Will we have robot lovers? What will flying cars look like? Can we live forever? Why do women wear lipstick? Will computers talk to us? When will cars drive themselves? When can we have holidays in space and what will it be like?
With such questions do editor Wilson da Silva and publisher Kylie Ahern plan to pique reader interest in their popular science magazine, COSMOS, which will be launched in June.
But the more pressing query for the pair is: Why will they succeed when all other locally produced pop-sci titles have failed?
Da Silva, who is president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, has extensive experience in the field, including 2 1/2 years as a reporter on the ABC science show Quantum and previous editing jobs on 21C and Newton. That the television show and both magazines folded does not dampen his confidence.
"More people go to science museums than rock concerts, so it's a sizable market," he says, pointing out that the ABC's Catalyst (which replaced Quantum) is watched by more than 750,000 people a week and overseas mags such as New Scientist, Discover and Scientific American have found footholds here. (New Scientist, which costs $6.50, has audited sales of 21,205 copies a week and a readership of 257,000.)
"The market out there is large, it has just not been properly tapped," da Silva says. "This category does really well on television, on radio, in books and particularly online, but in magazines no one has ever found the right formula. And we think we have."
The key, he believes, is "to be an intelligent companion on the road to discovery, not too highbrow but not talking down to people". COSMOS will be a 112-page glossy, sourcing editorial from around the world on topics including art, design, exploration and archaeology, "the kind of thing people enjoy on the Discovery Channel". Its target market is "anyone who has an interest".
Da Silva and Ahern came up with the idea for the mag in May last year and in July pitched it to biotech entrepreneur Alan Finkel, who last year sold his Axon Instruments to the California-based Molecular Devices Corp.
He loved it and said to come back with a business plan. By November we were renting office space," da Silva says. "He is commercially savvy - he drilled through those numbers like a laser - and he thinks there's a market."
The three are partners in a new company called Luna Media. Da Silva says Finkel will give the magazine time: "He understands that magazines build, that people take a while to get used to them. We don't want to burden a magazine with expectations it can't meet."
Luna hopes for a circulation debut of 20,000-plus copies followed by steady growth to somewhere north of 40,000 copies. The cover price has yet to be revealed.
