#44 Space 2.0: A spacefaring species

Technoculture podcast explores how digital technology influences our lives, our experiences, and ultimately what it means to be human today. Now, if we agree that the social and technological environment influences or shapes who we are and how we interact with each other, what will it mean to be human in the metaverse? My guest Sam Vaknin has a very interesting theory about the transition from narcissistic cities to a psychopathic metaverse. Sam Vaknin is the author of "Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited", a former visiting professor of psychology, and currently on the faculty of CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies).

This episode is about collaborative couples in science, i.e. men and women who work in science and who are partners, husband and wife, sometimes lovers, etc. My guest, Annette Lykknes, is professor of chemistry education and historian of chemistry at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Science as we know it today is an institutionalized social practice, with a mechanism designed to distribute trust and credibility. Trust IN science and trust WITHIN science are two dimentions of the same question that allow the process of investigation and discovery to keep moving forward. If you thought that science doesn't need trust, because it's all about the facts, think again.

Extending the human life with science and technology will re-shape society. It is not just a matter of living longer and healthier. We need to prepare for the consequences of longevity, from the job market to housing and banking, from politics to psychological well-being, Dmitry talks about his vision on the longevity that awatis humanity - very soon.

Space travel may not be an impossible dream anymore. Access to a diverse pool of talents is a great asset, and ESA's new cohort of astronauts reflects this, with the first parastronaut program. With this interview, I wanted to learn more about the selection process, how the requirements are evolving, but also to debunk some of the romanticized views that many of us may have of the astronaut's job.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge, MA. An MIT-trained physicist, Yaneer combines quantitative foundation in physics, computer science and mathematics with computer simulations and high dimensional data analysis to study collective behaviors and social challenges, with the aim of informing better policies. In the past year and a half, he has single-mindedly focused on COVID-19 with his initiative https://endcoronavirus.org. During this interview, he talks about the science of complex systems and how it can be applied to the current pandemic. He clarifies some very interesting concepts like "lockdown", which he claims was largely misunderstood, the relationship between big data and problem solving, and the variable that matters the most in defeating the pandemic: geography.

Mastering is a crucial step in the production of a music record, but not everybody knows what it is. What does a mastering engineer do? I asked the best of the best, in his studio in Hollywood. Peter explains what mastering entails and where it comes from. And we glance at the future of mastering, with Artificial Intelligence applications.

What does it mean to study the future? Nobody can predict the future. But we can look at emergent signals, signals of change, that reveal where we are today and enable us to be active creators of our collective future. Toshi Anders Hoo is the Director of the Emerging Media Lab (EML) at Institute for the Future (IFTF). The Institute for the Future is about empowering the world "to think more creatively, strategically about the future. And that means everyone."

John Chowning means FM synthesis to everyone in the audio community worldwide. But the man is no less extraordinary than his discovery. Co-founder of one of the most important centres for music research in the world, CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford University, John speaks about his approach to composition, and a lifelong quest for the "artistic gesture."

José V. Siles is a radio frequency engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. His research area is known as plantary science, i.e. the study of the celestial bodies that orbit stars, with a particular focus on our own solar system. José and his colleagues are trying to understand the life cycle of stars, how they form, how they die... because stars may hold the answer to the question: where do we come from?