On Tuesday, the podcast that I host and produce started its second season. The show is called Flash Forward, and it’s weird and fun and surprising. Every episode takes on a possible future, from the terrifying likely (antibiotic resistance) to the completely absurd (space pirates drag a second moon to earth). Every episode starts with a little radio drama, a trip to the future we’re looking at. These range from future commercials, documentaries from the future, scenes from labs, conversations between space pirates, voicemails and more. (Many of these voices are actually recorded by fans who volunteer to act out parts each week). Then we talk to experts about how that future might really go down. Those experts include historians, engineers, scientists, futurists, anthropologists, science fiction authors and more.
The second season is going to be fun, but I wanted to take this chance to reflect on the first season. Together, we traveled to twenty three different futures, everything from artificial wombs, to drones, to robot UN secretaries banning weapons, to an evil mega company building so many wind turbines that they actually alter the climate, to the discovery of an alien probe that is almost exactly like the Voyager probe humans sent out in the 1970’s.
Some people really like our dark and scary episodes: we talked about an end of antibiotic effectiveness, and about what it would be like if we applied life-extension technology to prisoners. Other people preferred the sillier ones, like what might happen if we had a second moon, or if the Earth stopped rotating around the sun, or a supernova consumed us.
But here I want to talk about the four most popular episodes, and what I think made them work. Yes, this is shameless self promotion, get over it.
1. The Day the Internet Broke: What would happen if the Internet suddenly went away? And what would it take to make that happen?
This is arguably our weirdest episode — we construct a future in which the entire world is totally cut off from the internet, but not because of any huge catastrophic event or disaster. It’s easy to think of things that might cut off connectivity: a massive series of earthquakes, nuclear war, a zombie apocalypse. But these are all things that would so fundamentally change our lives that the lack of internet would be a minor afterthought. I wanted to try and imagine a future that had everything else that most people have now: working roads, governments, grocery stores, but that also didn’t have the internet. Thankfully, guests Finn Brunton and Laine Nooney were on board to try and imagine a couple of ways that might happen.
I think this episode works because so many of us have tried to imagine a world without the internet. Sometimes that imagining is in the form of wistfulness: Wouldn’t it be nice to live without constant emails, or social media accounts, or Twitter fights? Other times it’s in youthful disbelief: Can you imaging having to do x, y or z before the internet? Either way it’s a thing I think many people imagine disappearing (admittedly not everyone, but the internet is rapidly becoming ubiquitous globally). But we can also safely bet on it sticking around. There’s no real risk that the internet is going away, unless your government shuts it down or there’s a huge global catastrophe. Which, again, makes the inability to trade stocks or post on Tumblr, minor issues.
2. The Supernova Next Door: What would happen if one a giant supernova happened nearby?
The first thing to know about this scenario is that it’s not something to sweat about. As our guests Katie Mack and Phil Plait explain, there’s no star nearing supernova-state close enough to us to get worried about. Which makes this, once again, a nice, safe, scenario to consider. And that’s why I think people like it: Even though the actual results of this one are catastrophic, the chances of it happening are so remote that it’s a fun and interesting thing to think about.
3. Greetings: What would happen if a probe that is extremely similar to the Voyager probes that the United States sent out in the 1970’s showed up in our galaxy?
Once again, never going to happen. At least not like this — although depending on who you ask, encountering another intelligent life form might be possible. I personally liked this scenario because it puts a little bit of a spin on the classic “first contact” scenarios that always seem to result in either utopia or horrific war or both. People love first contact scenarios for a lot of reasons (some of which we cover in the episode). But I think some of the reason is that these scenarios allow us to put a fictional lens to our own reactions and politics. For most people, there’s little anxiety about actually encountering aliens.
4. Winded: What would happen if a company put up so many wind turbines that they actually changed the climate on Earth?
Again, here, the number of wind turbines you’d have to put into the atmosphere to really impact the climate is gigantic — far more than it would take to power the entire planet. So we’ve got a scenario that lets us sidle up to evil corporations and climate change without having to tangle with a real example of how those things interact.
Notice anything? All of these futures are highly unlikely. They’re things that let us think about people and culture and politics without having to really face them head on. Episodes about real challenges we’re facing now, or will soon — antibiotic resistance, head injury, the prison industrial system, extinction — weren’t nearly as popular.
I get that science fiction allows people to explore and tangle with things that are hard and uncomfortable. I get that considering impossible scenarios is far more fun than considering scenarios that actually impact people’s lives today. As I’ve written before, there’s a good amount of escapism in science fiction. But in my opinion the best science fiction eventually steers us back to the things humans will face, that we do have to deal with.
This season I’ll do these outlandish futures of course — our first episode is about a world where the whole planet goes face blind. But I also want to tackle the other side too, problems and scenarios that are a little harder, a little darker, a little more real. And I hope listeners will join me for those episodes too.
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