Soonish

Episode 1.05: We meet people working to promote a range of alternatives to meat from livestock--including a cricket farmer, a researcher studying ways to grow meat from muscle cells in the laboratory, and a startup founder commercializing jackfruit, a huge fruit from India with a meat-like texture. The logic behind their work is simple. In the coming decades, as the human population expands toward 10 billion people by 2050, we'll probably have to figure out how to replace a lot of the meat we currently get from pigs, chickens, cattle, and fish with other forms of protein. That's partly because we’re already running out of the land and water needed to raise more livestock. But on top of that, a big chunk of all greenhouse-gas emissions comes raising animals. So finding protein sources that don’t depend on traditional livestock agriculture is both an economic necessity and, possibly, a way to slow global warming. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. For more information on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/3/8/105-meat-without-the-moo

Episode 1.04: Six million manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the U.S. since 2000, and you've probably heard economists and politicians say "those jobs aren't coming back." But that view isn't quite right. It doesn’t account for a cultural and technological revolution sweeping the United States—one that promises to redefine manufacturing, make it drastically more accessible, and create a ladder to new kinds of jobs for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers alike. In this episode of Soonish, we visit TechShop, a maker space where craftspeople are using high-tech tools to come up with new products. We talk with a business strategist at the Xerox-owned Palo Alto Research Center, where programmers are inventing design software that can help people get their ideas to market faster. We tour 99Degrees, a company in an old Massachusetts mill town where one entrepreneur is creating a path to skilled high-tech employment for manual garment workers. And we meet Bill Taylor, an 88-year-old mechanical genius in Belmont, MA, who has an elaborate workshop in his basement and decades of perspective on the changing manufacturing scene in the U.S. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Lee Rosevere. For more background on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/2/22/104-future-factories-with-workers-built-in

Episode 1.03: Museum attendance declined steeply in the first decade of this century, according to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA found that audiences were being siphoned away by the Internet, television, and other distractions. So, technology can be seen as a threat to museums—but maybe it's also a tool they can use to re-engage with the public. In this episode of Soonish, we visit museums in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston to see how some curators and educators are leaning on software, mobile devices, and digital media to get visitors excited about art. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Philipp Weigl and Kai Engel.

Episode 1.02: Monorails first captured the public imagination as the "trains of the future" here in the U.S., thanks to projects like the Disneyland monorail (1959) and the Seattle World's Fair monorail (1962). But today, it seems that new monorail systems are being built everywhere except America. Monorails have key advantages over competing forms of mass transit, such as buses, subways, and light rail—so what happened to the prospects for the technology in the U.S.? For the answer, Soonish went straight to the president of the Monorail Society, a 7,000-strong group with members around the world. And we traveled to Seattle to talk to the people who built—and who still run—the Seattle Center Monorail, and who tried to get a much larger monorail project off the ground in the early 2000s. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Grant Fikes.

Episode 1.01: This inaugural episode of Soonish is about the boldest vision of the future ever put down on film: Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." The movie came out in 1968, and it offered a detailed and inspiring forecast for life the early 21st century, including giant space stations, moon bases, thinking computers, and humans traveling to Jupiter. By putting the year in the title, Kubrick tied these forecasts to a very specific date. But by the time the actual year 2001 rolled around, very few of the film’s predictions had come true, and its optimism seemed almost naïve. In today’s episode we ask why we lowered our expectations so drastically—and what that means for our own future. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Kai Engel and Philipp Weigl.

Episode 1.00: A preview of coming attractions from Soonish, a new podcast about the future hosted by technology journalist Wade Roush, PhD. Each episode tells a story about the technological choices we’re making today and how those choices could end up helping us, or hurting us, tomorrow. The first episode premiers Friday, January 13th. Find more info at soonishpodcast.org. Music by Kai Engel.