Season Three

science

Flash Forward

What happens when everybody has 100% control over when they do or don’t have babies?

How is Babby (Not) Made?

This week we travel to a future where there is so much fake news that nobody can tell what is real anymore. Are we already there? What happens next?

Extra! Extra!

Today’s episode is about a future where nobody works on farms anymore, all farming is done by robots. Is it possible? Probably not. But it might be closer than you think.

Robocrop

Every year, over 20 million people get on a cruise ship and set sail for a seafaring vacation. Most of those cruises take their vacationers to warm, sunny climates. But thanks to climate change, a new hoard of ships might start sailing North rather than South. This episode explores a future where the Arctic becomes a tourist destination just like the Bahamas or the Great Barrier Reef.

Greetings from Paradice

California has one of the largest economies in the world. So what would happen if it broke away from the United States? Could California ever go independent? And if it did, what would that look like?

California Dreaming

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?

Deceptible Me

A controversial technique for combating climate change has caught the congressional eye.

SciFri 20171117

Could Tweaking The Atmosphere Help Us Fight Climate Change?

What would it be like if we could actually understand what animals were saying?

Dr. Doolittle

What if we just gave everybody money? It sounds simple, but universal basic income is a trendy idea again and a lot of you have asked for an episode about a future where everybody gets money from the government no matter what. And it turns out that while it sounds simple, just giving everybody money is way more complicated than you might thing.

Money For Nothing

Computers are getting smaller and smaller. But what if we had sensors the size of dust, that could float through the air undetected, talk to one another, gather information, and transmit that information back down to a central place? This is the concept behind smart dust, and it’s more plausible than you might think.

Eyes In The Skies

Would you replace ALL your food with pills? Where does this trope come from in science fiction, and what does it say about us that it still persists?

Farm To Tablet

If humans want to really have a go at leaving Earth and living in space or on other planets, we’re going to have to figure out a lot of things: spaceships, food supplies, fuel, how to keep everybody from killing one another. But one thing seems to be frequently left out of the picture, when it comes to distant space travel research: reproduction. It turns out we know very, very little about what pregnancy in space might look like, or whether it’s even possible at all.

What To Expect When You're Expecting In Space

Flash Forward is a show about possible (and not so possible) future scenarios. What would the warranty on a sex robot look like? How would diplomacy work if we couldn’t lie? Could there ever be a fecal transplant black market? (Complicated, it wouldn’t, and yes, respectively, in case you’re curious.) Hosted and produced by award winning science journalist Rose Eveleth, each episode combines audio drama and journalism to go deep on potential tomorrows, and uncovers what those futures might really be like. The future is going to be weird, so let's get ready for it together.