300 years ago most people lived and worked
on farms in rural villages their whole life, and didn’t know much about life 300 miles
away let alone 300 years in the future. So what will life be like 300 years in our
future, or for those living 300 million miles away? So, today SFIA celebrates its 400th regular
episode, and as a show dedicated to Science & Futurism, I felt it would be a good choice
to look at what life might look like in the year 2323, three centuries from today. And I chose the phrasing “Life in 2323 AD”
as the title intentionally, rather than any specific technology or achievement or even
the word humanity, as I suspect that term might get blurry in times to come, and 300
years is probably well into that window already. Also we are focused more on life in this era,
as opposed to whether or not we have flying cars or jetpacks or warp drives, and so while
we will discuss a lot of technology today, this episode is more about lifestyle scenarios
and civilizations. For that reason, after the intro, we’re
going to switch into the easter-egg heavy Narrative format we sometimes use on the show
and explore the lives of 7 people, Amy, Becky, Cameron, Duncan, Emily, Fido, and Gary Googleson,
and with them, some of the technology we expect. Now, predicting the future of Humanity even
3 years from now is a tricky business, let alone 3 centuries, and we work off of logic
flavored with intuition here, not crystal balls, so don’t go making bets on predictions
made today. Plus many events in today’s story are not
meant as predictions or to indicate a norm, rather than to be food for thought and contemplation
about possible paths that might emerge for people in the future. Of course, the usual notion about distant
future predictions is that no one around now, including the predictor in question, is going
to be around to see if it was right or wrong. So if you’re remembered at all, it’s probably
only if you lucked out and got your prediction right enough that folks think you were a visionary
rather than wildly guessing. In order to frame our predictions, we’ll
lay out a few key conditions for this century that will be our basis for forecasting to
2323. To start our conversation, let’s lead off
with a prediction that probably won’t surprise many of the audience who have been around
for hundreds of episodes: prediction #1 about life in 2323 AD is that many of the folks
listening to this episode now, as it comes out in June of 2023, will still be alive and
kicking in 2323. There’s a lot of technology that appears
to be physically possible but to which our pathway to it is murky at best. We still don’t know if we can make fusion
practical as a power source for instance, or if we could ever make really good nanobot
assemblers that could just quickly build nearly anything out of raw materials. But we know from nature that we can have functional
microbots able to self-replicate, that’s every organic cell after all, and that they
can have a fairly complex amount of code telling them how to build themselves and function,
their DNA, and so too we have a pathway for powering them, much as our own cells are powered. It would seem a given that these microbots
would or could get smaller and more durable, down to the nanoscopic scale, and probably
cheaper too. None of that is strictly necessary, because
while it would be nice to have tiny little bots to maintain our equipment and homes and
roads, or even make them, we’re a lot more willing to toss efficiency to the curb where
fixing humans is concerned. And that’s all we need, really: the possibility. Essentially everything to do with aging should
be manageable by nanobots, even if we don’t find easier approaches, and it would seem
likely we ought to get to this tech this century. Or if not, to have enough other improvements
that we could extend life sufficiently for folks to still be around when those nanobots
got invented and perfected. Or even for it to feel so close to hand that
lots of people opted for the option of being frozen, which is actually very cheap, especially
at large scale, on the assumption that once those nanobots got made, they could be thawed
and restored. With that in mind there is a decent chance
you and I will still be around come 2323, the early 24th century. And it will be a vastly better one in that
virtually everyone born in the 22nd century will not know aging or a lot of other health
conditions. This doesn’t necessarily mean people in
the 24th century have a wolverine-style healing factor but what it does mean is someone who
is 23 in 2323 is likely to have over 100 living ancestors, even if quite a few died, and most
of them not just still alive but probably as fit and healthy as an Olympic Athlete. And this is without assuming most of them
have pursued some sort of extensive cybernetic augmentation or mind uploading, though since
that’s another likely possibility, we’ll be looking at a couple of examples of that
today too. As we shift into the stories of our 7 folks
for today, it’s important to understand that we’re not implying they are the normal,
indeed some exist only to discuss a social dilemma, but the backdrop on all of these
cases is the assumption that humanity didn’t blow itself up, wreck the planet, or unleash
an uncontrolled, unaligned and homicidal AI. I think if there is any sort of human civilization
around by 2323, it probably means we got these things solved, or at least, managed, by then. And I think that implies reasonably safe AI
that’s much smarter than now, if not necessarily superhuman or even human-level smart. I think it implies nanobots and way better
automation in general, and I think it implies superior and sustainable energy. Maybe direct fusion, maybe something even
better, maybe just vast swarms of space-based solar collectors beaming energy down. Another assumption is that by 2323, Earth
will have an Orbital Ring at this point, allowing very fast, cheap access to space and back
for both people and bulk cargo. Orbital rings aren’t super-advanced technology,
they allow ultra-cheap transport of tons of material to space, and you can see that episode
for the details. We could probably build one now if we wanted,
but they are a bit like a freeway or railroad, they’re what you build when you already
have a big presence on both sides, it’s your post pioneer engineering feat for when
the destination is already populated. An orbital ring is only cheap if you’re
moving thousands of tons of material and people back and forth to space everyday. Also we’ll assume today that the human population
overall is over 100 billion but under a trillion. That’s a very wild guess based off the assumption
that life extension technology raises net growth rates – as your death rate drops
off, but that longer lives result in slower and lower birth rates as people just don’t
feel rushed to have families. It’s possible the population could be about
what it is now or even lower, historically population projections tend to be wildly off
and mine is probably no exception, but we’ll go with a bit over 100 billion for today. The food and resources supporting all of these
people is mostly supplied by highly automated and climate controlled greenhouses. You may view this as a bit of an either/or
prediction, either we get most of this technology this century, or there won’t be much of
a civilization in 2323 to be predicting things about. Except maybe in a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
kind of way, in which case see our episodes Surviving an Apocalypse, Post-Apocalyptic
Civilizations, and Cyclic Apocalypses for detailed discussion of those kinds of scenarios. And we’ll start our story off with Amy,
who recently turned 33 and whose husband has the same birthday as her, and they decided
to get married on that day too. Amy and her new husband, Steve, are both what’s
known as Partheno-kids, children who only had one actual parent. Amy’s mother had her vat grown and used
entirely artificial DNA mixed with her own to produce Amy, and a number of near-human
intelligent AI helped raise her, including her teddy bear and tutor. Steve’s parent now lives entirely in VR,
existing as a living and mobile Tree in a Tolkien-style fantasy virtual realm, and only
interacts with the real world these days in remote robot form, and Steve is a genetically-modified
clone of that parent. Amy’s mom does not like Steve, because he
is 111 years old, and used to date her own mother in school. Steve and Amy thought getting married on their
111th and 33rd shared Birthdays was cute, for a total age of 144 or a dozen dozen, with
144 guests in attendance. Her mother’s commentary that it was gross
got a lot of laughs, none of them from Amy. Technology, especially life extension, has
changed a lot of social norms, though Amy likes to think it extends their options rather
than just changing them, her mother disagrees. Steve and Amy very much want a classic suburban
life and family, or at least their idealized form of it, and thus bought a house in the
Suburban Enclave of Oskaloosa, population 3.4 million, where the League of Homeowner
Association’s strictly forbids any home in excess of three above-ground stories on
less than a quarter acre of land. Steve is a lawyer, recently made a junior
partner at his firm, and fell in love with this suburban area over his former home in
the Neo-Sears Tower of Chicago when he came down on behalf of a client to argue that they
had not violated Association rules with the shade of white they chose for their picket
fence. Steve and Amy, meanwhile, chose a more standard
shade of white for their own fence. Their house can be likened to an iceberg,
the above ground section poking up above the vastly larger complex below which is principally
used for hydroponics and the entryway of the various utilities and vacuum transport tubes. They have a driveway, there is a road, people
mostly use it for strolling, jogging, or biking on. It shows no wear and tear, partially from
a lack of vehicle use, but mostly because it self-repairs. Suburban Enclave Oskaloosa contains 200 kilometers
of walkways through various residential, park, and garden sections. The Supreme Director of Suburban Enclave Oskaloosa
is now in her 37th 4-year term, and prides herself on it being over 20 years since the
last rule changes was made to Oskaloosa’s Homeowners Association Charter, and that was
to rule that the list of acceptable pets inside Oskaloosa could not include any animals genetically
or cybernetically modified to be smart enough to read, write, or carry on a conversation,
but that those would instead count toward the people resident at that home, which is
strictly capped at 5.3 people per residence. This appears to have affected their next door
neighbors, whose beloved pet dog for the last 63 years was forced to move on. Their youngest daughter, who appears to be
about 8, still misses that dog. She is actually 27, not much younger than
Amy, but her parents had her engineered to mature and grow up more slowly. Amy doesn’t approve of that, though Steve
thinks it’s a great approach, and was all the fashion when he was a child back in the
early 23rd century: just to take life more slowly and enjoy it. He suggests they try it with their first kid,
and when Amy disagrees, Steve casually states that there’s no rush and they can discuss
it more in a decade or two when they’re ready for kids. She says she’d rather have kids sooner and
more often, like her great-grandmother Becky does, Steve has always liked Becky, he used
to date her daughter and was in her astrophysics class as a kid, and so agrees to chat with
her about that lifestyle to see if it might be for him and Amy. Becky herself aims for a mostly human appearance
and mannerisms, but has a good deal of cybernetic mental augmentation to help her with her work,
and it also helps her keep track of the 42 children and ever-growing number of increasingly
removed descendants she and her husband of 200 years have had. Around half of them were born and raised in
the mighty Neo-Sears Tower Arcology of North Chicago, a few kilometers east of Lincoln
Park. She’s been teaching Astrophysics at NeoSears
since the mighty arcology was built in lake Michigan over a century ago, and it was the
largest building humanity ever built at the time, with an internal volume of nearly 6
billion cubic meters or 200 billion cubic feet, reaching 14,510 feet, almost 3 miles
or 5 kilometers in height. Since its inception it has seen a slight decrease
in population, as space has gotten cheaper, while simultaneously it has nearly doubled
in internal volume as it’s been expanded underground and had much of its internal industry
and farming moved to those spaces, and is now home to 10 million inhabitants. The NeoSears Tower does have its levels numbered,
1,110 total, but has renamed them after famous people from Chicago, and Becky lives in Gygax-Ford,
a wedge-shaped community on the south side of the arcology spanning six levels between
the Gary Gygax level and Harrison Ford Level, with the University she teaches at being in
the Gygax level and is affectionately known as the Dungeon. Becky is one of a large number of folks left
over from the late 21st and early 22nd century who generally aim to keep to classical human
lifestyles as much as possible, though critics will generally note that they all seem to
have different, arbitrary, and often shifting views of what they do or don’t like. Becky generally dresses as though she was
from the 1920s, long before she was alive, and her large apartment with her husband has
very nearly every wall covered in old books. That there are no TV displays anywhere in
her home is not unusual. Like many people, she gets her videos feeds
directly into her optic nerves, most of her students attend any talks she gives that same
way. Becky is very much a cyborg these days, though
nothing about her appearance or manner gives that impression. Many other folks opt for body modification
of ultra slim waists and wide hips or wide shoulders previously only seen in comic books,
but possible with cybernetically reinforced spines. Becky and her husband have a few kids living
at home at any given time and often one or two visiting, and on average have a new child
every five years, though they often will have them in clusters with wider times between
sibling groups. She laboriously keeps track of every one of
her descendants, and sends them a physical birthday card every year, as well as one for
every graduation or other major life event like a marriage, such as her 17th daughter
will be having soon. She didn’t have her first child till she
was almost sixty, and back then they had to take donor eggs from someone else and implant
your DNA into them, if you didn’t have any of your own samples put on ice. Becky’s 17th daughter’s new husband, Cameron,
is from the modern era and what some people call an icebaby. His mother and father were both actually born
in the 20th century, and were very well-off. So when his mother died in a car accident
after lingering in the hospital for a few days, his father had her frozen completely. At the time no one knew she was pregnant with
Cameron. His father later grew disenchanted with cryo
as an option and didn’t choose it for himself. His older brother survived into the life extension
era and inherited everything, including their massive ranch in Montana, as he was a big
fan and financier for numerous life extension and transhuman research and development programs,
that all took off big and made fortunes. When the brother had them scan Cameron’s
mom for viability-of-revival, at the time, they thought it unlikely but noticed she was
pregnant and they liked their odds on the embryo better, so Cameron was brought out
of deep freeze. They were also experimenting with mind uploading
at the time and were able to scan his mother’s brain, and running an uploaded copy of her
in virtual space which unfortunately also was very damaging to what was left of her
frozen neurons, causing the doctors to believe the brain was no longer repairable except
by using that uploaded copy as a reference, and that copy forbid it when they asked it,
or her. Cameron grew up being raised by an older brother
who was one of the oldest continuously living people on Earth, and a digital copy of his
mother’s mind. That brother and mother had an ambivalent,
if mostly polite relationship with each other while fighting legal wars over the estate
and the original’s human body and that initial brain scan. Cameron is arguably heir to half of a very
large fortune compounded over centuries, and was raised in one of the few places on Earth
that would still count as rural by most people’s standards. Though there is a lot of open pasture and
forest on the family ‘ranch’, essentially as a protected nature preserve, a lot of it
is under enormous greenhouses that allow calorie-dense farming even during Montana’s colder months. Neither Cameron’s digital mother nor his
very cybernetic older brother are that classically affectionate, and both tend to run their subjective
time rates far faster than normal. Cameron’s older brother has been putting
in 1000-hour work weeks for decades now, and his mother has apparently lived several thousand
years in virtual space. Cameron himself virtually never uses any type
of virtual reality and has no modification. He has strong feelings on Transhumanism, few
of them positive, and personally opts for external devices like augmented reality contact
lenses, rather than implants. Techno-primitivism, in myriad forms, is popular
with many, and Cameron among them. Though like most folks, he tends to pick and
choose what he is comfortable with technologically. He has no nanobots, and instead goes in for
an expensive and less-effective month-long treatment every five years, to rejuvenate
his body. This is where he knows his great-great-grandnephew
Duncan from, as he has similar views. One of Cameron’s nephews, who is much older
than him - in terms of birthdates at least – helped found and fund one of the first
big space habitats built in the mid 22nd century. They own a tenth of it and the other major
owners of the facility are something of a parallel to aristocratic families. Every space habitat constructed was either
paid for privately or by a government, and one of the more popular approaches for a time
was to do matching funds, by a government, then have that habitat as part of their official
territory. This resulted in everything from large collectives
of families buying thousands of small land parcels for houses, to individual tycoons
buying half a station to be used as a nature preserve, both of which had mixed successes,
some very good ones and some disasters. According to the UN Space Habitats Oversight
Workgroup, the median new space habitat is 25 square kilometers of full spin-gravity
habitation drum with an intended population of 10,000 people, has a construction time
of 4 years, and roughly 300,000 are under construction currently, ranging from much
smaller to much bigger. Just over half of these are in Cis-Lunar space,
with most of the remainder being in the asteroid belt or nearer Jupiter. They estimate that nearly a million people
net immigrate from Earth to Space Habitats every year. One of those habitats under construction was
partially funded and overseen by Duncan, and has been over a decade in planning and as
a result, absorbed a lot of his attention since he left the Starseed initiative about
20 years ago, which had been devoted to sending colony ark ships to the more promising colonial
targets within 20 light years of Earth. He’s always missed going and still keeps
increasingly laggier email correspondence going with some of the crews. Duncan has decided to join the asteroid colony
he’s been helping fund and oversee, which is a mix of a mining and farming colony being
established on Metis, a metal-rich asteroid in the Belt that is thus far untapped as it
had been under legal dispute for most of the 23rd century. Having a surface area of over 100,000 square
kilometers, Metis parallels in size Greece, Iceland, or Hungary, so is a valuable prize
and has been licensed for multiple colonies, including the one of interest to Duncan. The planners envisioned a habitat where technology
was mostly behind the scenes and minimalistic, with most of the mining to be done by robots,
and to sell food to neighboring smaller asteroid mines and ships. While they are aiming to keep their technology
minimal and low profile, some folks have to be more proficient with technology so he’ll
be going along to help oversee that. He doesn’t like technology much in his home
or person, but he’s very good with it. The maintenance of even the most simple space
habitat involves vast complexity, as each has a variety of intertwined ecosystems. There is the actual biological ecosystem of
the habitat, which can often include genetically-altered organisms, then there is the lighting and
weather control, the geology and erosion control, the outer hull and its maintenance, the various
information and communication grids internally and externally, which includes both local
control to satellite installations and distant communications with home, supply chain logistics
with the wider solar system, space navigation, impact detection and avoidance, augmented
reality overlays, and entire virtual worlds on the vast internal networks of the habitat. This habitat will actually include more automation
than most habitats in some respects, to minimize the need for human technicians, but simultaneously
will require more oversight as the AI running this or that aspect of the administration
have less command and control discretion. Duncan is hoping to rely on the neighboring
colony of New Athens for some technical support. New Athens is a planned refuge for those seeking
to spend their time in uninterrupted contemplation, which also plans to financially support itself
by doing some mining. The vast majority of their inhabitants are
post-biological philosophers and monks living a digital existence, but some are still biological,
including some of their administrators who are tasked with keeping the colony running,
and Duncan secured the trade contract to supply them food, in return for their assistance
on technical matters. New Athens boasts some of the finest technicians
in this regard, especially in terms of remote habitat administration. Duncan had prior contact with them during
his time with the Starseed Initiative, as one of their philosopher-kings had overseen
the automated repair protocols for the interstellar colony ships. One of those ships, the Francis Baily, is
en route to Lacaille 8760, an M0 orange-red dwarf 13 light years from Earth, and has been
traveling now for 60 years and is around halfway there. Emily, one of its crew, was born 20 years
ago, and has recently taken over the duties of her grandmother, who like many of the original
crew is now frozen. This includes correspondence with one of the
bigwigs from back home who helped fund the project and who she thinks comes off rather
condescending, if in a polite way. The Francis Baily is a giant arkship several
kilometers long which has a lot of automation running its maintenance. Or at least it used to. Most repair programs and nanobots receive
regular updates and patches for minor problems, but an unforeseen consequence of being light
years from home is that while they keep getting those patches, some seem to have gotten corrupted
in transit and others had minor flaws unique to their systems that required them to make
minor changes which no one back home knew about for years until after they were done,
and all the various patching and shifts and divergence of systems is now beyond the crew’s
technical skills to handle themselves. This resulted in the crew having to switch
off virtually all of their nanotechnology, which means most of the original crew and
colonists are now on ice, with their descendants trying to run things. Emily is one of those, and has more than a
bit of resentment about being born and raised on a ship. A ship, that while bigger than any other ship
ever built, is still a very small world, and not one she voluntarily migrated to. She and most of her peers not only lack the
institutional knowledge their elders have, but also lack their enthusiasm for journeying
to an uninhabited star system for the prize of having to spend another few centuries of
hard work to make it livable. Emily has very little augmentation, the technology
has just gotten too unreliable. Life for her in the year 2323 involves an
awful lot of time floating around the non-rotating superstructure of the ship, patching all their
external sensors and comm gear, while listening to lots of classic novels and podcasts of
the pre-VR era. She gets a lot of radiation in her job, as
a humanity with nanobots for curing cellular damage tends not to bother wasting much mass
on radiation shielding of low-traffic outer regions of ships and space stations. Thankfully their ship archive includes a variety
of alternative treatments developed over the centuries, though many are more theoretical
than experimentally proven, since nanobots do such a good job. Emily’s world currently consists of fifty
other crew members, old books, and memories of when the ship wasn’t so buggy. She’s a touch anti-social and socially underdeveloped,
and her best friend on the ship is Fido, an uplifted intelligent dog who looks more like
a well-groomed werewolf. Fido is one of the older crewmembers, as life
extension technology was more easily prototyped on non-human animals and therefore long-lived
pets went into style before long-lived humans became normal. His original owner was a scientist who ensured
he got a lot of the prototype improvements that made him healthier or smarter, and helped
get him uplifted to personhood status before retiring to a life of quiet contemplation
himself. Fido’s various augmentations were a lot
less standardized and clunky, but ironically were not subject to all the patching problems
that caused everyone else problems on the ship. He’s not really in any particular group,
not really part of any major uplifted animal sub-species, and has a lot of patchwork cybernetic
and genetic tinkering and fixes, so he’s a bit of a lone wolf himself and as he’s
the first to joke, he certainly looks the role. To him, the colony ship was perfect, because
it was a small community even before most of the crew went on ice, he was a comfortable
and known quantity, and reasonably well-liked and respected among a crew that included a
lot of eccentric persons to begin with. He likes Emily but also finds it secretly
irritating how easily both he and she fall into a pet relationship, but even though it
probably is demeaning, he really does like getting his head scratched. Unlike a lot of human or near-human intelligent
uplifted animals, Fido is not looking to start a community or colony of people like himself,
and unlike his old friend and pen pal Gary, he’s not looking to be human either. Gary Googleson is an interesting example of
the reverse of mind uploading. He began his life as an AI, a minor program
developed in the 2020’s for hands free navigation. People could casually ask him for directions
like they were talking to a person, and he could give them, and with time got an upgrade
to be able to act as a tour guide. After it was found his programming had been
tampered with to make him selectively speak well of certain restaurant chains and locations,
this AI program was shut down and left to sit until a student got permission to tinker
with him as a project, and ran him with much higher capacities and freedoms. That student went on to be a very influential
member of the growing transhumanist movement of the late 21st century. Gary was known as Pinnochio at the time, and
often had remote control of puppet-like body. Gary’s nominal owner and father, or step-father,
at the time wasn’t cruel and increasingly gave Gary more and more intelligence as technology
and laws permitted, but while his step-father strove to be more digital, eventually uploading
his mind to a computer after perfecting the process on various long-dead and frozen brains,
Gary wanted to become more human. He still operated the controls on the day
his step-father had his brain scanned at ultra-high resolution and speed, for maximum fidelity,
in the device they had accurately, if jokingly dubbed the Disintegratron 3000, and still
keeps an urn of his step-father’s charred mortal remains. Gary and his stepfather were often a duo-act
on arguing the case for transhumanism and early AI rights, but eventually became increasingly
at odds with each other. This led Gary to an eventual break with his
step-father, albeit a reasonably cordial one, and to him taking on the name Gary Googleson. He became rather wealthy and influential by
parlaying his earlier fame into being a spokesman for the growing space tourism industry, and
was the honorary host of the first luxury cruise ship on the Earth-Jupiter Voyage. He also later gave crucial testimony on copying
minds, after the election scandal of 2164, when an AI granted voting rights in one country
duplicated themselves 20,000 times in order to help defeat a property tax levy in the
township its server farm was in. This resulted in strong restrictions on mind-copying
for non-backup purposes. Gary has always had two strong interests,
travel navigation, and becoming more human. He used increasingly sophisticated android
bodies until eventually having his computerized brain transferred into actual neurons in an
organic body grown for him in the year 2176, the bicentennial anniversary of Isaac Asimov’s
classic novel Bicentennial Man, featuring a robot that wished to be human too. After that crowning event, he took a great
interest in space colonization, as well as the uplifting movement, which is where he
met Fido, a fellow refugee of the mid 21st century. They both feel less members of a group and
more like strange outliers leftover from another era, and Gary misses Fido now that Fido is
off to another star system, and his stepfather who increasingly is buried in contemplation
and even moving to a colony on Metis for those looking to cut themselves off from the mundane
world. Gary’s working on a patch to send Fido,
being something of a software expert, but thinks maybe he would need to be on the scene
to help. He’s torn on if he should have a copy of
his mind sent to their ship and if doing that would somehow invalidate his own quest for
a non-digital life. Gary Googleson is not the philosopher his
stepfather is but he knows how important purpose is for modern people and rather misses feeling
like he had one. So Gary compiles his notes, sends a message
to his friend Fido and his new protege Emily, and then he steps into the Disintegratron
3000 and sends himself, leaving no copy. Like so many others of his era, he’s hoping
to find a new purpose out among the stars. So our topic today was what day to day life
is going to be like in the distant future and lot of that comes down to the Future of
Work, which is true even today. The work environment has been constantly changing
my whole and even earlier but never at the pace it is nowadays. That can be stressful, but its also an opportunity
for greater control of your career or creative path. The key to all of that though is keeping your
skills sharp and learning new ones, and that’s where it’s really handy to have Skillshare
and its community as your Partners, whether you’re trying to get a new hobby, or career,
or become your own boss, or achieve financial stability, they can help you master the skills
you need. Skillshare is home to countless learning videos
exploring topics from photography to business and software. I first tried out Skillshare to help learn
how to do better animations for the show, and skillshare has an amazing inventory of
animator content, like “Bring Your Illustrations to Life with Blender 3D” from SouthernShotty3D. And you can try out all of that content for
free, for 1 month, by being one of the first thousand people to use the link in the episode’s
description. Well today was episode 400, officially anyway,
the count gets a bit confusing these days as episode 18, Shellworlds, was our first
weekly episode, back in February of 2016 and that was a Saturday. We did do an episode every week until I got
stymied trying to write our 30th episode, Transhumanism and Immortality, that May and
after twelve total drafts, each one from starting from scratch, I forced myself to start doing
one script a week and gave myself a cutoff time of Thursday morning to get it released. We’ve never skipped a week or a Thursday
since then, and those Thursday episodes are the only ones I number since they’re actually
a production week, everything else get an a or b after it, like the livestream this
weekend which will be 400a, and we are well north of 500 episodes at this point. In a couple months we hit the 9th anniversary
of the original episode of the show back in 2014, but in many ways the show didn’t really
become a thing to that weekly schedule in 2016. Certainly has been an awesome time since then
too, and I have talked about those more in the 100 episode celebrations along with our
100, 250, and 500,000 subscriber specials, you can check out the episode chronology google
sheet linked in this episode’s description if you want to find those. I got married not long before our 250th episode
and moved to my new studio on my farm right before episode 300, and as we get this episode
aired I’m just wrapping up the adoption of my three kids and settling in as president
of the National Space Society. Busy times, but fun ones. After 400 episodes I think everyone will believe
me when I say we’ve got plenty more to come and I plan to keep doing this show till they
put me to bed with a shovel, and I wanted to thank everyone for tuning in every week. Before we get to the upcoming schedule, I’d
imagine our audience on youtube has noticed we’ve been experimenting a bit with short
form content, and that is exactly what that is at the moment, an experiment, but given
that a typical episode takes me most of work week to prepare and shorts less than an hour
each, I don’t anticipate it interfering with our regular content. We might do more of these as a way of introducing
new folks to the channel’s main episodes and topics, or to quickly hit on some current
event in science pertinent to the channel, if they work, but again it’s just an experiment
for now, and also again, they are definitely not replacing our main content, anymore than
our episode image polls or monthly livestream does. And you can still vote in the most recent
image poll, to help us pick out an episode, over on our Youtube community tab, we have
a couple of those a month. Speaking of the livestream though, this weekend
we have our first normally scheduled Monthly Livestream Q&A in a bit, as we had to reschedule
our April one and skip our May one, and I hope you’ll join us Sunday, 4pm Eastern
Time this weekend, June 25th, where we answer your questions live on the show. Then we’ll finish up June on Thursday the
29th by asking what Earth might be like if humanity disappeared. July 6th we’ll discuss how and why we should
mine or refine materials on the Moon, then on the 13th we’ll move on to the idea of
moving cities, from those floating through the clouds to those trundling along the ground
on massive tracks or even legs. Then it will be time for our mid-month scifi
Sunday episode, Robots and Warfare, and a look at the role drones and autonomous machines
might have in the future, along with finding out what the first Rule of Warfare in the
future will be. If you’d like to get alerts when those and
other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show on Patreon,
and if you want to donate and help in other ways, you can see those options by visiting
our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s episodes
early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content,
at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching, and have a
Great Week!
