Far Out

Space tourism is heating up, but is it ready for liftoff? Explore the future of space exploration through the lens of ethics, finance, environmental impact and more.

Smart home technology has great benefits for the environment that can save us money. However, people are often wary of the security risks. The future of smart home tech aims to combat these privacy concerns and create homes that take care of us and the planet.

Lab-grown, or cultivated, meat promises to deliver us from the pitfalls of modern meat production, but it’s still an emerging industry with lots of technical challenges. As a result, cultivated meat products are still exorbitantly expensive. What will it take to make them affordable?

Many people say cannabis helps them with insomnia, nausea, chronic pain and other conditions. Producers have long associated “good weed” with high levels of THC, the compound responsible for getting you high. Over the last few decades, the THC content in many common cannabis strains has skyrocketed, leaving consumers with fewer options. As we continue to legalize cannabis, will that ever change?

Fresh water issues are getting harder to ignore. In the next five years, half the world’s population will live in a water-stressed area. Drought-stricken cities like San Francisco have started requiring large commercial building to recycle their water. But can technology like blackwater recycling and desalination pull us out of the water crisis?

What is the future of aging? People aren’t dying as early or as easily as they used to. Innovations in medicine, health, and hygiene have helped us extend our lives by decades, but what comes next? Would you rather live to be a hearty and healthy 90 or live to be 150 but withering away for the last 60 years? We’ll talk about it in this episode of Far Out.