October 12, 2017 8:18 pm

Friday, Go Back to the Future as We Wrap up StarTalk Live! from Future Con

This week on StarTalk Radio, we rejoin our panel at Awesome Con/Future Con with Chris Hadfield, former astronaut and ISS Commander, comic co-host Scott Adsit, biorobotics engineer Katherine Pratt, mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudu, comedian Maeve Higgins, and, by holographic projection, Stephen Hawking, as we continue our discussion on how to engineer our way into the future.

The action picks up with Chris giving a little behind-the-scenes details about his viral performance of “Space Oddity” aboard the ISS, including what David Bowie himself thought of his rendition.

The conversation then turns towards technology: the transfer of tech from Earth to space, the influences of space technology on the transparent metals industry, and the legacy of spin-off technology derived from space exploration, like GPS.

You’ll also hear about building better engines to take us off-world. Our panel, and the entire science community, agrees that to explore further out into the universe, we’re going to need bigger, better, more powerful engines.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking also returns to the stage, via holographic projection, to talk about simulation vs. reality, nuclear weapons, and the idea of world government.

All that, plus, our panel takes live fan-asked Cosmic Queries from our wonderful crowd at Future Con.

This was our second year at Awesome Con, and everybody’s first year at Future Con. We really had a great time in Washington DC, and we hope those in the audience had a similar experience. If you’re listening to this and want to know what it’s like to experience StarTalk live, be on the lookout for the next StarTalk Live! show!

Please join us tomorrow night for StarTalk Live! from Future Con: Engineering the Future (Part 2) at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too. And remember that you can also catch next week’s StarTalk Radio episode one week early on TuneIn, at tunein.com/startalk.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen