In episode 231 Peter meets Fernando Gutiérrez Olaizola who is a Uruguayan-born futurist based in the United States with a passion for space and science fiction, a focus on Latin America, and a drive to identify opportunities for emerging and developing nations to participate in space-based commerce and exploration.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Fernando website: https://www.latinofuturist.com/
Ana Paula website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anapaulamedeirosafrofuturism/
Editor: CIELOS, The Bilingual Newsletter of Latin America in Space:https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7282216592510259200
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: As Futurists we try to imagine what to others is unimaginable. But what if the idea of me being a futurist is unimaginable?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: One of my first projects that I did for class, for World Futures, was the future of Latin America and space. And when I proposed it to my professor he said, that's an amazing topic. That sounds great. I don't know if you're gonna find anything.
And of course that's part of the frustration of being a futurist in Latin America is that what I hear from futurists in Latin America is that nobody even knows that they exist half the time. Or they certainly aren't getting the coverage that, that they would like to.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod. Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola who is a Uruguayan-born futurist based in the United States with a passion for space and science fiction, a focus on Latin America, and a drive to identify opportunities for emerging and developing nations to participate in space-based commerce and exploration.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to future pod, Fernando.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Peter Hayward: You mentioned in our correspondence, Fernando, that you have listened to Future Pod, so you know the drill. The first question for guests is for them to tell their story. So what's Fernando's story and how did you get involved with the Futures and Foresight community?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Thanks, and thanks for the question. Actually it was completely accidental.
Peter Hayward: that a few times, mate. Yes,
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: yes. No absolutely. I was having a chat with, someone, a friend of mine and I was looking to actually make a joke about being an armchair futurist, having no idea what futurists did, having grown up, reading things like Chariot of the Gods and what have you, all the things that we had in the seventies that were woo woo and out there, I kind of had a little bit of an idea of what I thought a futurist was.
And so I just went to crack a joke about being an armchair futurist and I said let me just see if there's a meme or there's a joke or there's a graphic out there that I might find to liven up the joke and I go out onto the internet and find that there's this entire world of Foresight and discover the University of Houston program, that just celebrated 50 years and reach out to them and wound up joining their program.
And that's the short story of how I became a futurist. And then as far as how I got into my specialties I was born in Uruguay and I've lived pretty much all my life in the States. I've been back and forth a few times. Actually went back for the first time in a long time last year. And so I've always had half an eye on Latin America and things going on there and thought I knew what was going on there, but obviously not having lived there, being from there, but, or being of there, not from there, however you want to put it.
There was so much to learn and so much that I wasn't aware of. And so I decided that would be my focus because it was something that I was very curious about. Something that I was very passionate about. Learning not just more about my family and my background and my country, but everything having to do with Latin America and foresight was a great way to do that.
So at this point, my focus is like a triangle. So the three points of my triangle really are Latin America, Space, and speculative or science fiction. And so I play in different combinations of those three at different times. Sometimes I gravitate more towards one, sometimes more towards the other or towards a third.
But generally I'm playing in one of those three areas for the most part. And obviously Latin America is super broad and speculative fiction is super broad and space certainly now with New Space and Space 2.0 and commercial space activities. And we'll see what happens with NASA losing 20% or so workforce in terms of what happens with that shift.
I think interesting things are going to happen there. One of my first projects that I did for class, for World Futures was the future of Latin America and space. And when I proposed it to my professor he said, that's an amazing topic. That sounds great. I don't know if you're gonna find anything.
And of course that's part of the frustration of being a futurist in Latin America is that what I hear from futurists in Latin America is that nobody even knows that they exist half the time. Or they certainly aren't getting the coverage that, that they would like to.
Peter Hayward: I've been speaking to African futurists and discussing the whole. Issue of the colonialization of futures and the de colonialization of futures.
And that, futures, if you look at it as a canon is heavily European based. American based, absolutely white, male based. Absolutely. And yet as the courses that are being taught around the world, and increasingly as we get, further and further into critical studies and literary studies and everything else, the whole notion of disciplines being captured by culture or captured by you hegemonic viewpoints.
And so yeah, as I say, when I've been speaking to African futurists, they're very conscious of this and they're also trying to open the field up and introduce, the indigenous or other ways of knowing kind of thing. I would imagine similar situation for South America.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Oh yeah, absolutely.
And Latin America and the Caribbean has so many parallels to Africa. It's kind of like the old joke that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. There's a lot of rhyming that goes on between Latin America and Africa. And there's a lot of interconnectedness too. We've got almost half a millennium of a slave trade, so there's a so much connection between not just North America, but certainly Latin America.
To the extent that there were many countries in Latin America where their majority population was either AfroLatin or Indigenous. And to some extent many of them still are. So yeah, there's certainly a lot of awareness of the colonization and the decolonization and there are certainly Indigenous voices that are being heard much more now than there ever have been.
Where the speculative fiction and the Latin America tend to merge a little bit is when I start looking at Latin American Futurisms, for example. So when we talk about Futurisms, we tend generally tend to talk a lot about things like Afrofuturism because that's the one that most folks - certainly north Americans and Europeans - tend to know the best. But there are also many Indigenous Futurisms. There are other Afrofuturisms: I've worked with folks like Ana Paola Medeiros out of Brazil. She's a Brazilian Afrofuturist.
Her family background is certainly mixed. African background and Indigenous background, as happens quite frequently in Brazil. So her research tends to be a bit of a blend of both. And so certainly there's that aspect to it. There's a lot of Indigenous Futurism that's going on in Brazil and across Latin America.
There's different flavors in Peru, in Bolivia, in Mexico, certainly with Aztlan and Aztec and Mayan. And then also once we start coming across the border a little bit, then you've got things like Chicano Futurism. And so this isn't foresight per se, but they are visions of the future that are not specifically Western or westernized or colonized.
They are certainly, in many cases, very decolonized. Going back to much pre-colonial, pre-Columbian, stories and ways of thinking about the world, about ancestors, about nature, about just everything that, that has to do with living life. There's certainly a lot of that.
And when it comes to Africa, for example, it's funny that you mentioned Africa, because that another one of my triangle points is space. With my focus in Latin America on space, I look at a lot at things like what African nations are doing in space. There's a group that's very active on LinkedIn that's called Space in Africa, and they do a newsletter. (https://www.linkedin.com/company/spaceinafrica/posts/?feedView=all)
And so I've chatted with the folks over there to get a better feel for how they collect their data and how they made their contacts and how they track the happenings to get a better feel. And to really start thinking about more of a Global South space initiative as well.
It's been really interesting for me having grown up in the United States. And so I have always been bifurcated, because at home everything was Spanish language, and Uruguayan traditions, and foods, and things like that.
And then as soon as you walk out the door, it’s very much not; it's very much red, white and blue traditional American concepts, the pilgrims, Thanksgiving and 4th of July and the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence and all these things. I knew a lot, but really now digging in and learning so much more about these specifics (about Latin America) that I've been studying over the last few years.
It's interesting. It's become a bit of a yin yang. So yeah, two very different things happening in my headsimultaneously.
Peter Hayward: I would think, if I use a metaphor, you are an amphibian in the sense that you've got these two distinct mediums, obviously the Latin American and the American, and you've also got the other.
Aspect, which is of course is this notion of the future and the present that, yeah, the particular way that America's constructed a lot of its views on the future. For years we had a thing called the World Future Society as future singular, which was quite a shock when you came from one of the European or critical traditions.
I know Houston certainly has gone to a lot of trouble to put the S on the end of future, but for a long while within the American system, there was a singular of future. It was American, it looked like Star Trek or something else. The world Fair. Yeah. And then over in this distinct culture, cultures, plural, cultures of Latin America then they'll, as you're describing both indigenous culture and the culture that emerged after colonization.
These quite distinct ideas of how the future is how time operates. Are you equally amphibian in trying to bring the two together and have the ideas of, the monoculture of American futures and the, I would imagine, the poly got futures of of South America.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah,and part of the challenge has just been learning about all those different voices, certainly because like you said it tends to be a bit more monolithic, certainly in the United States and to some extent north America and Europe. And you do have this sort of kind of like a through line, right?
We started here and we're going that way and everything is progress and concepts like Manifest Destiny is rearing, its head again. But just this idea of progress and what is progress and who defines that and is it a progress where we are more satisfied with our life?
Is it a progress where we have more things? Is it a progress where we're more consumer minded? Is it a progress where we are more climate conscious? So there's actually, so there's obviously some factions there with the Western point of view. But certainly, for Latin America and around the world, there's certainly many different views. When you start thinking about how different cultures, different societies view, history in the passage of time, whether it's a straight line going up or straight across or down or it's a wave or it's circular; and all those things really influence how you look at the future.
If you come from a culture where you believe that history is cyclical, that sooner or later things are going to change, I don't have to feel that there's no hope because things are bad now, but they always change. So, whether they change in my lifetime or not that's not for me to say, you start thinking about ancestral thinking and thinking about your descendants and things like that then I think that changes the perspective a good bit as well.
Peter Hayward: And again, I don't want to generalize Latin America because it's not one thing. It's exactly, yeah, it's many things. But when I first encountered a lot of Latin American ideas, it actually wasn't in futures. It was actually in politics. And what struck me in the study of countries like Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Columbia, Europe, was how actively and dynamically politically their histories had been.
They weren't all following and singing from the same hymn book. They had radical ideas. You saw swings of politics. One of my heroes was in the was in Chile with a end day and where Stafford beer came over and worked with a end day. To bring cybernetics to bear on the Chilean economy. And so I would imagine if I can generalize to call the Latin American approach to politics and social change, quite innovative, creative, but that also creates an a naturally innovative and creative side to the way they do futures work.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah, I think so. The conversations that I have with the folks that are doing futures down there surprises even me to a great extent. Because again, I, coming from North America myself, I would say, I know the language and I understand the concepts, but it's not something that has been as fully ingrained, obviously, as it has with them.
And it really, it's a fascinating place because you've got so many different cultures and you've got so many centuries of intermingling of cultures that that it really is complex certainly to try to do anythingas a group can be challenging, I'm sure, but also extremely rewarding.
And to your point about it not being one kind of homogenous culture, what is really interesting is being an immigrant, being a Latin American immigrant, it certainly feels homogenous when you live in a part of the country where there aren't that many people who speak your native tongue and you get together with other folks.
My father never really learned English. My grandmother never learned English. We had many family friends who were Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian. Colombian: my parents' best friends and one of my best friends, I've known him literally since he was born because he's a couple years younger than I am.
They're Colombian. For me growing up, if you spoke Spanish, we were kind of all the same.
We didn't all eat the same food or what have you, but we were the same, we were the same flavor of other…
Peter Hayward: I like that. It's a great phrase.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: And so picking that apart a little bit has been fascinatingin a positive way, it's really, understand the differences in those cultures and really understand their histories. It is very enlightening. Just even my own national history, Uruguay is essentially the only country in Latin America, the Caribbean, pretty much certainly in, in South America, where no indigenous language is spoken regularly and no indigenous practices are regularly practiced.
There are some folks who are descendants of the Charrua that have lived there for centuries who are working on bringing some of that back. But it's so fragmented and it's been so thoroughly damaged, I guess is the way to put it. It’s hard to bring back their language, which is very fragmented.
There's not that much left of their culture and their practices. Also there were a couple of instances that, aside from killing a chunk of the population also drove them underground. They were there but they weren't really talked about and they weren't really practicing and, and so now after about a century and a half they're working on bringing that back. There's a lot of interesting things happening and a lot of work being done to resurrect and resuscitate.
Peter Hayward: So can we lean in to, given the majority of people listening to future pod aren't certainly across what's going on in Latin America, and it's probably a big question for you to handle in a podcast format, but can you kinda, for the listeners who aren't really aware, can you do a kind of quick sweep through Latin America to indicate.
The foresight work that's happening, some of the critical distinctions from the futures and foresight concepts or approaches and the similarities between what people are used to in, in Europe, America, Australia, and Latin. But also what's interesting, what's exciting?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. A little bit I've been dabbling.
I've been meeting with some folks down there, haven't done a ton of projects with them per se. Like the projects that I've done primarily have been around things like futurism. So it's been a little bit more around speculative futures. The folks I've met with a lot of it is still organization.
It's really looking beyond. There's a whole bunch of folks doing foresight work, but a lot of it is really organization and looking beyond just, oh, we have three or four people at this university, or maybe a dozen people if it's a bigger university doing this type of work. And now there's two organizations ALAF and that is is doing that. (https://alaf.global/)
And the other one, whose name ex escapes me, so it's gonna take me a second. You remember? Don't worry. Yeah, no. So ALAF is one, which is the Association of Latin American Futurists. And then the other one their name is Spanish. It's s which is essentially the Latin American Futures association or web. (Red Latinoamericana de Futuros https://redlatamfuturos.com/)
And so these groups are really looking to bring, a more unified voice to foresight for the region. Obviously it's going to be a diverse voice, but that's a lot of what's going on with that. And again, a lot of it is happening at the university level and I don't know that there's as much, there's some, there's, there is freelancers definitely freelance.
I don't know if there are as many people in Latin America calling themselves futurists whether one would consider them. There's a whole argument of what is a futurist, all right. That's happening. But so I don't know if there are that many armchair futurists down there, but there's certainly coming out of the universities there's a good bit.
They're working on indigenous related projects. They're working in, of course, it depends too on the country.
Peter Hayward: which, which of the countries that really it'd say, are dominant in the. In the Latin American future space.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Certainly Brazil has a very large presence.
Argentina. Obviously the larger countries have a larger presence. I know a few Uruguayan futurists as well. But with a country of only three and a half million people, there's not going to be that many. There's some interesting work coming out of Chile and Peru and Columbia and certainly Ecuador.
Peter Hayward: So one thing I was struck, Fernando, was when I used to attend the World Futures. Conferences in America, and they usually have a cocktail party before the conference starts, and you'd go in there and get a drink and rub shoulders with obviously, the delegates who often were just futurists and people you knew.
But I also met a lot of political figures from Latin America, people at the either junior minister level secretary level, and for them coming to hang around with futurists. These were senior people in government that were there to find out about futures and to find ways to, and it seemed to me that in those political, yeah, both Central America and Latin America, there was certainly a political.
Willingness to find out more about futures, even less so than what we find in Australia and America, so to speak, in the political systems. That, is that a fair call?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. I think there's definitely an openness to it. As a matter of fact, one of the projects I just recently finished working on wasn't for a Latin American government, but it was for UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme.
And they're putting together a report on Democracy and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2040. And so I worked with their futures team and wrote some scenarios for a few different flavors of possible governments in Latin America in 2040. So obviously we had some that were a bit more heavy handed and some that were a bit more transformational.
But those are specifically geared towards governments, towards leadership whether it's heads of state or folks in their legislatures or what have you, as well as people in business. Anyone else who might be interested; NGOs as well. But definitely the main audience for that is government folks. Because those are the people that are really trying to figure out where things are going next. And certainly with the upheaval and the changes happening in the worldany possible insights into the future I think can be helpful.
I think also it's important to note that there was a big futures meeting in Uruguay last year that was hosted by the government there. I think there's a lot of focus in Latin America on futures, and I think there's starting to get to be a bit more focus of futures on Latin America.
Peter Hayward: So Fernando, third question I like to ask the guests is what are you paying attention to? Obviously the professional side of what you do, but particularly what are the emerging futures that you are very excited by, energized, by interest by that you follow.
You've already mentioned that space for you is a big one and speculative futures. So maybe you want to talk a bit about those some more, and particularly what you are paying attention for, what you are looking for.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: We'd been talking a little bit before about decolonization and really thinking about how colonial influences have impacted various parts of the world.
I think I see more of that happening. I know that some of the folks I talk to, not necessarily in the futures field, they're very sensitive to the term decolonization and I don't have an issue with it, but I think there's certainly some perspectives that are very western that need to be rethought.
So that is, I think, something that I'm seeing more and more of. And I see it happening not just in academia, but I see it a little bit more heading towards the street level and folks kind of seeing that they don't necessarily have to focus on living the life that is promoted, by more western commercialism and things like that.
I think the other thing is we're seeing more and more of bleeding through the borders. Some really creative, interesting things that are happening in the global south that we're starting to see come across into more traditional Western, culture and when you go to places like Africa or Latin America, and I'm familiar a little bit with the financial stuff in Africa as well.
There's things that have been issues, like financing and bankability and being able to stand up small businesses and being able to move money around and things like that. Things that, in Western culture, we take for granted a little bit and you see some of these solutions that are happening and they're really not even thinking outside the box. There's no box there. It's something that you look at it and go, that's a really brilliant idea. And I don't know that anybody in the US or even in Europe would've thought of that just because it's not something that that we would've come at that way necessarily.
From that perspective everything again from FinTech simple things like micro loans to even financing projects that, are going to fail, but that are going to be able to provide some incentive to get other things going. And just looking at things from that perspective is so radically different than this culture of “let's succeed”.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think you've gotta look at, I, it's a combination of necessity. And innovation. But they also, because they haven't got the history and the development and investment in the past, they really are free to go and try anything that they haven't done before. And they're bound by what is the way of doing it?
Because they haven't done it. I look at what happened with mobile phones in Africa, and so as soon as the technology arrived, people found ways to use mobile phones. We haven't thought to use mobile phones. I think Africa got to financing via phone much faster than the actual financing companies did.
I think they were being used to transfer money and operate as a currency kind of thing, as well as a communication medium.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah, no, absolutely. I there's so much app-based not just commerce, but communication going on. In ways that we wouldn't necessarily expect coming from a Western perspective.
I think it's interesting that there certainly is history there. The thing is, there's sometimes in a lot of cases history that either they want to move away from or moving towards; it's difficult, right? Because being able to take care of your population in your community, in today's world is dominated by western financing models really and by western communication structures.
And you have to figure out a way to work sometimes within that structure and sometimes outside of it, but always trying, I guess not to work completely against it, just because it's the way the game is played to some extent. And going back to the question too is as far as weak signals, I think one of the things that we're going to see more and more of is cultures and countries taking more control of their resources and their commodities.
I think we've got five centuries of sort of an extraction mentality. And I think there's going to be more and more of, okay, what can we do with these materials? I know that I think it was Nigeria that they're looking to, spin up more and more copper processing, and I want to say it's Nigeria.
If it's not Nigeria, I apologize. But it was a country that's rich in copper, and up until now, 90 something percent of their copper has left the country, unrefined and unprocessed. And so they're looking to do more and more of that because what winds up happening, and it's happened in Africa, it certainly happens in Latin America, these raw materials go out at a fraction the cost, often sweetheart deals and then they get processed and then they come back asmobile phones at a thousand or $2,000 apiece. And I know eventually their goal is to refine it enough to where they can start building components themselves to the point where they're talking about eventually starting to manufacture cars locally.
Obviously you have to have, if you don't have a Futurist, at least you have a future vision for things like that. So I think there's going to be more and more that of saying, “Hey, you know what? These materials are ours. And rather than getting, pennies on the dollar for the material, the raw material, let's figure out how we can build the infrastructure and do more of this ourselves and export more finished goods, or at least partially finished goods.”
Peter Hayward: you see it as an economics that we wanna capture value in the country, but at the same time, you've got the old co the old economics thing, that if you are a resource exporter and that is basically a short track to real social problems.
It's called the curse. It absolutely is. Yes. If you're Absolutely, and so I would've thought now that people have looked at people like Nigeria and others that have had, Angola, that have had tremendous natural resources, but they've actually been a curse for the country. Yeah. For the way that those assets have actually caused the country to develop in ways that actually hasn't been to the benefit of the people who live there. So I think there's a couple of pressures for it. I agree too. I think that there'll be a strong push and whether it's nationalism, whether it's governments, just simply saying, we're gonna make it hard for you.
I think this also gets tied up. Your colleague from Houston, I've got a podcast coming out shortly with Andy about his book beyond Capitalism. I would've thought that the capitalism journey in Africa and Latin America would be interesting as well because they would be pushing capitalism in ways that almost they're the experiments for what capitalism could be.
Would you say.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah and I think there have been unfortunately a lot of those experiments that haven't been successful and it's difficult to say whether they would've been successful, whether they would've been good, whether they would've been bad because there's been a lot of intervention as well.
Certainly Latin America and Africa have been Cold War playgrounds for the last 70 years or so. Lots of opportunities there for proxy wars and you were mentioning Allende earlier, so certainly a victim of that. So I think left to our own devices a little bit in the Global South I think we can come up with some very creative and very different ways to approach something that may be very a different flavor of capitalism. And certainly when you talk about things, when you're looking at indigenous cultures, you can have a lot more to talk about commons.
When you start talking about commons, lots of capitalists get very antsy. And even though there's certainly ways to do it that shouldn't be an issue. And certainly with the technologies that we have that are spinning up and with the resources that we have available, we should be able to do something that's a net positive for everyone.
But, old ways die hard. If you look at what's happening in Ecuador right now and there's lawsuits going on. The indigenous cultures are fighting furiously to keep control of their lands, and the government is actively trying to remove their control so that they can sell extractive rights.
So yeah, certainly. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Let's talk about space because you talk about Absolutely. Space and speculative fictions and for much of my childhood space was always a contest where it was always America and it was always the dominant superpowers that were gonna be the people who. Controlled space, and I suggest it's not quite emerging that way right now.
Is it?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: No, it absolutely isn't. Absolutely isn't. Yeah. There's certainly new players. As I mentioned earlier, NASA, it looks like about 20% of their workforce is gone through voluntary or semi voluntary or forced retirement, however you want to look at it. They're talking about removing active satellites for… for reasons.
And, with Russia, Russia's been launching Soyuz now for decades. And so they haven't really had much in the way of new technology. And those were the two big players. And with their…dalliances I don't know what their future in space is going to look like. The Chinese are quietly doing what the Chinese do.
They've got their Tiangong Space Station. They've got their space station up, so they've got a pretty continual presence in space now as well that not that many folks talk about, the Chinese are moving forward, as they do and they're doing well.
India. The ISRO has got an active space program. They've launched quite a few times, and then JAXA in Japan and ESA in Europe, but then you've got all the commercial players. You've got SpaceX, Boeing, unfortunately they've had their issues with their Starliner, and you've got, you've got the Billionaires Row because you've got Bezos with Blue Origin and Musk, SpaceX, and, Virgin Galactic is still floating around there a little bit.
Peter Hayward: there must be some, so there must be some wild scenarios that you are speculating on. What are just some of the really crazy ones. What are the real, wild card scenarios that you think are possible, maybe preposterous, but still possible?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: It's interesting, right? Certainly looking at Latin America, one of the things that recently popped in my head, because I had been looking a lot into countries like Chile really looking to nail down their mineral rights and take better control of extraction of their resources.
So I thought there's a lot of talk lately about asteroid mining. And every once in a while something will pop up and say, oh, this asteroid is enough to make everybody on earth a billionaire. That's not how economics works, but whatever the whole point is that it's full of, whatever it's full of titanium or something.
But the thought of maybe having a commercial space venture in Latin America where you've got a conglomerate of countries working with some commercial space ventures andmining experts from Chile, let's say, and you wind up almost with a, and here we go, speculative fiction where you kind of wind up with almost like an Armageddon situation where you've got the folks that are really good at mining and the folks that are really good at launching things and some governments that are really good at working together. Maybe they put something together to go up and go mine some asteroids and bring back those resources back to the continent is really good at mining and maybe, do something like that.
So there's one that's been bouncing around my head a little bit because there is, '
Peter Hayward: cause there are launch, 'cause there is a good launch window in in what you would, what is, it would be Northern Columbia, Venezuela. That's kinda where the kind of launch window for Latin America would be.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. Yes and no. You've got in French Guyana, you've got the European Space Agency's got their launch facility and little bit further, south from that in Brazil.
Peter Hayward: French or is that gonna
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: That I don't know. I, it's interesting. I just, I did see a recent headline that they are opening that up to other launchers, because up until now it's mainly been the ESA that's been launchingfrom there, their Ariane rockets, but now they're allowing other commercial launch launches to happen from there. Brazil is in the process of essentially spinning up a whole city essentially for space launches. And those are, again, those are great for equatorial launches.
Now, not everything is equatorial and as systems improve and you're able to move your orbits a little bit and launch in different trajectories you have more options. For example, I'm in Florida, I used to live about 40 minutes from Kennedy Space Center, so I would go out my front door and watch rockets go up which was really cool.
But we're nowhere near the equator. And I'll talk about it a little bit more later, but I am now working with the government of Uruguay because they are in the roadmap phase of creating their own space agency. And so they're looking to create a launch facility on the east coast of the country, which is essentially latitude-wise, it's pretty much very similar to Florida.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. What,
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Minus the hurricanes and it's tornadoes. So the weather's actually a little bit better. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: And what's, what's, australia's been talking about, getting more serious about establishing a its own space agency as well. It sounds odd to people who are only familiar with space agencies like the Russian and American but where is the impetus coming for smaller countries to actually have their own space agency?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: I think a lot of it is Space 2.0 and New Space because there are so many commercial players now, and there's so much new technology and there's so much miniaturization that you have lots of opportunity. You don't have to spend billions. First of all, you don't have to spend any money to launch anything.
If you're a country, you can spend a fairly reasonable amount of money and create a facility as long as you, you have the logistics in terms of good ports, good roads, good infrastructure, stable economy, stable government,
Peter Hayward: the people will come to
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola:
Decent weather. Absolutely. And so what do you need? You need the logistics, right? You need to have a way to get the materials there. You need to have a place to store them, to process them, to prepare them. And whether that is a vehicle assembly type facility, whether it's clean rooms to work on satellites whether it is just the technology involved in prepping the materials, or if you're even talking about crew, then you're talking about facilities, being able to house them, to have crew sleep and train.
And then fuel is another important thing, right? You've got various types of fuel that are used for launches. So you need to have that type of infrastructure in place. So then you're talking to local and national government agencies around things like handling and transporting of volatile fuels and things like that.
Peter Hayward: So it's, so it becomes I mean it becomes a national product to build it to Yeah. If you build it, they'll come. It's a Yeah, absolutely. A way of attracting either supporting indigenous industry or bringing in people that simply you are the best at launching this type of payload into space.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. And realistically it could conceivably be something along the lines of, our country happens to have a really good location for launching and it's got good weather and we've got good infrastructure, so we're going to build this place where you could launch from. And then you've got another country that maybe, their universities have been focusing on, on, weather satellites and things like that.
So they want to launch these weather satellites, but they don't have a place to launch from. And maybe you've got a commercial partner that's happy to launch them for them. So yeah, I think you're going to wind up seeing a lot more conglomeration and lots of partnerships happening.
For sure.
Peter Hayward: So Fernando we're getting towards the end of the podcast. I know you want to talk some more about speculative fictions as well. So do you wanna just maybe talk to listeners about that?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Peter. A few years back I started digging into the idea of Latin American Futurism. And as I mentioned earlier, I partnered with Ana Paula Medeiros from Brazil on a presentation about Latin American Futurisms.
And she's very knowledgeable on the subject,so I would say more than partnering, I kind of almost hosted. While she did a good chunk of the presentation - I love giving her credit because she just knows it, it's such a great topic for her and she knows so much about it. And then from there, little by little it started blossoming.
I started learning more about these different speculative visions of the future from around the world. There's Indigenous futurisms, like Amazon Futurism, there's certainly Indigenous futurism coming out of Colombia, out of Peru, Mexico. And then even within the United States, you've got futurisms that are connected to Latin America, for example, but they have much more of a blended flavor, from the immigrant experience.
There's some great Indigenous futures from North American Indigenous peoples and certainly both US and Canadian that really what these all have in common is really blend a lot of traditional concepts and traditional thinking with different visions of the future.
And as I've learned as I've researched more and more, this is essentially something everybody in the world thinks about the future and everybody in the world looks at the future through the lens of their culture. You've got futurisms in Africa that aren't Afrofuturism per se, because Afrofuturism tends to be much more of a, an American or North American construct.
So you've got different flavors of futurism coming out of Africa. The Gulf States have their own visions of the future and within their cultural framework and certainly especially the wealthier ones have some really different ways of looking at the future. Asia, India, the Indigenous cultures in Australia and New Zealand as well.
I've really been going down some rabbit holes with this, and I'm in the process of putting together a syllabus for an elective course that would be teaching what I am calling global futurism. And the term that I use that comes out of the Routledge handbook that came out last year is “Co-Futurisms”. (https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-CoFuturisms/Taylor-LavenderIII-Dillon-Chattopadhyay/p/book/9781032557649?srsltid=AfmBOorjZB0qSoK9hy3-QDyvkovCcZJ45Op_sFIjrdI5Pas4N1M59oWe)
And I really like that because they used to be referred to as “alternative futurisms”, but alternative obviously means that there's a right future and then there's an alternative future. There's a quote unquote normal future, and then there's an alternative future. So kind of getting away from that.
And they're all co-futurisms because they are all equally correct and equally of value. And I think where this really comes in certainly as an elective for a Foresight program is what we talked about earlier, the fact that we tend to look at things through the lens of the culture that we grew up in.
And with Foresight having been so traditionally dominated by white Western males for the most part. Obviously, it's a much more diverse field now, but still to continue to move away from that I think it's a great opportunity to spend a semester looking at the ways in which different cultures see the future and themselves in it, and their ancestors in it, and the world in it.
And then how to apply those necessarily to your future's work. Yeah. Just understanding, right?
Peter Hayward: imagine, Fernando, it's a challenge in a lot of ways. While obviously Futuring makes perfect sense and understanding how we all look at the idea of the future through our culture as we, it's also a challenge, I would imagine, to not have it so that the ideas coming from other cultures are simply reapplied to the dominant culture and basically acquired and made into theirs rather than the ideas sit within their culture.
We can learn from them, we can learn about them, but it's not our job to just simply cherry pick them and then claim them as ours. Again, that's just colonialism. 2.0 isn't it?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah, I guess it depends on how you were to take it. If you're just going to take it and incorporate a piece of it or just use maybe some of the symbolism of it, but really keep the messages
I think that could definitely be that could be a cause for concern. I'm looking at it in two ways. One, I'm looking at it as a way for everyone to have a better understanding about how everyone else thinks about the future. And so when you are speaking with someone from another culture, then you know you've got some idea, maybe a little bit better of where they're coming from, obviously being sensitive to it and not assuming that it's homogenous, but I agree, yeah, that is something that, we want to make sure that we're cognizant of that, that we're not necessarily maybe internalizing it and then using it as a surface or symbolic piece that isn't necessarily sincere.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I get, if I give you a metaphor that if you, again, in Australia, I'll just use an example, is that with indigenous art, now indigenous art is done obviously by indigenous people conveying indigenous ideas of culture and time and everything else.
But then these pieces of art then get taken and traded as art pieces. Then they get, and then they have the dealers who pass them around, and invariably they're sold for things of tremendous value, but almost none of that value passed down to the people who created it. So you almost have the idea, the originator and then.
The dominant culture takes it and does something with it that is theirs and not shared. So I would've thought that the whole point of futuring is the sharing of ideas, the sharing of learning, the sharing of understanding.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. And really, that is the point of what I'm doing. I'm trying to put together a program that is going to expose people to the way that other cultures think about the future and not really necessarily have them use it within their own work, per se, but just have an understanding of it. Because again, if we're not familiar with it then how do we even speak to it? If you're going to speak to someone from that culture how do you speak with them if you don't even really have a good feeling for how they see the future?
And again, because it's a speculative fiction class primarily it's also exploring those fictions just from the sheer delight of exploring fiction as well. When you look at things like (Liu Cixin’s) The Three Body Problem, it's very mind blowing to the Western mind because it's not the way that, that we normally view the world, so that's very true.
And then there's different blends and it's interesting because, looking at things like, there's a book called Amazonfuturism written, by a Brazilian author. And it's a very interesting book, and it's completely speculative fiction. It involves interdimensional travel and it's on an alternate timeline.
And there is an invasion from Europe to the Americas, but the indigenous characters are a bit more what you would consider solar punk maybe. And then the invading characters are more what you might consider steampunk. It's such a perfect blend of colonial because it's such a mishmash.
It's, you've got this person who is indigenous who wrote this book that is celebrating his indigenous culture and some of the mystical aspects. And again, like I said, multidimensional, but then at the same time, you've got themes of solarpunk and steampunk.
And it sounds like
Peter Hayward: Creole. Sounds like Creole futures.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. So it is, and depending on what you read, some things are, I don't want to use the word pure, but certainly a bit less blended than others.
Peter Hayward: And will that, is that likely to pop out somewhere in an, in a, in an institution?
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. Like I said, I've got the skeleton of the syllabus put together and I'm still building up the coursework. I'm looking to have that completed later this year. I presented it at the Houston Foresight spring gathering fiftieth anniversary.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. And got really good feedback on it. Whether there'll be a spot for it as an elective remains to be seen. But there's other options as well whether it becomes a masterclass or what have you. But yeah, certainly looking to make it available.
Peter Hayward: Tom Lombardo, as he created Yeah. His own science fiction course.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Oh, love that course
Peter Hayward: So there's a, there's actually now in the world of digital, you could actually create your own course. Yeah, absolutely. And actually run it as an online course with readings and and discussions.
It's, yeah, that's the whole exciting thing with digital now. It is that the channels for getting information out and people participating is so open.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: Yeah. So I just, it's a matter of completing, finishing, putting it together and then nailing it down. The other thing I've considered doing is if there were, for example, in the US we have what are called HBCUs, which are historically black colleges and universities that during segregation, they were specifically for African American students.
But now they're, they're open, but they're still historically so they tend to have a higher population. So I thought one of those universities perhaps. Yeah. And shift a little bit more to be a little bit more of a, maybe an Afrofuturism in perspective and say, okay, this is, it's a, obviously everybody's had their vision of the future forever, but, in terms of giving it a name and really giving it a place in the world, Afrofuturism has become a bit of the dominant one in terms of recognition. So I think maybe having that as a centerpiece and then saying, okay and here are some of the other things that, that are similar to it or have blossomed from it, I think that could be a little bit of a different type of course, but also another interesting elective and maybe more in a social studies or literature format.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Cool. Look, I'm gonna wrap it. Fernando, it's been great. I haven't met you before and I was this came as a recommendation.
Someone said You should get this guy on FuturePodt. Take it as people find you interesting and I've certainly found it an interesting conversation. And thanks for spending some time with the FuturePod community.
Fernando Gutierrez Olaizola: No, thank you for having me. I, yeah I feel like you said we have met before and I feel like I know you from listening to the podcast.
Peter Hayward: Thanks,mate.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Fernando and that you were surprised and learned something about the state of Latin American futures and that you will check out the people Fernando spoke of. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.