Big Picture Science for 04/23/12 - Early Adapters

Big Picture Science - Early Adapters

ENCORE The times are a’changing – rising temperatures, growing population, and new technology coming at us faster than a greased cheetah.

So how will humans respond? Find out about future farming in the city – your vegetables might be grown in downtown, hi-rise greenhouses. Also, a population expert tells us how our planet can cope with billions more people, and the man who invented the term ‘cyberspace’ describes what the future might hold for the techno-savvy.

Darwinian evolution takes a long time to accommodate to new environments. But Homo sapiens can beat that rap by wielding the right technology – and becoming early adapters.

Guests:

• Dickson Despommier – Emeritus professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, author of The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century
• William Gibson – Author, most recently, of Zero History
• Joel Cohen – Mathematician and biologist at Rockefeller University
• David DeGusta – Paleoanthropologist at the Paleoanthropology Institute in California

Permalink: http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Early_Adapters

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://radio.seti.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.

First aired December 6, 2010