Flash Forward

We’re back! After a bit of a break, your regularly scheduled Flash Forward episodes will resume starting today. Every other Tuesday you’ll get a future delivered straight to your listening device. I hope you enjoy! On this episode, we’re talking about the

In our last episode of the season, we take one one of the most requested futures: telepathy! What would it be like to be able to link minds, and communicate brain to brain? And how likely is it that we’ll ever get this kind of technology?     We start the

This episode we travel to a future where the 2020 census goes haywire. What happens if we don’t get an accurate count of Americans? Who cares? Apparently the constitution does!     The 2020 census is currently in the crosshairs — census watchers say that

This episode is all about a world without plastic. What would that look like? Is it even possible?     Today, plastic is seen as one of our great environmental enemies. But it actually wasn’t always that way. Bradford Harris, a historian of science and th

In this episode, we travel to a future where a tech mogul feeds a machine learning system all the religious texts he can find, and asks it to generate a “super religion.”    Buckle up because this is a long episode! But it’s fun, I promise.    For the int

This episode we travel to a future where you can choose to turn off your ability to deceive yourself. Are you now a perfectly clear eyed genius? Or a perpetually depressed misanthrope? Maybe both?     This episode was suggested by my mom. It begins with t

This episode we take on a future full of bioprinted replacement organs. You asked for more hopeful futures, this is about as hopeful as they get!     We start by hearing a bit about what the current organ donation market is like from Christine Gentry, who

In this episode we travel to a world without bees. And not just honey bees, all bees.     You’ve probably heard a lot of doom and gloom predictions about what might happen if honey bees went extinct. Mass famine! The end of coffee! World economic collapse

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 shou

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 B