Episode description

Catherine Asaro, physicist and Nebula award winning author, is our featured guest. (Her website) She discuses nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence and the singularity. She also describes her expectations concerning aging and longevity, oil and alternative energy; and she agrees to let the host arrange for her to do a personal appearance inside Second Life.

She mentions that she has begun composing music on the computer, says a few words about her new novel (The Night Bird) and briefly lets slip that she will be consulting with a game developer (which she could not name) to help them with aspects of the new game they are designing. 

When asked questions which form the core beliefs of The Order of Cosmic Engineers (web) (a new international organization of which your host is a founding member) she displays a remarkable level of agreement. 

As a tutor to gifted children she sees how the world view of children today is radically different than those held by children just twenty or thirty years ago. Their vision of the world has been transformed by the Internet and cell phones into something far more global and far less tied to ones specific locality. 

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 25, 2008 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 66 minutes]

Catherine Asaro is the author of 23 novels which have been described as a blend of hard science fiction, romance and space adventure. 11 of her novels belong to her Saga of the Skolian Empire. Her novel The Quantum Rose won the Nebula Award for best novel of 2001 and she is a three-time winner of the Romantic Times Book Club award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

From UCLA she received a Bachelors Degree in Chemistry. From Harvard she received a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics.

She has done research at the University of Toronto in Canada, the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Germany, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her research involved using quantum theory to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. She was a physics professor until 1990, when she established Molecudyne Research.

A former ballerina, she has performed with ballets and in musicals on both the east and west coast of the United States. In the 1980’s she was a principal dancer and artistic director of the Mainly Jazz Dancers and the Harvard University Ballet. 

She has also published short stories, reviews, essays, and scientific papers in refereed academic journals. Her paper Complex Speeds and Special Relativity, which appeared in the April 1996 issue of The American Journal of Physics, forms the basis for some of the science in her novels.