The Speculative Science Podcast
Format
· 13.10.26
Prof. Silvia Vignolini: The blue that was never there.
The brightest blue in nature contains no blue at all. Silvia Vignolini grows colour out of wood, and asks what we still need to buy once we can.
The 40-Minute Architecture
Three acts. One bridge across the Miracle Gap.
The inciting incident. The moment of curiosity that turned a scientist into an architect.
A precise teardown. How does the breakthrough actually work — channels, mechanisms, dates?
Guided speculative science from 2040. The architect describes a day in the world their miracle has scaled into.
All episodes
Prof. Dr. Philipp Adelhelm: The battery that ends scarcity.
Available June 16th, 2026: Professor of Physical Chemistry, Humboldt University Berlin. Sodium-ion batteries with Prussian blue electrodes — built from abundant, cheap materials, without lithium or cobalt. The energy storage breakthrough that makes the transition democratically available.
Dr. Jason Morton: Proof that the AI ran honestly.
Available June 23, 2026: CEO of EZKL. Zero-knowledge machine learning that lets any third party verify an AI model ran correctly on specific data — without seeing the model's weights or the inputs. A 2035 where "the algorithm said so" comes with a cryptographic receipt.
Dr. Filip Rezabek: The root of trust leaves the planet.
Available June 30th, 2026: Co-founder and CTO of SpaceComputer. A satellite in low Earth orbit is a computer no one can reach to tamper with. SpaceComputer relocates the hardware security root to orbit — where physical inaccessibility becomes the security model.
Dr. Enrique Solano: Useful quantum, on today's hardware.
Available July 7th, 2026: CEO of Kipu Quantum. Algorithms compressed to run on noisy, error-prone quantum processors — making practical quantum computation available a decade before the hardware is ready. A 2040 where quantum advantage is already invisible infrastructure.
The Team
Host
Ivo Betke
Operator-in-Residence and architect of the conversation. Ivo guides each guest from the rigor of their lab into the poetry of the future they're building. 10+ years bridging operational specificity and speculative ambition.
Executive Producer
Nicolai Haas
The architect behind the 40-minute journey. Nicolai shapes each episode into a structured narrative that moves from Origin to Mechanism to Dispatch — a boardroom-ready briefing from the future.
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