Narrator: In the 1960s, a brilliant but controversial engineer named Gerald Bull had a radical idea: why use expensive, expendable rockets to get to space when you could just shoot things out of a giant cannon? With funding from the US and Canadian governments, he built a massive supergun in Barbados for what was called Project HARP. His team fired payloads that reached the upper atmosphere, proving the concept was viable. But political winds shifted, funding dried up, and Bull’s company collapsed. Years later, he took his expertise to a new client: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. His work on a new supercannon, Project Babylon, ended abruptly in 1990 when he was assassinated outside his Brussels apartment. This strange, dramatic story of genius, ambition, and geopolitical danger perfectly captures the messy reality of technological progress. It’s a world where brilliant ideas can lead to ruin, and the path to the future is never a straight line.

This complex intersection of promise and peril is the focus of the book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith provide a humorous and deeply researched guide to the technologies that are just on the horizon, moving beyond the hype to explore the immense scientific, economic, and ethical hurdles that stand in the way.

Narrator: The dream of space exploration, from orbital manufacturing to Martian colonies, runs into one colossal barrier: cost. The authors state that right now, it costs about ten thousand dollars to send a single pound of anything into orbit. This incredible expense is driven by the fact that we traditionally build massive, complex rockets and then throw them away after one use. This is the central problem that companies like SpaceX are trying to solve.

The story of SpaceX and its reusable rockets illustrates a fundamental shift in thinking. For decades, rockets were expendable. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, pursued the seemingly impossible goal of having the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket fly back to Earth and land itself upright on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. After many explosive failures, they succeeded in 2015. By recovering the most expensive part of the launch vehicle, they aimed to slash the cost of accessing space. The authors argue that this isn't just about making launches cheaper; it's about fundamentally changing what's possible. Cheaper access could enable everything from vast solar power arrays in orbit to asteroid mining operations. However, the book also explores wilder ideas, like the space gun from Project HARP, reminding us that the road to cheap space access is paved with both brilliant innovations and dangerous ambitions.

Narrator: If we can get to space cheaply, the next question is what we’ll do there. One of the most tantalizing possibilities is asteroid mining. The Earth’s resources are finite, but the solar system is filled with asteroids that are essentially floating treasure chests. Daniel Faber, the founder of Deep Space Industries, points to an M-type asteroid named 3554 Amun. He notes that this single, relatively small asteroid contains more than thirty times the amount of metal that humanity has ever mined on Earth. And there are thousands more like it.

These asteroids aren't just full of metals like iron and nickel, which could be used to build giant structures in space. C-type asteroids are rich in water, which can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel and breathable air. This concept of in-situ resource utilization is critical. Instead of launching everything from Earth at ten thousand dollars a pound, we could build a self-sustaining space economy. However, the economics are tricky. Bringing platinum back to Earth might crash the market, but using asteroid resources to build things in space could be the key to unlocking true human expansion across the solar system.

Narrator: Back on Earth, one of our greatest challenges is energy. The authors explore what they call the potential ultimate solution: nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission, which splits atoms, fusion smashes them together, releasing immense energy. It’s the same process that powers the sun. The fuel for fusion, derived from common elements like lithium and deuterium, is incredibly abundant. The authors cite data showing that the lithium in a single laptop battery and the deuterium from half a bath of water could produce as much energy as forty tons of coal, with no greenhouse gases and no risk of a catastrophic meltdown.

The challenge is immense. To overcome the natural repulsion of atomic nuclei, fusion reactors must achieve temperatures hotter than the core of the sun. The book details the two main approaches: magnetic confinement, which uses powerful magnetic fields to contain superheated plasma in a donut-shaped device called a tokamak, and inertial confinement, which uses the world’s most powerful lasers to blast a tiny fuel pellet. While hobbyists like Richard Hull have even built tiny, working fusors in their basements, achieving a net energy gain remains the holy grail for massive, billion-dollar projects like ITER in France. Fusion has been "the energy of the future" for decades, but if we crack it, it could change everything.

Narrator: The technologies in Soonish don't just affect the macro scale of space and energy; they also promise to reshape the physical world around us. Two of the most mind-bending concepts are programmable matter and robotic construction. Programmable matter is the idea that objects could change their shape and function on demand. Imagine a smartphone that could unfold into a laptop.

Researchers at MIT, for example, have demonstrated this with a simple reconfigurable straw. They 3D-printed a strand of material with special joints that bend when they absorb water. When placed in water, the strand automatically folded itself into the letters 'MIT'. This is a simple proof of concept for a world where materials are no longer static. This could be combined with robotic construction. The book moves beyond simple 3D-printed houses to explore the idea of swarm robotics. Inspired by termites, researchers at Harvard developed small, independent robots that can work together to build large structures without any central coordinator. Each robot follows a simple set of rules, and together, the swarm can build castles or pyramids. This decentralized approach could allow us to build massive, complex structures in a completely new way.

Narrator: The final frontier explored in the book is the human body and mind. Augmented Reality, or AR, promises to overlay digital information onto the real world. The authors paint a vivid picture of an employee using AR contact lenses to escape a boss's tirade by transforming the office into a tropical beach and the boss's voice into a sports broadcast. While this is a whimsical example, it points to a future where our perception of reality is customizable. This has powerful applications in surgery, education, and industry, but also raises concerns about distraction and the blurring of lines between the real and the virtual.

Even more profound is the field of synthetic biology, which involves redesigning life itself. Using tools like CRISPR, scientists can now edit DNA with incredible precision. This could allow us to create gene drives to make mosquitoes immune to malaria, effectively wiping out the disease. It could also allow us to program bacteria to act as tiny doctors inside our bodies, detecting cancer cells and delivering drugs directly to them. But the power to rewrite the code of life brings enormous ethical questions about designer babies, ecological disruption, and the potential for bioterrorism.

Narrator: Perhaps the most intimate and unsettling technology is the Brain-Computer Interface, or BCI. The goal is to directly link the human brain to a computer, allowing us to read, write, and upgrade our own minds. This technology is already helping paralyzed patients control robotic arms with their thoughts. The book explores the future possibility of restoring memory in Alzheimer's patients with a "hippocampal prosthesis" or even enhancing our cognitive abilities.

The lengths to which researchers will go are staggering. The authors tell the story of Dr. Phil Kennedy, a BCI pioneer who, unable to get FDA approval for human trials, traveled to Belize and paid a surgeon to implant an electrode into his own brain. He temporarily lost the ability to speak and suffered complications, but he considered the experiment a success for the data it provided. This extreme example highlights the immense promise and profound risks of tampering with the brain. As one researcher in the book notes, a future where our brains are all connected to a cloud would transform what it means to be human, but it would also remove all barriers to communication and, potentially, all privacy.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Soonish is that technological progress is not the clean, inevitable march we often imagine. It is a chaotic, profoundly human endeavor, full of brilliant failures, unexpected detours, and staggering costs. The future doesn't just arrive; it is built, piece by expensive, complicated, and often-flawed piece. The Weinersmiths' work demystifies the future, showing that the gap between a science-fiction concept and a real-world technology is filled with immense scientific, economic, and ethical challenges.

The book's most challenging idea is that for every problem these emerging technologies might solve, they introduce new and complex dilemmas. Cheap space access could lead to space weapons. Synthetic biology could lead to ecological catastrophe. Brain-computer interfaces could create a new form of inequality. Soonish leaves us with a critical question: As we develop the god-like power to reshape our planet, our biology, and our own minds, what kind of future will we choose to build?