Episode description

Stephen Euin Cobb is today's featured guest. (This is the second half of the experiment in which the questions I normally pose to others I ask of myself.)

Topics: Why I am an atheist and why I am not an anti-theist; my insistance that there is a rapidly growing need for a new and different kind of tolerance, greater than any this world has ever seen before; how this universe will end, and why I think we will someday engineer other universes; why past predictions of the future have always been so wrong; the probability that we will invent faster-than-light travel; and my estimation of the probability of The Singularity.

Also described are: why I started doing this show, why I chose the future as my topic, and how doing this show for three years has completely re-written my understanding of the future.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 6, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 34 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist and the host of the award-winning podcast The Future and You. He is also a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine, the online magazine from Baen Books. His articles have also appeared in Space and Time Magazine, H+ Magazine and >[gRiM]<>[cOuTuRe]< magazine. Within Second Life (as Boc Cryotank) he is a photographer and photojournalist. He has invented several games, the most popular being Death Stacks for which there is an annual tournament held each summer in Charlotte NC. He is also an artist, essayist, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation.

News: The Kepler mission to discover earth-like planets will radio its results to earth only once every thirty days. (NASA has not announced when this first report will be sent.  Possibly late May to mid June 2009) During Kepler's first 30 days of watching 100,000 stars, it will discover planets which orbit their star in ten days or less; as well as about half of the planets which orbit their star in fifteen days or less. In its second report Kepler will identify planets which orbit in less than 20 days, and about half of those that orbit in more than 20 days but less than 30 days. Every monthly report will increase, by a specific number of days, the orbital period of those planets discovered. But since the statistical probability of any planet crossing the face of its star diminishes with the size of its orbit, each of Kepler's monthly reports will contain fewer and fewer new planets. The first month will have, by far, the most.  Progessive reports will include planets in wider and wider orbits until the orbits of earthlike planets are (hopefully) revealed later in the three and a half year mission.