After nearly ten years of blogging here at The Speculist and more than five years of podcasting under the name FastForward Radio, we will be moving both the blog and the radio show to worldtransformed.com and, going forward, The World Transformed will be the name both of this blog and our radio show.

Why the change?

For a long time we’ve wanted to get the blog and the show under a common banner, but we never thought “The Speculist” was a particularly good name for  a radio show. On the other hand, “FastForward Radio” is a good name for a blog only if it exists just to support the show, but that was never the idea. The blog and the site are both here to support a common set of ideas.

Anyway, we don’t own the domain FastForward Radio and we’re old fashioned about wanting to own our domain.

Of course, as long-time FFR listeners know, our two landmark special series (in 2009 and 2011) went by the name The World Transformed. That’s a domain we DO own, and frankly it’s just too good a name and domain to let sit around for months or years at a time.

Thus the change.

This doesn’t mean that The Speculist name is gone. The World Transformed will be both a publication and audio production of Speculist Media. And that isn’t just a sentimental thing. We’ll be doing some interesting things under that name in the months to come. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: We have put the show announcement up for Thursday’s End of the World Special on FastForward Radio.

As we all know, the last day on the ancient Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012. To commemorate this historic landmark, FastForward Radio will be doing a special Countdown to the End of the World show starting at 11 PM EST Thursday, December 20.

We’ll be sharing more details about the show over the next couple of weeks, but for now we can tell you that our good friend science comedian Brian Malow will be joining us to ring in the apocalypse, along with special guest host P.J. Manney.

On the show, we will announce the winners of the What are your plans for the end of the world? contest, which you can enter by leaving a comment below telling us…what your plans are for the end of the world. We will be sharing some of the most creative answers on the show. There will be several prize winners with a very special grand prize: an Apple iPod fully loaded with the entire FastForward Radio series — all 250+ shows!

Entries must be received by 3:00 PM PST on Thursday December 21 2012

Also, we’ll be making a huge announcement about the future of The Speculist and FastForward Radio.

Don’t miss out. The end of the world is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a deal. (At best!)

UPDATE: Reader Barbara Riggs points out that we were inadvertently showing an Aztec calendar. How embarrassing! Corrected.

Author Ramez Naam joins Phil and Stephen to discuss his new transhuman thriller, Nexus. How plausible is such a technology, and how real are the opportunities (and threats) it might represent? Tune in and find out.

Wednesday, 19 December 2012 7:00 PM PST / 10 PM EST

The Top 10 Hot Topics About the Future

The Three Big Changes Everybody Wants to Discuss

Finding Resources to Support Your New Group

Finding Members and Getting Started

Be there:

Wednesday, 12 December 2012 7:00 PM PST / 10 PM EST

Join us

Wednesday, 5 December 2012 7:00 PM PST / 10 PM EST

About Our Guest

Philosopher, singularitarian, infopreneur and a fellow party animal Nikola Danaylov was born in Bulgaria.

In 1998 Nikola moved to Canada where he completed an HBA in Political Science, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Toronto plus an MA in Political Science at York University.

It was at York University that Nikola got deeply interested in the Technological Singularity and wrote a research paper titled “Hacking Destiny: Critical Security at the Intersection of Human and Machine Intelligence.” After university Danaylov started SingularityWeblog.com and the popular Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.

During the summer of 2011 Nikola completed the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University and returned home to Toronto, Canada where he lives with his beloved wife Julie.

Think of the many things you can do right now, right where you are (wherever that happens to be.) A few examples:

In the first of a three-part series,Phil and Stephen discuss The Possibility Explosion, one of three radical transformations that are reshaping our world and our lives.

Think of the many things you can do right now, right where you are (wherever that happens to be.) A few examples:

• Read virtually any book that’s ever been in print
• Send and receive an unlimited number of messages with people all over the world
• Take any of thousands of free college courses
• Place an order for virtually any imaginable product or service
• Listen to an amazingly wide assortment of music
• Watch any of thousands of movies and TV shows
• Write a paragraph or an article or a book and share it with dozens, hundreds, or millions of people
• Record and distribute music
• Apply for a job (or dozens or thousands of jobs)
• Launch a business
• Produce and distribute a movie or TV show

How many of those things could you do instantly (and from anywhere) 5, 10, or 50 years ago? And what does this tell us about what we’ll be able to do 5, 10, and 50 years from now?

The possibilities are…explosive!

Join us:

Wednesday, 28 November 2012 7 PM PST / 10 PM PST

If we should look to the future with anticipation, what should our attitude be towards the present (and the past?) Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon make the case for gratitude — with a long list of items we’ll soon be grateful for.

Topics discussed include:

Nose-cell transplant allows paralyzed dog to walk

Nanoparticle halts multiple sclerosis in mice

Can technology create utopia?

3-D Printers and Regenerative Implants

Civilization and the Survival of the Sexiest

Fighting Fembots

This is it — the big 250th edition of FastForward Radio on BlogTalkRadio.

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon reflect on what got them started doing FastForward Radio, how their thinking about the future has changed over the years, and what’s next for  the show.

How are human beings exceptional? Compare a human being to a turtle. Just to make it interesting, we will exclude obvious physical and cognitive differences between the two species for the time being. It still leaves some really interesting questions.

1. How much has the typical life of the typical turtle changed over the past 50,000 years? How much has the typical life of the typical human being changed over that same period? (Interestingly, if the turtle’s life has changed at all, it’s probably due to something that humans have done.)

2. How much is the typical life of the typical turtle likely to change over the next couple hundred years? How much is the typical life of the typical human likely to change over that same period? (Once again, if the turtle’s life changes at all…)

3. How different would the world be if all turtles went extinct 10,000 years ago? How different would the world be if all human beings went extinct 10,000 years ago?

You can substitute any species for turtles and the results will be pretty much the same. We’re exceptional. Putting aside any arguments about the existence of the soul or a special role for human beings as defined by religious belief, there is still no getting around the rapidly changing nature of humanity or its undeniable impact on…everything:

We are transformers of the world, but beyond that, we are the transformation of the world. We are the making and remaking of everything around us. We are the defining, and redefining, of every concept that our minds can entertain.

Please do read the whole thing.

(Turtle image via Wikimedia Commons.)

The cover of MIT Technology Review shows Buzz Aldrin, second man to set foot on the moon, with a caption reading: “You promised me Mars colonies. Instead I got Facebook.”

Have we really stopped solving the big problems?

On a special Thursday evening FastForward Radio, Phil and Stephen examine whether human achievement has peaked.

Will we ever go back to the moon or beyond?

Will we ever make progress on the great challenges humanity faces — war, poverty, disease, the environment?

Will we ever live in a “City of the Future?”

Tune in and find out!

Are human beings better or more important than other living things?

Should we be just as concerned about the lives of animals as we are our fellow humans?

Woud the world be better off without humans?

Phil  and Stephen  discuss the case for human exceptionalism and explain why humanity has a unique role to play in determining the destiny of all life on earth, the earth itself, and the entire universe.

Nobody is going to fall off.

In the end, they are all still going to be rich and they are all still going to be leading very comfortable lives.

This public service ad for Water Is Life makes the point, using Haitians to recite tweets delivered by folks living in the developed world, that quite a few of us lead lives with training wheels these days:

(The kid talking about pickles really gets to me. I don’t know why.)

A true Utopian believes we can have a world in which all problems will be solved. This is nonsense. I believe that in the future people — and I mean everybody, including people who currently live in the kind of conditions shown in the video — will face tremendous, momentous, devastating problems–most of which would be incomprehensible to us today. But if we could understand them, they would sound every bit as trivial as “I hate it when my leather seats aren’t heated” sounds to these Haitians.

Goldman is a good example of a new key player in organizations: the “data scientist.” It’s a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few years. (It was coined in 2008 by one of us, D.J. Patil, and Jeff Hammerbacher, then the respective leads of data and analytics efforts at LinkedIn and Facebook.) But thousands of data scientists are already working at both start-ups and well-established companies. Their sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact that companies are now wrestling with information that comes in varieties and volumes never encountered before. If your organization stores multiple petabytes of data, if the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a “mashup” of several analytical efforts, you’ve got a big data opportunity.

Not as sexy, apparently

Much of the current enthusiasm for big data focuses on technologies that make taming it possible, including Hadoop (the most widely used framework for distributed file system processing) and related open-source tools, cloud computing, and data visualization. While those are important breakthroughs, at least as important are the people with the skill set (and the mind-set) to put them to good use. On this front, demand has raced ahead of supply. Indeed, the shortage of data scientists is becoming a serious constraint in some sectors. Greylock Partners, an early-stage venture firm that has backed companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, and Workday, is worried enough about the tight labor pool that it has built its own specialized recruiting team to channel talent to businesses in its portfolio. “Once they have data,” says Dan Portillo, who leads that team, “they really need people who can manage it and find insights in it.”

We’ve heard for years that one of the biggest challenges organizations face is getting a handle on all their data, getting their data under control. Full disclosure: I used to do product marketing for a database company, so I have in fact been saying things like that for years. It was true years ago and is even more true today.

The stakes are higher today, however, not just because there’s more data — although there is — but because of the myriad possibilities that lie within that data. Huge, game-changing market opportunities are waiting to be tapped; potential business-killing trends are beginning to emerge. Knowing how to look for these possibilities, finding them and defining them, understanding them and making them understandable to others within the organization — these are skills whose value it would be difficult to overestimate.

Individuals who possess that skill set, who can look at data and create working scenarios from it, can pretty much write their own ticket. But is there really anything sexy about it?

Okay. Maybe.

UPDATE: Equal time. Apparently this guy isn’t as sexy, either, unless he happens to be a data scientist. For that matter, we don’t know that the angel shown above isn’t one.

Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic feat of high-altitude skydiving may be more than just an impressive accomplishment. Is it a signpost on the way to a future in which we are all Baumgartners?

Phil  and Stephen  discuss how balloons in space, cardboard bicycles, underground parks, and other developments show us a world of nearly limitless possibilities: one in which ourown amazing feats may be limited only by…our own imaginations.

Plus: Scientific proof that we’re living in a computer simulation?

And: A voyage to Alpha Centauri.

Also: Other superfantastic, speculicious topics!

His name is Joseph Kittinger. He made his astounding leap from the US Air Force experimental craft Excelsior III some 52 years ago,  on August 16, 1960. You may have seen Kittinger recently (or at least heard his voice), as he was in charge of mission control communications for Felix Baumgartner’s successful space jump — which finally, after all these years, broke Kittinger’s records for skydiving altitude and skydiving speed.

It’s less likely that you’ve heard of Nick Piantinida, who broke Kittinger’s record for high-altitude ballooning on February 6, 1966, reaching 123,500 feet in his balloon named Strato Jumper II. Unfortunately, Piantinida’s attempts at beating Kittinger’s skydiving record were unsuccessful; he was severely injured in his final attempt and died shortly thereafter. But his ballooning record held for some 46 years, until earlier this week when Baumgartner topped him by less than a mile.

All of which raises an interesting question about Baumgartner’s amazing achievement: why now? Why has it taken all these years to add 4500 feet to Piantinida’s altitude and 115 miles per hour to Kittinger’s speed to finally deliver the ultimate, supersonic, feat of skydiving?

The reason it’s taken so long is that we’ve been waiting for someone willing to put up the money–someone willing to make it happen. I have no doubt that the Air Force could have broken Kittinger’s record decades ago if they had seen any point in doing so. But they aren’t in the business of performing crazy stunts and setting records. Red Bull, on the other hand, is a huge promoter of extreme sports. They are all about the crazy stunts. In this project they saw an outstanding opportunity to build awareness of their brand, so they were happy to pony up the cash needed to make Baumgartner’s jump possible.

Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing. As de-industrialization continues to push capabilities that once belonged only to large governments into the hands of smaller enterprises (think Red Bull in this story, but also think SpaceX) or even individuals, the relentless compounding of improvements opens up all kinds of possibilities. As with the introduction of the cardboard bicycle, most of the elements needed to make Baumgartner’s jump possible were already in place. All that was needed were a few supporting bits of technology and the will to make it happen. 

The will is the real clincher. If you have enough of that, you can get the technical stuff working. In this world there has always been a lot more will to do extraordinary things than capability to support that will. What we are witnessing today is the early stages of a capability explosion. This will inevitably lead to a possibility explosion — so many people doing so many extraordinary things that we will have to constantly recalibrate  what we mean by “extraordinary.”

How long before anyone who wants to can recreate Baumgartner’s amazing jump? And how long before some corporation or individual recreates Neil Armstrong’s giant leap?