Zach Weinersmith on Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Improve and/or Ruin Everything

We have a special guest on the show today: I’m excited, are you
excited? It’s Zach Weinersmith. Zach is the creator of the
webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which I’m sure many
of you love and enjoy. He created the Bad Ad-Hoc Hypotheses
festival where people give ludicrous solutions to genuine
scientific problems. And with his amazing wife Kelly Weinersmith,
hosted a podcast, the Weekly Weinersmith, and wrote a book –
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies that Will Improve and/or Ruin
Everything. This book deals with the future of space travel,
programmable matter, nuclear fusion, all kinds of emerging
technologies, written about in a hilarious and informative way –
and it deals with the impacts they’ll have on society.

We had a wide-ranging discussion, from talking about the
near-term future of space travel, space elevators, how to tell if
technology predictions are accurate or not, how technology will
impact society, the inevitability of technological progress,
whether we can mine asteroids, and all manner of wonderful
things. 

You can find out more about Zach and Kelly's work at @ZachWeiner
and @FuSchmu respectively. You can listen to more of my show at
www.physicspodcast.com where you can talk to us about your
questions, concerns, and ask listener questions to be featured on
a future episode! Please, tell one of your friends to listen to
the show, ensuring the exponential growth in listener base that
will one day consume us all.