Hear a live recording of The Future of Exploration with award-winning journalist and bestselling author Tim Marshall, interviewed by Matt Pycroft.

Tim Marshall is one of the UK’s most respected geopolitical commentators and the author of Prisoners of Geography. With decades of experience reporting from conflict zones and global hotspots, his work reveals how geography continues to shape politics, power, and the future of nations.In this conversation, Tim turns his attention beyond Earth, exploring the emerging geopolitics of space. As nations and private companies race to expand their presence beyond our planet, what does exploration mean in this new frontier?

Hosted by Matt Pycroft, this new RGS podcast series is an inquiry into what it means to explore in a rapidly changing world. We’ll speak with leading thinkers, scientists, and explorers to examine both the practical frontiers and the philosophical questions that define modern discovery.

The series asks what’s left to explore, how exploration is changing, and why it matters more now than ever before – a conversation that will challenge assumptions, broaden perspective, and help shape how we understand the unknown in the decades ahead.

How much of our own planet have we truly explored?

In this episode of The Future of Exploration, ocean explorer and Nekton Mission Director Oliver Steeds challenges one of our biggest assumptions that the final frontier lies in space. Instead, he argues that the greatest unknown is much closer to home, in the vast, largely unexplored depths of our oceans.

Oliver reveals why we have mapped only a fraction of the seabed, why most marine species remain undiscovered, and how these hidden ecosystems play a critical role in regulating the Earth’s climate and sustaining global food systems. From extraordinary deep-sea discoveries to AI-powered species identification, he explores how new technologies and global collaboration are transforming our ability to understand life beneath the waves.

If we have discovered less than 10% of ocean life, what might still be out there, and can we find it before it disappears?

What does it mean to explore a world that already feels mapped? In this conversation, Tom Allen, explorer, author, and the Society’s current Expeditions and Fieldwork Manager, frames the future of exploration as curiosity in action – the ongoing practice of looking closer, asking better questions, and sharing what we find.

Drawing on years of slow travel, expeditions, fieldwork, and translating these experiences into books, films, even actual trails to follow, Tom argues that the future of exploration lies less in going further and more in going deeper: into places, into cultures, and through that into our understanding of the world today. From citizen science apps to mapping ancient footpaths, he explores how digital technology and global collaboration are reshaping who gets to explore and what effect it has on the world.

The episode takes on the legacy of exploration head-on, highlighting the problematic nature of its historic ties to privilege, extraction and individual heroism and the attention still given to this narrative. Tom envisages a more inclusive, participatory future where anyone can contribute to knowledge and where efforts are judged by their value to society.

Set against a backdrop of global change, this is a timely rethink of exploration as a shared, purposeful practice, and an invitation to see yourself as part of it.