October 5, 2017 8:58 pm

Friday, Step into the Future with Chris Hadfield and Company

Can anyone really know the future? Well, even if we can’t, we can certainly talk about what it might be like. This week on StarTalk Radio we welcome Chris Hadfield, former astronaut and ISS Commander, to the hosting chair as he leads our StarTalk Live! panel from inside Future Con.

He’s joined by comic co-host Scott Adsit, biorobotics engineer Katherine Pratt, mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudu, and comedian Maeve Higgins to discuss how we’ll engineer the future and what technology will lead us further out into the universe.

You’ll hear discussion on human exploration – our journey from Magellan to the International Space Station – and why Chris believes that the urge to explore is within all of us. He also gives us an example of that urge manifesting itself when he was doing a spacewalk that took him “through” the Northern Lights.

You’ll learn about the technological problems that we’ll need to overcome to safely journey to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Our panel also discusses the new class of NASA astronauts, some of which might be the first people making the journey to the red planet.

This episode also features more discussion on advances in technology in the medical world. Plus, our panel discusses their favorite superheroes, and – it’s not every day I get to say this – theoretical physicist and science rock star Stephen Hawking appears on stage via holographic projection.

And this is only Part One!

Please join us tomorrow night for StarTalk Live! from Future Con: Engineering the Future (Part 1) 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