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.