Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who spoke at the Smith Center in January, has predicted the imminent next stage of evolution — what he calls “the singularity.”

Here, humans will organically bond with their machines, and those machine/humans will become self-evolving, allowing us to transcend “the biological limitations of our brains.” 2029 being the year when he thinks this will begin.

And cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said the human race is doomed due to its own devices, unless it gets off Earth and into outer space. Quickly. “Our genetic code carries aggressive instincts. We won’t survive another 1,000 years (on) our fragile planet,” he has said.

Of course we currently don’t have the know-how to last indefinitely in space. But with Kurzweil’s promise of the exponential growth of nanotechnology (tiny machines that can turn humans, and machines, into god-like entities), maybe there is hope. […]