Joe: Alright Lewis, I'm going to say the title of a book, and you give me your gut reaction. Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Lewis: Sounds like my last attempt at online dating. High hopes, mixed results, and a lingering fear of robots. Joe: That is... surprisingly accurate for the tone of this book. It’s written by a husband-and-wife team—Zach Weinersmith, a famous web cartoonist, and Dr. Kelly Weinersmith, a research scientist. That blend of sharp humor and hardcore science is what makes this book so brilliant and different from other futurism books. Lewis: A cartoonist and a scientist. That explains the "improve and/or ruin" part. One is drawing a utopia, the other is running the numbers and sighing. But what’s with the title, Soonish? Why the "-ish"? It feels non-committal. Joe: The "-ish" is the entire point! The book argues that we're terrible at predicting the future because progress isn't a clean, straight line. It's a messy, unpredictable, and often ridiculous journey. Lewis: Huh. So it's less about the shiny future and more about the muddy, pothole-filled road to get there? Joe: Exactly. And the best way to understand that is with a story about how we learned to read the human brain. It didn't start where you'd think. It started with a 19th-century scientist who was just really, really curious about cold gas.

Lewis: Okay, stop right there. How on earth do you get from cold gas to a modern brain scanner? That connection seems completely random. Joe: It is! And that's the beauty of it. The authors use this incredible example of a device called a SQUID—a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. It’s one of the most sensitive tools we have for detecting the tiny magnetic fields our neurons produce. Lewis: A SQUID. Got it. Sounds like a rejected Bond villain's weapon. So where does the cold gas come in? Joe: Well, back in the 1820s, the famous scientist Michael Faraday was just messing around in his lab, pressurizing gases. He accidentally liquefied ammonia. It was a cool party trick, but nobody knew what to do with it. This kicked off a century-long race among scientists to liquefy every gas they could find, purely out of scientific curiosity. Lewis: A race to make things cold. Sounds like a slow-burn reality show. Joe: It was! The final boss was helium, the hardest gas to liquefy. A Dutch scientist finally did it in 1908, getting it down to just a few degrees above absolute zero. And when he had this super-cold liquid helium, he thought, "What happens if I run electricity through something this cold?" So he tried it with mercury. Lewis: And what happened? Did it explode? Please say it exploded. Joe: Even better. The electrical resistance completely vanished. It became a perfect conductor. He had discovered superconductivity. Again, a fascinating discovery with absolutely no practical application at the time. It was a solution looking for a problem. Lewis: So we have liquefied gas and a perfectly useless, perfectly conducting wire. I'm still not seeing a brain scanner, Joe. This feels like a cosmic Rube Goldberg machine. Joe: That's the perfect analogy! The final, most random piece of the puzzle came in the 1960s. A 22-year-old graduate student at Cambridge named Brian Josephson was studying quantum mechanics. He made a purely theoretical prediction that if you put a thin barrier between two superconductors, electrons could "tunnel" through it in a weird, predictable way. Lewis: He predicted quantum tunneling? My brain just blue-screened. Joe: His own professor told him it was nonsense. But he was right. This discovery, the "Josephson junction," won him a Nobel Prize. And it turned out that this junction was so exquisitely sensitive to magnetic fields that when engineers finally put all these pieces together—the liquid helium to create superconductivity, and the Josephson junction to detect the fields—they had created the SQUID. Lewis: Wow. So a brain scanner only exists because of a chain of seemingly unrelated discoveries over 150 years. Faraday wasn't trying to read minds; he was just curious. The Dutch guy wasn't trying to cure Alzheimer's; he just wanted to win the cold-gas race. Joe: Exactly. And that’s the "soonish" problem in a nutshell. The authors quote one of their interviewees saying, "Often what seemed complicated was easy, but what seemed easy was complicated." We think progress is about a lone genius having a "eureka" moment, but the book shows it's usually a long, weird, collaborative stumble in the dark.

Lewis: Okay, so progress is messy. I get it. But what about something we all think is just around the corner, like cheap space travel? We see SpaceX landing rockets on drone ships. That feels pretty linear. It seems like we've cracked the code. Joe: It does, and the book gives SpaceX and reusable rockets huge credit. The authors point out the fundamental problem: right now, it costs about $10,000 to send a single pound of anything into orbit. That’s the weight of a can of soup. Your lunch would cost more than a new car to launch. Lewis: Ten thousand dollars a pound! That's... astronomical. Literally. So making rockets reusable is the obvious answer. Joe: It's the most famous answer. But the book dives into a much wilder, and frankly, more dangerous idea for getting to space on the cheap. It tells the story of a man named Gerald Bull. Lewis: Never heard of him. Was he a rocket scientist? Joe: Not exactly. He was a cannon engineer. A brilliant one. And in the 1960s, he had a radical idea: why use expensive, explosive rockets when you could just shoot things into space with a giant gun? Lewis: Hold on, a giant gun to shoot things into space? That sounds like something out of a cartoon. Which, I guess, is fitting for this book. Joe: It was called Project HARP—High Altitude Research Project. With funding from the US and Canadian governments, Bull built a series of massive cannons. The biggest one, in Barbados, was 120 feet long. It could fire a projectile at 7,000 miles per hour, so fast it could reach the edge of space. Lewis: That is completely insane. Did it work? Joe: It worked astonishingly well for gathering atmospheric data. But the goal was to launch satellites. The problem is, NASA was the future, and the idea of a "space gun" seemed crude and militaristic, especially during the Vietnam War era. Funding was cut, and Bull’s dream died. Lewis: A tragic story of a misunderstood genius. Joe: This is where the "and/or ruin everything" part comes in. Bull was bankrupted and bitter. He couldn't let go of his supergun dream. So in the 1980s, he found a new client who was very interested in giant cannons: Saddam Hussein. Lewis: Oh no. You're kidding me. Joe: He began working on Project Babylon, a supercannon for Iraq that would have been the largest in history. The purpose was... ambiguous. But it was clearly a weapon of immense destructive potential. The story doesn't end well. In 1990, Gerald Bull was assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels, likely by intelligence agents who didn't want Project Babylon completed. Lewis: Wow. That is a dark, dark turn. So you have the celebrated, futuristic story of Elon Musk and SpaceX on one hand, and this tragic, almost supervillain-like story of Gerald Bull on the other. Both were trying to solve the same problem. Joe: And that's what the book does so well. It doesn't just give you the sanitized, press-release version of the future. It shows you the brilliant, the messy, the dangerous, and the deeply human ambitions behind the technology. It shows how the same drive can lead to improving everything or... ruining it.

Joe: Speaking of controversial geniuses who push the limits, the book's final section, 'You, Soonish,' takes this to the most personal level imaginable. It moves from the outer universe of space to the inner universe of the human brain. Lewis: This is where it gets really sci-fi, right? Brain-computer interfaces, plugging into the Matrix, that kind of thing. Joe: It is, but again, the story behind the science is what's so compelling. The book tells the incredible tale of Dr. Phil Kennedy, a neurologist often called the "father of cyborgs." For years, he developed brain implants to help "locked-in" patients—people who are fully conscious but completely paralyzed—to communicate. Lewis: That's amazing work. A real hero. Joe: Absolutely. But he hit a wall. The FDA, the agency that approves medical devices in the US, stopped approving his human trials. They were worried about the risks. Kennedy was devastated. His life's work was about to grind to a halt. Lewis: So what did he do? Did he switch to another field? Joe: He did something far more radical. He decided that if he couldn't get approval to test on another patient, he would become the patient himself. Lewis: You're joking. He implanted one of his own devices into his own brain? Joe: In 2014, he flew to Belize, where the regulations were looser, and paid a surgeon to implant an electrode into his motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls movement. Lewis: That is next-level dedication. But is it genius or madness? What happened after the surgery? Joe: The immediate aftermath was terrifying. The surgery caused swelling, and for a month, he completely lost the ability to speak. He, the man who dedicated his life to restoring communication, was rendered mute by his own experiment. Lewis: That's unbelievably ironic and horrifying. Did he get his speech back? Joe: He did, thankfully. And for a few months, he conducted experiments on himself, trying to map the neurons associated with speech. But the wound never fully healed, and the risk of infection became too great. He had to have the implant removed. Lewis: What a story. It's the ultimate example of the risks and ethical tightropes these scientists walk. It really forces you to ask, where is the line? Joe: Exactly. And that's the question at the heart of so many of these emerging technologies. The potential to "improve everything" is immense—restoring sight, movement, memory. But the path there is fraught with risks, ethical dilemmas, and people like Phil Kennedy who are willing to sacrifice their own bodies for a glimpse of that future.

Lewis: So when you pull it all together—the weird journey of the SQUID, the dueling fates of the space pioneers, the scientist who experimented on himself—what's the big picture the Weinersmiths are painting? Joe: I think the book's real genius isn't just in explaining the technology. It's in revealing the messy, unpredictable, and deeply human story behind innovation. Progress isn't some clean, inevitable force. It's driven by flawed, brilliant, and often obsessive people. Lewis: It’s not about the "what," it's about the "how" and the "who." Joe: Precisely. The "how" is almost always a winding, unexpected path, like with the SQUID. And the "who" determines whether that path leads to something that improves the world, like reusable rockets, or something that threatens it, like a dictator's supergun. The book demystifies the future by showing us that it's not being built by gods or robots, but by people. Lewis: That’s a much more interesting, and honestly, a more hopeful way to think about it. It’s not just happening to us. It makes you wonder, which of today's 'crazy' ideas will be tomorrow's brain scanner, and which will be the next supergun? Joe: That's the billion-dollar question. And it’s a question for all of us, not just the scientists. The book is a call to be curious, to be critical, and to engage with these technologies as they're being born. We'd love to hear what you all think. Which emerging tech excites or terrifies you the most? Let us know. Lewis: A fantastic read that will make you look at the future with a lot more wonder, and a healthy dose of skepticism. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.