Fourteen years ago, I sat down with an Italian engineer who gave his novels away for free.

Marco Santini was not chasing royalties. He was chasing readers.

His book The Alpha Centauri Project imagines the 24th century split three ways: humans, artificial intelligences, and souls, the digitized minds of people who refused to stay dead. Their interests do not align. Their futures collide. An interstellar voyage becomes the only way to avoid a war.

It reads like a thriller. It lands like a warning.

What stayed with me was not the plot. It was his stance on the future.

Pessimistic scenarios can always exist. With rationality, optimistic ones can be created.

That line cuts against both camps that dominate the conversation today. The doomers who see only collapse. The boosters who see only liftoff. Marco refused both. He argued that optimism is not a mood you inherit, it is a discipline you practice.

We talked #transhumanism, #ScienceFiction, and what it means to digitize a human being after death. We also talked about why an author would hand his life’s work to strangers for nothing.

His answer surprised me. I left it in the interview.

This is one of 300+ long-form conversations in the #SingularityFM archive, and some of the 14-year-old ones read sharper now than the day I recorded them. This is one of those.

Watch the full conversation [ https://snglrty.co/4oKLtbi](https://snglrty.co/4oKLtbi)

Marco Santini — author of The Alpha Centauri Project and Evolution: The Future, is my new guest on my Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.