I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THE AGE OF DISCOVERY 2.0 PODCAST SERIES. I’m pleased to announce that I’m co-producing a new podcast series with Scott Rank, host of the show History Unplugged. It’s called Age of Discovery 2.0 and it explores how the next few decades of space exploration will be just as important — but likely far more — to our civilization as the first Age of Discovery was 500 years ago (as I’ve written about before). I’m one of the guests on this series, along with Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society, Rand Simberg, Robert Zimmerman, and others.

The first episode comes out tomorrow. Here’s the synopsis:

No era transformed Western Civilization like the Age of Discovery. Before then, Europe was an economic and military weakling that had suffered centuries of defeat from Islamic empires. Constantinople, Greece, Serbia, and the Crimea had all fallen to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Compared to its richer, more educated, and far more powerful rivals in the East, Europe was the Third World of the late medieval era. Chroniclers saw it as living in a long twilight, far removed from its golden age. It had nothing to look forward to but Judgment Day.

But with Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the West was reborn. Trade routes to Africa, India, and China opened. Ship building began at a furious pace. New wealth flowed into European capitals. At the same time, printing presses spread new ideas about science, religion, and technology. Literacy rates exploded. Above all, anyone willing to brave the dangers of traveling and settling in the New World could seek their fortune, bypassing whatever their birth status was in Europe’s rigid social hierarchy. Because of the Age of Discovery, for the first time in generations, Western Civilization had hope in the future.

Today, an Age of Discovery 2.0 is upon us. With Elon Musk promising rocket launch costs at $200/kilo (one percent of the Space Shuttle’s launch costs, with much lower costs to come), the price of sending explorers to space will soon match the cost of a ticket on the Mayflower in 1620. In a few decades, the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies will be as accessible to humans as the New World was in the Age of Sail.

How will the Age of Discovery 2.0 change our civilization the way the first one did five centuries ago?

To find the answer, History Unplugged is interviewing historians, scientists, and futurists who have spent decades researching this question by looking at the past to understand the future. It will explore how:

The first Triangle Trade between England, American, and the Indies, (in which manufactured goods went from Britain to the Americas, which sent food staples to the Indies, which sent cash crops back to Britain) foreshadows a second Triangle Trade between Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt (in which high tech goods will go from Earth to Mars, which will send hydroponic crops and fusion-friendly deuterium to the Asteroid Belt, which will send rare earth metals to Earth).

How the development of large sailing ships turned the oceans into a highway that connected any two seaports on Earth, and affordable rockets will enable global travel from any point on Earth to another in an hour or less. Then will come orbital hotels; moon bases with incredible space observatories; human settlements on Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of the outer planets; and then, breaking all limits, pushing onward to the stars.

How slavery was a conscious choice in the American colonies (Virginia embraced it to staff its tobacco plantations while Puritan New England rejected it in favor of an educated society built on small family farms) and how the same choices on human rights could make the future a libertarian paradise or a neo-feudal dystopia.

How the East India Company’s control over India foreshadows SpaceX’s control over Mars and what happens when a corporation effectively controls a nation (or in this case, a planet).

The labor shortage – and lack of regulation – in off-world colonies will lead to incredible innovation, as did the lack of workers and government restriction in colonial America drove the rise of “Yankee ingenuity’s” wave of inventions.

Stay tuned, it launches tomorrow.