The Future And You

Stephen Euin Cobb (author and futurist) is today's speaker.

Topics: News and commentary concerning: The first implanted brain-computer interface which is wireless (it's from Brown University); The Human Brain Project intends to simulate an entire human brain; A new Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope which takes adaptive optics to a whole new level; A 3-D Printer which creates microscopic objects; And the world’s smallest implant for monitoring blood chemistry can tell your smart phone when you’re about to have a heart attack.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 27, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 28 minutes]

NOTE: In today's commentary about 3-D printers, the professor I mentioned interviewing some years ago was Dr. Adrian Bowyer (inventor of the RepRap Machine, an open-source 3-D printer any hobbyist can make). If you'd like to learn about Dr. Bowyer's pioneering work in open-source 3-D printers check out the September 17, 2008 episode. That episode is 83 minutes long because we went onto a lot of detail.

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he is also a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. His novels include Bones Burnt Black, Plague at Redhook and Skinbrain.

Robert G. Kennedy and Kenneth I. Roy (engineers and researchers) are today's featured guests.

Topic: Building Shell Worlds. Shell Worlds are a method of building comfortable biospheres over the entire surface of celestial bodies which are too small to retain an atmosphere by their natural gravitational attraction. Such objects include the moon, the planets Mercury and Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and other gas giant planets, perhaps even some asteroids. Sub-topics discussed include: the methods, benefits, difficulties and vast natural resources this would make available.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 20, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 57 minutes] This panel was recorded on July 21, 2012 in Chattanooga Tenn, at the science fiction and fantasy convention LibertyCon.

Robert G. Kennedy is an author, speaker, and engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Kenneth I. Roy is an author, speaker, and engineer with the US Department of Energy. (Neither is speaking for their respective agency in this discussion.)

Robert G. Kennedy, Dr. Gregory L. Matloff, Les Johnson, Dr. Ben Davis and Phillip R. Cox are today's featured guests.

Topic: Building a Dyson Dot, which is a very small segment of a Dyson Sphere. A Dyson Sphere is an object Freeman Dyson suggested we look for if we wish to discover alien civilizations in our galaxy. It is a spherical device which completely surrounds a star, and collects all the radiant energy from the star so the energy can be used by the civilization which built it. Such objects would be large and glow brightly in the infrared.

Sub-topics: Reasons we should build a Dyson Dot (it would solve for Global Climate Change and pay for itself by providing our civilization with more energy than we currently use); reasons we should not build a Dyson Dot (it may break space treaties and it's scary-big); and the engineering hurdles its construction would require us to overcome.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 13, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 55 minutes] This panel was recorded on July 21, 2012 in Chattanooga Tenn, at the science fiction and fantasy convention LibertyCon.

Robert G. Kennedy is an author, speaker, and engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Dr. Gregory L. Matloff is assistant professor of physics at New York City College of Technology. He has consulted for the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, is a Fellow of the British interplanetary Society, is a Hayden Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and is a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Dr. Ben Davis earned his PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Notre Dame. For several years he then taught mathematics, programming, astronomy and physics. He now works in the biometrics industry.

Phillip R. Cox has been an engineer in the military-industrial complex for the last thirty years. His career has included the development of many fine spacecraft and weapons of mass destruction.

Dr. James K. Woosley (physicist and lecturer) is our featured guest.

Topic: Areas within particle physics which still offer the promise of discoveries in the near and distant future. Some of these discoveries may yield new energy sources to power our growing civilization, or the propulsion methods needed for interstellar travel to become reality. Some may even allow us to engineer our way around the light barrier and build faster-than-light spacecraft.

Sub-topics Dr. Woosley covers: Antimatter, Tachyons (particles that can only travel faster than light), Neutrinos, Quarks, Quantum Chromodynamics, String Theory (manifolds and membranes), higher and lower dimensions of space, Supersymmetry, Preons, the Rishon Model (by Haim Harari), and a bit about the Higgs Boson.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 6, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 66 minutes] These audio segments were recorded on June 21, 2012 in Chattanooga Tenn, at the science fiction and fantasy convention LibertyCon.

Dr. James K. Woosley received his bachelors in Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics from Western Kentucky University. From Vanderbilt he received a masters in electromagnetic analysis of nerve impulses, and a doctorate in experimental particle physics. After which he went on to a career in the aerospace industry in Huntsville.

[Side note:] Dr. Woosley's description of preon theories surprised me because I had created a preon theory myself back in the 1980s and 1990s, though I did not call it a preon theory since I'd never heard of such a thing. I called my fundamental particle a pip, and described in detail how all the known subatomic particles were made of pips and nothing else; as well as how the fundamental forces of nature were created by the behaviour of pips and nothing else. In the mid 1990s I tried to get some attention for my theories by mailing them to a couple of scientific journals, but they were never published. Eventually I used my preon theory as backstory and local color in my novel Skinbrain. I did this by summarizing it into the rantings of an alien physicist being tortured by a human physicist who kidnapped him for his advanced scientific knowledge. If you're curious and wish to read MY version of a preon theory, Skinbrain is available from Amazon, in Kindle format, for just $2.99. The reviews have been excellent. They average four and a half stars.

Stephen Euin Cobb (author and futurist) is today's speaker.

Topics include: An update on Google Glass; Google's contest which will allow you to buy your own google glass for $1500 (your host has entered this contest); carbon nanotubes woven into conductive threads may replace copper for electrical wiring in aircraft and help wearable computers become woven into clothing; an impressive new antibacterial gel from IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology; and the first bionic eye to get FDA approval is an implanted artificial retina which gets its image wirelessly from an external camera. Also: your host offers his own little contest which piggybacks on Google's contest.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 27, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 30 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he is also a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. His novels include Bones Burnt Black, Plague at Redhook and Skinbrain.

Stephen Euin Cobb (author and futurist) is today's speaker.

Topic: The Millennium Project. Its assessment of some of today's trends, and the likely changes to our future these trends may produce. Trends described include: robotics, surgery, medicine, computing, energy, education, automobiles, clothing, the Internet, smart phones, nanotechnology and nanorobotics, 3D printing and open source hardware, supercomputers, free online education, artificial intelligence, life extension, computational biology, smart dust, and CERN's achievement of containing 309 atoms of antimatter for an astonishing 17 minutes.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 20, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 37 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he is also a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. His novels include Bones Burnt Black, Plague at Redhook and Skinbrain.

Stephen Euin Cobb (author and futurist) is today's speaker.

Topics include: Entropia Universe--a huge online game somewhat like World of Warcraft but with an economy pegged to the US Dollar. (Players are allowed to put money into the game and to take money out. Apparently some people are making their real-world living by playing the game.) Also: A push to make more advanced robotic prosthetic arms for amputees; a pacemaker-like device which has been used to produce deep-brain stimulation which has shown good results in reducing the effects of Alzheimer's disease; and a website called GovTrack.us which allows any person to track what any member of congress is doing, saying and voting for.

Also: your host's recent guest-blog entry for the online magazine SF Signal (in which he makes some positive predictions about the future); his being interviewed for the online magazine Hofstra Pulse (about why movies, TV shows and novels so frequently depict an awful future no one would want to line in); comments on your host's experiences writing and training neural nets (a form of artificial intelligence); and his conviction that our "do-nothing" Congress is a direct product of our elected officials constantly squirming under the massive scrutiny of the voters watching them through the unblinking Internet.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 13, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 36 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he is also a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. His novels include Bones Burnt Black, Plague at Redhook and Skinbrain.

Stuart Jaffe (author and co-host of The Eclectic Review) is today's featured guest.

Topics: Google putting together a convention this month for app developers to come and write apps for Google's new eyeglass computer; Google calling for the end of passwords and pushing for some method which might be more secure than passwords; Casual terrorists verses Dedicated terrorists; the new 4K and 8K TVs (which have four times and 16 times the resolution of HD TVs); David Brin's prediction of a future without privacy (in his novel Earth) and the curious effects in Nancy Kress's novel A Beggar in Spain; the life-changing convenience of streaming TV shows and movies; ways Japanese and Korean movies are different from America movies; as well as Life extension and what Stuart might do differently if he knew he would probably live to be 300 years old.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 6, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 37 minutes]

Stuart Jaffe is the author of The Max Porter Paranormal-Mysteries, The Malja Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic fantasy series, and After The Crash as well as the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain, and many other short stories which have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He is the co-host of The Eclectic Review -- a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. He also plays guitar, is active in the theater, and holds a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Stuart Jaffe (author and co-host of The Eclectic Review) is today's featured guest.

Topics: the future of traditional publishing after the ebook revolution is over, Stuart's own efforts and experiences in book promotion, his results in podcasting, his expectations of the future, his impression of 3D movies, and his impression of Vocaloid (the popular software used to create the singing voice of the also popular animated Japanese performer Hatsune Miku).

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 30, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 32 minutes]

Stuart Jaffe is the author of The Max Porter Paranormal-Mysteries, The Malja Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic fantasy series, and After The Crash as well as the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain, and many other short stories which have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He is the co-host of The Eclectic Review -- a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. He also plays guitar, is active in the theater, and holds a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Listener Email: Brian J Piccioni wrote to point out that we are far deeper into the transition from film projectors to digital projectors in movie theaters. To support his statement he provided links to two articles: Difference Engine: Ne plus ultra and Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling.

Stuart Jaffe (author and co-host of The Eclectic Review) is today's featured guest.

Topics: trends in movies, TV and book publishing. Stuart's love hate relationship with CGI; will CGI ever completely replace actors?; and why George Lucas's long push for digital projectors in theaters still has yet to succeed. Also: Stuart's analysis of the ebook revolution based on his 20 years of personal experience in publishing.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 23, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 37 minutes]

Stuart Jaffe is the author of The Max Porter Paranormal-Mysteries, The Malja Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic fantasy series, and After The Crash as well as the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain, and many other short stories which have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He is the co-host of The Eclectic Review -- a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. He also plays guitar, is active in the theater, and holds a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.