Episode Details

We are in a crisis…

…of crises.

We are in a crisis of geopolitics as we move from a unipolar world of one global hegemon to a multipolar world of competing powers.

We are in a crisis of economics as our elites hoard more and more wealth, immiserating the working and middle classes.

We are in a crisis of nationalism as people turn to populists, authoritarians and fascists for simple answers to complex questions.

We are in a crisis of ecology as the over-extraction of natural resources destroys the only home we have.

The existential threat of nuclear weapons or global pandemic. High speed population growth and collapse. Digital disinformation and propaganda. 

The emergence of AI.

We are in a crisis of complex and interlocking crises.

Some call this the Polycrisis. Others the Metacrisis.

But there’s a better way to understand our crisis of crises.

We are in a Seldon Crisis.

Watch the full video essay on the Science Fiction channel

The Foundation Saga was born from a personal crisis. 

A young Isaac Asimov, on his way to a pivotal meeting with the formidable editor of Astounding magazine John W. Campbell, had no story to pitch.

Campbell was reshaping American scifi from its roots in pulp adventure stories, to a harder edged artform that took science seriously.

Asimov found last minute inspiration in his reading of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

If the greatest empire in Earth history could collapse, what would the decline and fall of a galactic empire look like? And more importantly, how could civilization rise again?

​This question became the seed for one of science fiction’s most powerful myths. Asimov rewrote the genre of space opera to explore profound ideas of politics and history, and made the galaxy a mirror for the future of humanity.

Asimov’s answer to the question of civilisational collapse, the novum or new idea at the heart of his story, remains perhaps the greatest high concept in all science fiction

The science of Psychohistory

“It was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically.”

Imagine we can predict the future state of human civilization, in the same way we can predict the future state of a cloud of gas particles.

Using a mathematical equation.

But there are limitations.

The human population must be on the sca