this future, come back next time, and we’ll travel to a new one!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this future there are no more human police officers. Is that even possible?

 The future of policing is a really really complicated topic. And it’s also, and this might be the understatement of the year, a controversial one. On this episode we’re not going to try and give you a full picture of what the future of policing might be. That would take hours. Instead, we’re going to focus on two really specific pieces of this topic.

 First we talk to Madeline Ashby, futurist and science fiction writer, about robots, and what it might be like if we replaced human law enforcement with robotic law enforcement. Then, we talk to historian and writer Walidah Imarisha, about a future with no cops at all. We also hear from Doug Wyllie, the Editor at Large for PoliceOne, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn't like either proposal. 

 Further reading:

 Disrupt Tha Police by Madeline Ashby

 Bomb Robots: What Makes Killing In Dallas Different And What Happens Next?

 Robocop Delivers Pizza, Prevents Suicide

 11 Police Robots Patrolling Around the World

 Machine Bias 

 Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race 

 Angels with Dirty Faces 

 Wrestling With Angels: Walidah Imarisha on Harm and Accountability

 Audre Lord Safe Outside the System Collective

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. Special thanks this week to Brent Rose. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month on Flash Forward, we go to a future where anybody can make a video of you doing anything they want. And that technology is cheap and easy to access. What happens?

 This episode we start by talking about the technology as it exists now. Hamed Pirsiavash the show to explain his research into generating videos using algorithms. 

 So that’s where the technology stands now. But once it gets better, there are all kinds of applications. Hal Hodson, a tech reporter at The Economist, tells us about how it could be used in movies. Right now, movie-makers use CGI to project faces onto other faces. Recently, in the latest Star Wars, the faces of Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin from the original trilogy were projected onto actors faces for the few scenes in the new movie. Here’s a look at how they did it.

 But in the future, they might not have to do any of this. They could simply generate the video they need using images of Leia and Tarkin’s faces. Which also means that movie stars could wind up being in hundreds of movies a year, since they don’t have to actually be there, on set, to act. And they could keep acting in movies long after they’ve died, too. 

 That’s a fun thing to think about. Here’s a less fun thing to think about: how people would use this technology to seek revenge and ruin people’s lives. And to talk through the legal implications, I called Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who specializes in revenge porn cases. She explains how these generated videos of the future would actually get around today’s revenge porn laws. 

 Then, to wrap it all up, I talk to Jenna Wortham, a writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-host of an amazing podcast called Still Processing. In a world where online identities are not only personally valuable, but economically valuable, what does this do to us? When anybody can torpedo your finely crafted online persona with a fake video, do we all just give up? Do we try to erase everything from the internet about ourselves? Or do we lean into this and start making wild aspirational and experimental videos? Or maybe all of the above?

 Bonus: You will also find out what butter, The Falkland Islands, and Snakes on a Train have in common. According to Rose.

 Some further reading for this episode:

 The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn

 Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyonce

 The future of fake news is real time video manipulation

 The Butter Wars: When Margarine Was Pink

 The British Punk Band That Fooled Reagan, Thatcher and the CIA 

 Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks 

 Teaching Machines to Predict the Future

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. Special thanks this week to Wendy Hari, Jacki Sojico and Dan Tannenbaum. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

 That’s all for this future, come back next time, and we’ll travel to a new one!

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California has one of the largest economies in the world. So what would happen if it broke away from the United States? Could California ever go independent? And if it did, what would that look like?

 This is a future that’s been on my list for a while, but since the election here in the United States it’s taken a bit of a different tone. California voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, 66 percent of the state cast their votes for her. And as most of you probably know, she did not win. And this is one of the big talking points of many California secessionists. The presidential election is almost alway totally decided before California’s polls even close. So why should California continue to be ruled by a government that it basically doesn’t elect? And, they argue, that doesn’t really have their best interests at heart.

 To help figure out what this future might be like, I talked to:

 Peter Laufer, a journalist and the author of a book called The Elusive State of Jefferson.

 Jon Christensen, a professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Department of History at UCLA. He’s also the editor of a quarterly magazine about California called Boom.

 Jay Rooney, the press secretary for the California National Party.

 Richard Monette, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and the director of the Great Lakes Indian Law Center.

 If you want to learn more about the various California independence movements, here are some links.

 The California National Party

 Yes, California Independence Campaign

 Secession, the American Civil War

 Calexit? Brexit Buoys California Independence Movement

 Active separatists movements in North America

 Republic of Lakotah

 One in four Americans want their state to secede from the U.S., but why?

 Americans for Independence, in America

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. Special thanks this week to Sameer Ajmani, Jade Davis, Brent Rose, Jim Basili, Caroline Sinders and Scott Musgrove. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year, over 20 million people get on a cruise ship and set sail for a seafaring vacation. Most of those cruises take their vacationers to warm, sunny climates. But thanks to climate change, a new hoard of ships might start sailing North rather than South. This episode of Flash Forward explores a future where the Arctic becomes a tourist destination just like the Bahamas or the Great Barrier Reef.

 Researchers at UCLA have projected that the Northwest Passage might be totally ice-free by 2050. And that’s something that big commercial cargo ships have been eyeing for a while. But now, cruise ships are getting in on the game. The first big cruise ship to make the full Northwest Passage trip was the Crystal Serenity. 

 This week we talk to a few people who have seen the impacts of this new tourism boom.

 Arielle Duhaime-Ross is a climate and environment correspondent for HBO’s VICE News Tonight. Arielle went up to Pond Inlet to see the Crystal Serenity, and talk to the people in Pond Inlet about what it's like to suddenly be flooded with visitors in puffy coats. 

 Jackie Dawson is the Canada Research Chair in Environment, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa. She’s done a lot of work studying the ways tourism impacts people and the environment in places like Pond Inlet. And she spent years trying to convince people to take arctic tourism seriously.

 Nancy Guyon is the Director of Tourism and Cultural Industries for Nunavut, the northernmost Canadian territory. And Nancy’s job is to try and figure out how to harness this new interest in the arctic for the good of Nunavut.

 So this future is a little bit unlike some of the other ones I do on this show, because it’s a future that’s kind of inevitable. It’s happening, it’s going to happen. Are communities ready for it? No, is the general consensus. And in this episode we talk about what might happen as this gets more and more popular. What happens when a ship hits and iceberg? What happens when private yachts show up to communities that don't want them? How do you make sure that these ships don't disrupt local hunts, and that the tourists respect the people living in these communities? 

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 The music in this episode was:

 BoxCat Games, “Assignment”

 BoxCat Games, “Love of my Life”

 Oorlab, “Apiarist, Part 1”

 Sounds in this episode: "Wind, Synthesized, A.wav" by InspectorJ of Freesound.org

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