Correction: An earlier version incorrectly identified Breanna Draxler as Breanna Daxler. This article has been corrected.
So there’s contemporary reality, which is already surprising (“Five body parts you can make with 3-D printers,” reported by Forbes.com).
And there’s science fiction, which leapfrogs past decades of incremental study to reimagine a bright shiny — or bleak, depending on your point of view — new world (“Ex Machina,” “Humans,” “AI,” etc., etc., etc.).
Something in between is the subject of “Futuropolis,” a new biweekly podcast from Popular Science magazine. In 15-to-25-minute segments, PopSci editors Breanna Draxler and Lindsey Kratochwill talk over what everyday life might be like in the foreseeable future. In “Microgravity Dinners,” they eat astronaut food (“Oh, God, it’s crunchy, it’s chewy; this is supposed to be ice cream?”) and interview David Irvin of Systems and Materials Research, which has a NASA grant to come up with better alternatives; he describes a 3-D printer that can make a pizza, with layers of dough, tomato sauce, cheese.
An episode called “The Programmable Pooch” considers what we will look for in robotic pets; “Finding Mr. (Swipe) Right” examines how we will meet potential soul mates and fall in love; and you can guess what “Robot You Can Drive My Car” is about.
The format is casual, and its questions are usually more interesting than the answers. For example, talking with Bill Smart, an associate professor of robotics at Oregon State University, the reporters discuss the end of robotic pets’ “lives”: When one breaks, will its heartbroken owner want to download its memory into an identical replacement? Or would that tech-savvy owner cheerfully upgrade to the latest iPet iteration?
One entertaining addition is predictions from long-ago editions of Popular Science — such as an 1893 article noting that the requirement for robotic pets would be “if it is a bird, that it should sing or talk” and Wernher von Braun’s 1965 prediction that astronauts would dine on filet mignon.
The podcasts are available on iTunes, SoundCloud and several podcast apps, and at the Popsci.com Web site.