Exploring Possibilities

R. Buckminster Fuller famously predicted that technological advancement will allow us to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” So how is that working out for […]

Phil and Stephen kick off the holiday season with a special Thanksgiving-week discussion of one of this program’s most enduring topics: what we have to be thankful for. The list is probably a lot longer […]

Somewhere between Cygnus the Swan and Lyra the Harp sits a star with a big secret. A whole lot of something is orbiting that star, and it is unlike anything astronomers have seen before. Is it possible […]

Phil and Stephen demonstrate the World Transformed Pareto Optimism Principle with four stories that speak to an amazingly bright future and one that goes in a very different direction. The Good News: Vertical Pink Farms and […]

Phil  and Stephen   return to one of their favorite topics — The Adjacent Possible — “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all […]

How do we know whether an idea is so crazy that it just might work or so crazy that we shouldn’t go near it with a 10-foot pole? Phil and Stephen discuss a wide variety […]

There are those who believe that they are not living in the same universe they used to. They have moved from one reality to another. Their evidence for this fundamental shift in reality? The spelling […]

First it was a planet that wasn’t there. Then it was a planet. Then it got demoted. Some people were okay with that; some were kind of ticked. But whatever it is — planet, dwarf […]

Phil and Stephen discuss a wide range of future-impacting topics all originating right here in our own neighborhood. Topics include: Tiny probes going to Mars — No they aren’t “Nano” probes, but they still might […]

Some pundits are saying that a complete reset of the the economy is in order or is perhaps even inevitable. Phil and Stephen argue that nobody is thinking nearly big enough, or long-term enough about re-setting […]

A decade and a half ago, WebVan, a same-day grocery delivery service, crashed and burned in what was probably the most spectacular failure of the original dot-com bust. Many lessons were learned from the Webvan story, […]

Think you know the future? Well, think again. Phil and Stephen present a list of 10 potentially startling, mystifying, and some downright shocking things that are in your future, or the world’s future, that you […]

Where are the possibilities? Everywhere. All around us. Phil and Stephen explore a grab-bag of possibilities: Finding success through enabling failure. Creating the roadmap for post-scarcity. Awarding a prize for the biggest contribution to the datafication […]

Phil and Stephen have done more than 400 podcasts about the future over the years. Tonight marks the 100th show since this program changed its name from FastForward Radio to The World Transformed. So, 100 […]

Next year is not only the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Back to the Future, it is the year that Marty and Doc travel to at the end of the film. And it […]

From a recent TechCrunch piece by Christian Cantrell: This is only one example of how technology has a tendency to self-propagate; to use humans as a vector to create copies and mutations and derivatives of itself; to […]

Phil and Stephen examine the mysteries of time encoded in living beings all around us. What do present-dayspecies tell us about life in the distant past? And there may be deeper implications. Could the presence […]

What are these mysterious organisms living on the hull of the International Space Station? How did they get there? And how can they survive in space? Is this evidence that life on Earth originated elsewhere? Or […]

We look at a lot of scenarios for what might happen in the future — cool technological developments, major advances in science, new evolutionary developments for humans and for other species on this planet — but are […]

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Phil and Stephen’s collaboration. This week they look back over a decade of tracking the future. Here’s a small sample of what were talking about 10 years ago: Success: […]