Virtual Worlds, Virtual Lives

On this episode, a look back at our search for life on Mars. We hear about the Viking mission to Mars — the first to land a craft on the Red Planet — and the controversy over what it discovered, what drove a national obsession with the “Martian civilization” in the early 1900s, a ...  Show more

Journalist Jon Ronson's new book starts with a series of panicked text messages from his son — who had been lured to a massive, gothic-looking castle in Connecticut. A female friend had been invited to a party by a wealthy older man from Tinder. But there was no party. Instead, t ...  Show more

"Virtual reality" might seem like a new concept, but are we already living inside a virtual world? How do we balance spending time in these technological worlds versus the "real" world? Plus, we explore questioning the nature of our own reality, and riff on the idea of creating a ...  Show more

We discuss how things like the metaverse and AI might influence how we live. 

Traveling is tricky right now and, for most, the boundaries of our worlds have shrunk dramatically. So a lot of people are spending a lot more time in virtual places, like Sea of Thieves, Fortnite, Ultima Online and more. Explore how these online worlds help us push past real-wor ...  Show more

A new technology is emerging which could change the world as significantly as mobile phones or the Internet. That technology is Virtual Reality. Up to now it’s mainly been used for fun - but things are changing. Adam Shaw investigates how VR could change our lives and revolutioni ...  Show more