Early Adapters

Big Picture Science

Science, Technology

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2012

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 Descripción en español First aired December 6, 2010 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
0:04.2	I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.
0:09.6	Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century
0:15.3	and a half after Charles Darwin.
0:17.7	Join us as we meet the passionate researchers and communicators who are expanding our knowledge
0:23.0	and fighting to keep good science in our schools and politics. Subscribe to Safeguarding Sound
0:29.3	Science on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you like to listen.
0:39.0	The French are right.
0:41.0	If there's one thing you can count on, it's change.
0:43.4	No matter what happens, circumstances will change forcing us to adapt.
0:47.6	How's that for a broad statement?
0:49.3	And there are some sweeping changes afoot.
0:51.2	The planet is changing, population is is increasing. Temperatures are rising.
0:54.9	Arable land is disappearing. So are other natural resources. But then again, technological innovation
1:00.2	is coming at us fast. Maybe there'll be a technological fix for a changing planet. And what about our own
1:05.8	adoption of technology? Remember landline phones? Didn't think so. Now there are cell phones,
1:10.9	BlackBerrys, iPods, iPhones, Skype, a techno-onslot. How are we adapting? I'm Molly Bentley.
1:16.9	And I'm Seth Shostak. In this hour of Big Picture Science, some thoughts on how we humans move
1:22.6	with the times. Let's begin by going to the Big Apple.
1:31.1	I'm walking down 8th Avenue in New York City.
1:39.6	Cars are going by, and rising above me is the product of 100 years, least of architectural and engineering ingenuity.
1:41.0	It's hard to say.
	...

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