Home Episode Mons Voyage

Mons Voyage

June 6, 2017

This episode, we go on another vacation! Can you tell I need a vacation? Anyway, back to the episode. What would it be like if you could hop on a space cruise ship, and take a trip to Mars?

This is a special episode because our little future intro is actually two real people playing real parts. Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich are the authors of a new book called Vacation Guide to the Solar SystemThe book is a spinoff of their long-running project the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a project of Guerilla Science and a place where people could really come inside and ask about trips to other planets. And they take us on a very fun tour of what you could do, as a tourist, to Mars.

Along with Olivia and Jana, this episode features Ben Longmier, a former rocket scientist, and Rebecca Boyle, a science writer who has a true love for Mars. 

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to intergalactic travel, so in this episode we focus specifically on tourism. Not colonization, or research, or any of the other things that you could potentially try to do. And we’re also going to focus on a single planet, just because trying to cover all the planets would be really hard. So what would it be like, to take a vacation to Mars. Just… a trip for fun. Like going to Cancun. But instead of snorkeling you hike up Olympus Mons? Listen to find out!

Further reading:

Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky.

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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TRANSCRIPT

Rose: Hello and welcome to Flash Forward! I’m Rose and I’m your host. Flash Forward is a show about the future. Every episode we take on a specific possible… or not so possible future scenario. We always start with a little field trip to the future, to check out what’s going on, then we teleport back to today to talk to experts about how that world we just heard might really go down. Got it? Great!

This year we’re starting in the year 2155.

 

[door chime]

 

Jana Grcevich: Welcome to the intergalactic travel bureau. I’m Jana, so I’ll be your travel agent. So what do you like to do on vacation?

 

Rose: I like to scuba dive.

 

Jana: Oh OK. We have some excellent scuba diving locales. Yeah, if you would like to travel to Jupiter there is an excellent moon there called Europa. And there’s scuba diving there. It has a layer of ice that’s, you know, 20 kilometers thick or even thicker. And you can drill down through and go scuba diving down there, and everybody’s always looking for life down there and you know we won’t guarantee anything, but you can try for it. Anything else you like to do.

 

Rose: I like to snowboard.

 

Jana: Excellent. So have you ever gone low gravity snowboarding.

 

Rose: No….

 

Jana: OK. So it’s a very different experience. The thing is is you’re not going to be snowboarding on regular ice. You might want to snowboard on Nitrogen ice on Pluto, for example. And it’s one tenth Earth’s gravity so it takes a little while to get up speed. But the nice thing is is there’s very little atmosphere so you can really get up to speed as long as you’re willing to wait that out and keep going down the mountains. So I’d recommend the Hillary mountains on Pluto for skiing or snowboarding.

 

Olivia Koski: I hear there’s also a really good sandboarding on Mercury.

 

Jana: Oh yeah. A lot of people don’t think about that.

 

Olivia: Yeah. Yeah there’s good good sands on Mercury to snowboard down; or ski. The challenge with Mercury is the sun, of course. It’s very close to the sun; the sun will fry you instantly if you’re caught outside during the day. So I hope that you enjoy night snowboarding.

 

Jana: Beautiful view of the stars. But you’re definitely going to need to stay on the night side if you prefer staying alive.

 

Rose: I do.

 

Olivia: It’s risky out there. It’s risky out there to take a space vacation.

 

Jana: We definitely don’t guarantee that you’ll come back alive but we’ll do our best.

 

Olivia: And it’s totally worth it. Totally worth it.

 

Rose: So this future is one in which we can travel, as tourists, to other planets. There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to intergalactic travel. So in this episode I’m going to focus specifically on tourism. Not colonization, not research, or any of the other things that you could potentially try to do. And we’re also going to focus on a single planet, just because trying to cover all the planets would be really hard and would take a long time.

 

So what would it be like, to take a vacation to Mars. Just… a trip for fun.

 

Jana: Excellent. Well, we have a great location for hiking; its Mars…

 

Rose: It turns out our travel agents from the top of the show, are actually real space travel agents. Sort of.

 

Olivia: I’m Olivia Koski

Jana: And I’m Jana Grcevich

 

Rose: Olivia and Jana are the authors of a book called Vacation Guide to the Solar System, which comes out today. The day this podcast airs, June 6th. The book takes you through your possible tourism options for all the planets in our solar system. And it’s a really delightful way to learn a lot of cool stuff about the planets.

 

The book is an offshoot of this project that Olivia and Jana came up with years ago called the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, which is a place where people could really come inside and ask about trips to other planets.

 

Jana: So people would come in, and we;d talked to them about what they like to do on vacation and what their favorite occasions in the past were. And then we’d just adapt that to the solar system and talk to them about moons and planets that they might like to visit.

 

Olivia: So if they’re more interested in warm locales we would talk about going to the inner solar system, to planets such as Mercury, Venus. If they preferred skiing or more Arctic locations, we could plan trips to Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, places like that in the outer solar system.

 

Jana: If they like beaches, we send them to Titan because it has methane and ethane beaches, which are 300 degrees below zero, but…

 

Rose: And they actually set up physical locations for the Intergalactic Travel Bureau so people could come in and get travel advice like we heard at the top of the show.

 

Olivia: And we always provide postcards from space so people can send a postcard from the moon, Mars, Pluto, Saturn, anywhere that they would like to go or would like to go in their minds.

 

Jana: Yeah, so usually people write out the postcard as if they’re reading it from the place and we won’t tell anyone that they didn’t actually visit Mars.

 

Rose: I’ve been to a couple of these, and they are very cool. So if there is an Intergalactic Travel Bureau pop-up near you, you should definitely check it out.I actually still have the post cards hanging up on my wall. And apparently one of the most popular places people want to go when they go into the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, is Mars. Which isn’t all that surprising. Humans have had a special love for Mars for a long time.

 

Rebecca Boyle: The world of science fiction and science generally, people have always been connected to Mars. I think it’s because it’s close. You can see it, it’s always there. It’s very red. It’s obviously different than other planets, like it moves across the sky in the same pattern, on the ecliptic, but it looks different. And you can tell that just by yourself, like you don’t have to use a telescope to see that. You can just look at the sky and Mars stands out, like it looks different because it’s red. And it also moves backward or appears to because of the way that it orbits the sun,it has retrograde orbit. So sometimes from Earth it will appear to go the wrong way, which is also a reason why Mars has always been linked omens, or bad histories, or religious myths. But yeah, it’s sort of this charismatic planet.

 

Rose: This is Rebecca Boyle, a science journalist who writes about astronomy for places like The Atlantic, 538, and WIRED Magazine. And Mars is her favorite planet.

 

Rebecca: The overarching reason is because I feel like it’s kind of the Earth’s little brother. It’s very similar to earth in many ways, but different enough in the only ways that matter. Which is that life may never have arisen there. If it did, it’s been gone a very long time. It had a lot of water at one point. It probably had oceans. It definitely had rivers, but they’re gone. It had a magnetic field at some point that’s now gone. All the things that it used to share in common with Earth, Earth still has, and Mars has lost. And so it’s like the earth in negative, or it’s the earth in some dystopian future, or really it’s the earth in its past too. That’s one thing that’s cool about Mars. It’s like a time capsule for the early Earth.

 

Rose: So, let’s say we wanted to go to Mars. On vacation.

 

First, we’d have to get there. Which…. Would actually take a long time. Traveling to Mars takes at least six months, if you time your takeoff properly.

 

Rebecca: That’s why spacecraft go to Mars every two years, roughly. They line them up because when the planets are closer together it’s a lot easier to get a spacecraft to Mars. But then it still takes like six to nine months to get there, depending on how quickly you’re going.

 

Rose: And if you’re going to spend six months getting somewhere, you probably want to stay for more than a couple of days.

 

Rebecca: You wouldn’t want to just take a step out, look around, take a picture and get back on the spacecraft. That would suck,, you’d want to be there and do stuff.

 

Rose: But if you stay too long, you wind up missing the window to have a quick trip back.

 

Rebecca: You either stay for just long enough that you still get to take advantage of that window or you stay for a long time, like a year. Because you’re waiting then for Earth to come back closer and make your journey home shorter.

 

Rose: So if you’re going to Mars, you’re probably signing up for about a two year trip. That’s… no longer really a vacation right? I mean, I don’t think my boss would be okay with me being like, “Hey so I’m going to be out starting next week … for two years. Don’t worry, I’ll put up an out of office reply.”

 

So in order for this whole vacation thing to work, I think we might need to get to Mars a little bit faster. Which is really hard to do. So to find out more about that, I called Ben Longmier.

Ben Longmier: My name is Ben Longmier and I was formerly a professor at the University of Michigan, working on advanced plasma propulsion for spacecraft travel and for pushing satellites around space.

 

Rose: Rocket science is obviously  complicated, but the basic gist of getting a rocket into space is still a giant explosion.

 

Ben: The way the rockets work now; you burn two chemicals. Those chemicals release some energy exothermically. You see this fire; hot gases rush out through a nozzle. That nozzle pushes back on this rocket and the rocket lifts off the ground and there you go, you get into space.

 

Rose: Once the rocket gets into space, there are a couple of options for keeping it going.

 

Ben: Once you’re in space, then there’s an open question. Do you continue to use chemical rockets, chemical boosters, with this finite burn temperature. Or do you switch over to something like an ion thruster. And these have a few names: ion propulsion systems, hall thrusters, plasma thrusters, and so on.

 

Rose: Ben’s work was on plasma thrusters.

 

Ben: The idea is, instead of burning some chemicals, you can create a plasma which is just a collection of ions and electrons, and then you can heat that plasma and you can accelerate it out the back. And there’s no limit to how much you can accelerate and heat that plasma.

 

Rose: One of the main advantages to using plasma, is that it’s a lot more efficient.

 

Ben: Plasma propulsion has the advantage of using a smaller amount of propellant. But it’s leaving the rocket at a very high velocity something like 10 times the velocity as a chemical thruster. So the benefit is you use a tiny amount of propellant, and you use it very efficiently. So it’s like the Prius of thrusters.

 

Rose: And it can shorten the timeframe a tiny bit:

 

Ben:You can get on a faster trajectory so you can still keep the total trip time to something like perhaps four months.

 

Rose: But that still doesn’t really solve our issue of vacation timing. Four months to get there, four months to get back, and some time on Mars. That’s still probably at least year, all told. And Ben doesn’t think we’re going to get all that much faster any time soon.

 

Ben: Getting to Mars in a month is really tough. I don’t think we’re going to be doing that in the next century. You just need too much energy. Forget the propellant, forget chemical propellant, or plasma propellant, you just need too much energy. And I can’t think of a system that would give you that much energy unless you have a massive massive fission rocket. But things just don’t quite work out for a month long trip.

 

Rose: Fission rockets are basically rockets with a controlled nuclear reaction propelling them. They work, but they’re really hard to convince people to actually use, considering how afraid many people are of nuclear reactors. I mean, would you get onto a spaceship powered by a nuke?

 

Ben: (laughs) But from the technical side, there is no better use of of nuclear energy than using in space. It basically last forever, it lasts for the whole duration of the mission, many decades. And the energy density is just really really high. So from an engineer’s or physicist’s perspective, it is a fantastic idea. It’s just a difficult political sell to launch a fusion reactor on a rocket where. whatever it is, there’s a one percent chance of that thing’s going to explode in midair and send fragments all over the ground. That’s a difficult sell I think.

 

Rose: But Ben actually doesn’t think this point about it not really being a viable “vacation” for most people is going to really deter the people who will be able to afford this kind of trip anyway.

 

Ben: You know I think we think about tourism now as, “Okay, I’m going to hop on a jet plane. It’s going to get me literally anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And I’ll stay for a few days or week and I’ll come back.” But if you think about how tourism was done, you know, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen hundreds; if you wanted to visit a different continent, you take a two month long journey, you get to some destination, you’d stay there for several months and you take that two or four months journey back. I think in that kind of context you can consider Mars tourism. But it’s still a journey that is going to carry with it something like a one percent chance of blowing up when you take off from Earth and a one percent chance of blowing up when you take off from Mars. It’s going to be a hazardous journey. And people signing up for this will have the understanding that, “Okay, two percent of dying. I’m willing to take that risk.”

 

Rose: It probably goes without saying that a vacation to Mars would be wildly expensive, something only really wealthy people can access for a long time. Which means that really, maybe it doesn’t matter after all that it will take a year or two to go, see the sights, and come back. When you’re rich enough to afford a Mars vacation, you’re probably rich enough to take two years off from whatever your job is.

 

So let’s say that you are one of those super rich people and you’ve boarded your ship for your Mars vacation. You’re going to be on that ship for up to six months. You’ve probably paid a lot of money for it, which means that the ship isn’t going to be some bare bones thing.

 

Rebecca: And that’s one of the things that Elon Musk talks about. Like, his whole plan to get people to Mars, you know thousands of people to Mars, in the next few decades is he keeps saying, it will be really fun. I think the the BFS, big space spaceship, will be like awesome. It’ll have a pizza parlor, it’ll have a food court, it’ll have a room that you can float in and see the views. Otherwise people aren’t going to want to go. That may be true but it’s also not really practical in terms of cargo space. The little artistic renderings of Musk’s spacecraft look nothing like what the spacecraft has ever looked like in the history of human spaceflight.

 

Rose: Let’s just hope that nobody on your space cruise ship comes down with any of the horrile diseases that some people get on ocean cruise ships.

 

Then, after six months of travel on this giant space cruise ship, you get to Mars. And you have to land. Which is really, really hard.

 

Rebecca: It is. It’s ridiculous. It’s super, super difficult. So far all that we can really get to Mars is about a metric ton. That’s how big Curiousity is. Thats big, it’s the size of a car. It’s not small. But if you’re thinking about what you’d need to send with for people to be there, it’s an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude more than that. And Curiosity was this ridiculous sky crane hover craft thing. It took so much engineering and ingenuity to get it there safely. There really is not a plan how to get more than that.

 

Rose: But let’s say you land your mega-ship on Mars successfully. Now, you’re here, and it’s time for phase two of your vacation to really begin. And when we get back, we’re going to talk about what you might do on a Mars vacation. And, what might throw a wrench into your fun.

 

But first, a word from our sponsors.

 

[[ADS]]

 

Rose: Okay so our giant space cruise ship has landed on Mars, and now… your Martian vacation really begins!

 

Rebecca: You definitely have a lot of interesting rock climbing.

 

Jana: Excellent. Well we have a great location for hiking. It’s Mars. Have you been low gravity hiking before. So this is going to be at one third Earth gravity, but you are going to need to wear a suit, obviously, to protect you from the temperatures and also keep you in breathable air. And so you might find it a little bit cumbersome but it’s going to be mostly easy hiking. I’d recommend you start out with a trip to Olympus Mons, which is not an active volcano, but it is a volcano. It’s kind of a nice easy slope on it so you can go and it’s not too arduous to climb up it. And you want to visit the caldera, which is the kind of depression, that dip. at the top of the volcano and get a lovely view.

 

Rebecca: You’d probably have sand skiing or some kind of dune surfing activity, because there’s a lot of very soft slippery sand that would be kind of fun to snowboard on. I don’t know if you’d call it snowboarding because it wouldn’t really be snow

 

Olivia: Another must see sight on Mars is Mariner Valley. Mariner Valley stretches the length of the United States, and it’s four times deeper than our own Grand Canyon. So, it’s pretty hard to miss, you’ll be able to see it from orbit. And it’s an excellent canyon to explore if you’re interested in hiking and incredible views of red rocks.

 

Jana: Yeah, really great vistas. The visibility can get low if there’s a lot of dust in the air. But when there isn’t, there’s less atmosphere that you’re looking through so you can get really stunning views.

 

Olivia: If you’re interested in a day trip, we recommend going to Mars’s two moons.

 

Jana: Phobos and Deimos. You can jump on Phobos higher than Earth’s highest building. You could jump over it if it were located there, and it would take you a while to come down so maybe it would be boring to actually do, I don’t know. But I think it would be fun.

 

Rebecca: You could probably golf, it would be really fun there because you’d be able to hit the golf ball super far.

 

Jana: I like Deimos because I imagine that everybody brings a baseball to Deimos and throws it into orbit. And that there’s just a bunch of baseballs orbiting around Demios. And it’s really hard to land on it because you have to go through this sea of baseballs that people have thrown into orbit. That’s my vision.

 

Rose: Maybe you’d also go visit some relics. Like the Mars Curiosity rover when it finally shuts down. Or any of the other probes that we’ve crashed into Mars.

 

Jana: There’s this great comic. It’s like somebody coming to the remains of the Curiosity rover. And it’s like future astronauts making this pilgrimage to it. And it’s still there and it’s this park where people leave things. Who’s going to move it?. Who’s going to throw it away, right? I imagine that people that travel to Mars will will you know go there and see it.

 

Rose: This all sounds really fun. But there will also be some thing that are… let’s say annoying. Like the dust storms.

 

Rebecca: It’s a dust storm like you’ve never seen on earth, like the worst storm you can imagine in the Sahara or maybe Arizona or somewhere that has these thousands of feet high clouds of dust like blocking out the sun. But on Mars it can be the entire planet at some times of year. And this is not really well understood, why these things start and stop.

 

Rose: If you’ve read the book, The Martian, or you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember the scene where a dust storm throws somebody around. That’s not exactly what would happen. Because there’s very little air pressure on Mars, the dust actually move you that much.

 

Olivia: There is one myth that we would like to clear up about Mars. A lot of people are concerned about the dust storms of Mars. I think this has been a result of movies like The Martian, which was a good movie, but one thing that it depicted was these dangerous dust storms of Mars. And while Mars is incredible dusty, those dust storms are not actually that dangerous.

 

Jana: The atmosphere is only like one percent as thick as Earth’s. When you have things blowing around, they can get up speed, but you’re not going to be blown over by these winds very easily. It would have to be a really extreme storm to be something like what they saw in The Martian. More likely they’ll have trouble with the seals. I guess they can’t make a movie about the seals not sealing properly because the dust gets in there. I guess that’s not dramatic enough. But i think that would be more likely what you’re dealing with.

 

Rebecca: The sand is so fine that it would get in all the cracks of your suit and your Rover and your habitat.

 

Rose: Fine enough to actually cause a lot of problems.

 

Rebecca: Yeah that’s going to be one of the huge problems. I mean, radiation is probably the number one health hazard and dust is probably the number two or even equivalently dangerous. You’d be inhaling it, potentially, because you know you’re coming in through your airlock or whatever. And then you take off your space suit. But this dust is so fine that it will just be airborne and you would be inhaling it, and eventually that would cause a lot of problems. And you know it could make it difficult for you to breathe. You’d have asthma on Mars, it would be really hard if not impossible to totally eliminate that from the living environment.

 

Ben: Yeah, I really agree with that. I think dust is sort of an underrated problem. People get freaked about radiation because it sounds scary. I was and am still good friends with Jack Schmitt, who flew on Apollo 17. He was the last man to step out onto the moon. He and Gene Cernan were on the moon. They, of course, were on the surface of the moon longer than anyone else. And if you look at the photos of them coming back in the capsule after a couple of EVAs, they’re freaking dusty. They’re just sort of covered head to toe in this fine black powder. They were not really able to solve it.

 

Rose: Plus, while you’re dealing with all the dust, you’re also dealing with some pretty extreme jet-lag. The day on Mars is 24 hours and 40 minutes long.

 

Rebecca: So you move forward 40 minutes every day. And this adds up quickly. It doesn’t sound that bad because it’s only a little bit of time, but very quickly it’s, like 2:00 a.m. on earth when it’s the middle of the day on Mars. It’s basically like you’re constantly flying west. And you can’t catch up.

 

Rose: And some people living on Earth right now actually know what it’s like to live on Mars time. And how awful that can be.

 

Rebecca: It’s pretty bad. From everyone I’ve talked to, the people who do it really hate it. When spacecraft get to Mars, people who work on the spacecraft go to Mars time for like three months. I think that’s the standard NASA. So that you’re working when the spacecraft is working. So people are getting in there at JPL at like 2:00 a.m.

 

Rose: In 2012, when the Mars Curiosity rover successfully touched down on the red planet, a whole team at NASA made the switch to Mars time. And one of the engineers on that team, a guy named David Oh, actually had his whole family go with him. David’s wife, and their three kids, all lived on Mars time for a month.

 

Rebecca: And the kids weren’t in school, so they can handle little better. And they kind of looked at it as an adventure. So they all get up at 2 a.m, and he would go to work, and they would do stuff. But then the mom even said, “Well, there was nothing open, so we really couldn’t do anything. And it’s dark outside. It’s not like it’s safe to play outside in the dark.” So it kind of limited how much that could even really do that.

 

Rose: People who work at NASA and go on Mars time for their missions, pretty much universally hate it. Not just because sometimes you wind up having to wake up in the middle of the night — night shifts have existed for a long time. But because every Mars day is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so you wind up slowly time shifting everything by 40 minutes a day. So you can’t even really get into a regular routine that matches Earth time.

 

Since the trip to Mars would take six months, you’d probably get acclimated to the time change slowly, and maybe you wouldn’t even notice it. But it would have to be part of the schedule on your Mars cruise. And it’s possible that even with a slow change to Mars time, human bodies still couldn’t quite adapt. We just don’t know

 

Rebecca: No one really knows what would happen in your brain over a long period of time.

 

Rose: Lots of people seem totally willing to sign up for a trip to Mars, whether it’s a luxury vacation or a more bare bones experimental mission.

 

And the first trips, of course, won’t be luxury space cruises. They’ll actually probably be flyby missions. Where instead of landing on Mars, you simply fly past it, and wave. Which… I have to say, to be honest, sounds horrible.

 

Ben: I think that route may exist though. For one it’s going to be a lot cheaper. People often have this idea that, oh my gosh you’re so close let’s just hop down and land. But when you look at the physics and engineering, it’s like, well actually no. Even though you’re close, it’s still ten times harder to land than to just fly by, just from the amount of propellant you use and the difficulty. Honestly I think that will be an option.

 

No, I’m sorry. I don’t care how good the spaceship is.  If I travel for six months to go see Mars, I don’t want to just fly by it. I want to actually get off the spaceship!  

 

Be: Yeah. I totally agree. Psychologically, of course, you want to land. Just as a person. Like, oh my god I took this travel all the way here, and took all the risks getting here, why not just set down. But I think there will be an option. I think flybys, from the beginning, will be easier to do. And there may be some wealthy older person that doesn’t have time to wait another five years before the landing technology really gets all of the kinks worked out so they do the flyby.

 

Rose: I do wonder if the Intergalactic Travel Bureau could ever get travel insurance.

 

Rebecca: Yeah yeah you’d never be able to get like a liability policy if you were a Mars tourism company. No one would insure you.

 

Jana: The reality of space travel is incredibly daunting. It’s not an easy thing. You’re not just going to pack a bag and go to Mars. It’s hugely complicated. We don’t know if we can get you back alive. We don’t know what going to happen. You might not be able to survive the radiation.

 

Olivia: This is something that we love to do, and kind of a fun tension that Jana and I have. She is an astrophysicist; she’s very tied to the science behind these vacations.

 

Jana: And you’re the dreamer.

 

Olivia: Jana’s the sceptic and I’m the dreamer.

 

Jana: And I think it’s kind of fun to be flippant about it. And nod to the fact that it’s fun to imagine these things but the actual science of keeping people alive in space is very difficult.

 

Olivia: I think we’ve never appreciated Earth more than when thinking about travelling to other places because we see how harsh the conditions are.

 

Jana: I don’t know, I think it’s fun to frame it in, you know, “I’m going to take a road trip to Iowa.” No one takes a road trip to Iowa, but, “I’m going to take a road trip, and it’s going to be this easy thing, and it’s going to be just like vacationing on Earth.” The Earth is where we evolved to survive. And it brings out how suited we are for this environment and how unsuited we are for space travel.

 

Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. Special thanks this week to Jana Gercvich and Olivia Koski, go check out their book! The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky.

 

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

 

And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

 

That’s all for this future, come back next month and we’ll travel to a new one.

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5 comments

Nick June 7, 2017 at 9:44 am

Hi Rose, in this podcast you mentioned a sponsor/new podcast, phonetically as “2 U” or “Too You.” I couldn’t tell, but could you link to that here? It sounded really interesting.

Reply
Nick June 7, 2017 at 9:51 am

If anyone is wondering, the new podcast Rose mentions is called “2U” and their website is http://2u.com/forward

Reply
Mike Reeves-McMillan June 26, 2017 at 3:55 pm

I also couldn’t figure out the spelling of the sponsor.

The levels on this episode are really varied, from almost painfully loud to inaudible. May I recommend using The Levelator?

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Rose July 2, 2017 at 7:51 pm

Hi Mike!

I use Levelator on all my episodes, not sure why this one was sounding weird for you. The levels all look right on my end but I’ll keep looking into it!

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Travel Podcast Ep. #15: Ecotourism and Future Travel Trends – Mphoric – Cool websites directoru January 28, 2020 at 10:36 pm

[…] towards space for a moment. Rose, in one of your previous “Flash Forward” episodes called Lonely Red Planet, you imagine traveling as a tourist to other planets. Here’s a clip from that show where you […]

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