Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

Matt and Hilary let you into one of our planning sessions, demystifying the amazingly shallow and slapdash way we decide what to talk about. This chapter is so rich that we figured we'd have to divide it up into two episodes. This episode focuses mainly on Zo and the kind of problems we have with her and the kind of problems that she presents to us. We ask really fundamental questions that the book puts to us at this point in the narrative, including about the nature of pleasure and freedom in a world that spans the solar system and in which humans can expect to basically live forever. The big question we seek to answer across this and the next episode (which we probably don't ever answer) is, as articulated by Hilary: What do we make of the relationship between the things we’re learning about the transformations in the solar system (accelerando/ explosive diaspora) and what we learn about Zo?   We talk about our problems with Zo. Both of us didn't like Zo at all the first time we read this book, and the