Interstellar travel, hypercomputers, space mining – they all sound like the stuff of Star Trek and Buck Rogers, but they're among the latest predictions from one of Britain's most eminent scientists. And the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, is better qualified than most to gaze into the future. The astrophysicist and cosmologist offers glimpses of a "post-human" universe in an essay, "To the Ends of the Universe", written for an forthcoming book.
He says subjects that were once in the realm of science fiction are now subject to serious scientific debate. And he warns that humanity is not the "terminal branch of an evolutionary tree" and could yet evolve into organisms capable of travelling to other galaxies. Rather than taking millions of years, he says, post-human evolution will happen much faster due to technological advances and genetic modification. He suggests that during the coming century the entire Solar System will be explored and mapped by flotillas of "tiny robotic craft".
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