Colin McInnes is Director of the Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory at the University of Strathclyde. His work includes the investigation of families of novel spacecraft orbits and their mission applications, autonomous control of multiple spacecraft systems and advanced space concepts. His recent work involves exploring new approaches to spacecraft orbital dynamics at extremes of spacecraft length-scale as a means of supporting future space-derived products and services. He has been the recipient of national and international awards including  the Royal Aeronautical Society Pardoe Space Award (2000) and the Ackroyd Stuart Propulsion Prize (2003). More recently he was awarded a Leonov medal by the International Association of Space Explorers in September 2007. Over the last ten years McInnes’ work has been funded by a diverse range of international partners including research councils, agencies, and leading players in the aerospace industry. He currently holds an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council.

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Ayesha Khanna is Founder and Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a research and advisory group focused on human-technology co-evolution and geotechnology. She is a Partner at K2S Advisors which provides strategic and financial advisory services in smart and sustainable cities, technology and infrastructure. She is also a Faculty Advisor at Singularity University and directs the Future Cities group at the London School of Economics. A technology and innovation strategy expert, Ayesha has over ten years of experience advising clients and cities on scenario analysis, product development,  digital branding and customer experience. Her clients have included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, American International Group, and Deutsche Bank. Ayesha is frequently interviewed in the media and was recently featured by the New York Times. She is a regular speaker at industry, marketing, and academic conferences related to emerging technology trends and intelligent cities.

Ayesha is the author of  Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and was series editor of The Complete Technology Guides for Financial Services published by Reed Elsevier. She has also written for diverse publications such as BusinessWeek, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes, Strategy+Business, and Foreign Policy. She also blogs on human technology co-evolution at Big Think. She is currently working on the book The Generative City.

Ayesha is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and co-curator of TEDxGotham. In 2010, she co-chaired the Innovation Advisory Board for the New York City congressional campaign of Reshma Saujani.

Ayesha has a BA (honors) in Economics from Harvard University, an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University and is writing her PhD in Information Systems and Innovation at the London School of Economics.

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It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash. Self-indulgence becomes irrational only when we discount the future too steeply—when we devalue our future selves way below what they should be worth given the chance that those selves will still be around to enjoy what we’ve saved for them. There is an optimum rate of discounting the future—mathematically, an optimum interest rate—which depends on how long you expect to live, how likely you will get back what you saved, how long you can stretch out the value of a resource, and how much you would enjoy it at different points in your life.

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