Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the future has been amazingly accurate. “Within 20 years,” he said, “we’ll have largely replaced fossil fuels.”

As for the waste left behind by old industries, Kurzweil said that information technologies will after we move to environmentally friendly, renewable forms of energy, nanotechnology can clean up environmental impact from industrial technologies.

“We’ll recycle physical products using nanotechnology to reorganize the molecules which are useful in the new devices we need,” he said. “If we can reorganize matter and energy at the molecular level, we can recycle usefully.” […]