"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to more than 100 of the world's most influential minds. Exhilarating, visionary, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, their responses provide an eye-opening road map of our near future.

Preface: the Edge question -- Introduction/ Daniel C. Dennett -- Evolution changes everything / Scott Sampson -- DNA: writing the software of life / J. Craig Venter -- A change in who we are / Pz Myers -- The robotic moment / Sherry Turkle -- The brain-machine interface / James Geary -- Breaking the species barrier / Richard Dawkins -- Slippery expectations / Corey S. Powell -- The full flourishing of solar technology / Ian McEwan -- Personal genomics-or maybe not / Steven Pinker -- Our genes are not our fate / Dean Ornish -- A forebrain for the world mind / W. Daniel Hillis -- Future as present: a final experiment / Ernst Poppel -- But we shall all be changed / Frank J. Tipler -- The credit crunch for materialism / Rupert Sheldrake -- The laptop quantum computer / Donald D. Hoffman -- Undo the present; recall the past / Seth Lloyd -- Rounding an endless vicious circle / Alan Alda -- The idea of negative and iatrogenic science / Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- The feeling that things will get worse / Brian Eno -- Homesteading in Hilbert Space / Frank Wilczek -- Revelation / Stefano Boeri -- The discovery of intelligent life from somewhere else / Douglas Rushkoff -- A cure for humankind's existential loneliness / Paul Saffo -- AI and intellectual mastery / John Tooby and Leda Cosmides -- Avoiding Doomsday / Alexander Vilenkin -- Escaping the gravity well / David Dalrymple -- Synthetic biology with interplanetary reach / Dimitar Sasselov -- Life (or not) on Mars / Rodney Brooks -- A separate origin for life / Robert Shapior -- Shadow biosphere / Paul Davies -- Laboratory Earth colonies / John Gottman -- Interstellar viruses / George Dyson -- Computers are the new microscope / Terrence Sejnowski -- Silicon immortality: downloading consciousness into computers / David Eagleman -- The implementation of life in engineered materials / Neil Gershenfeld -- Decoding the brain / Gary Marcus -- Cheap cryonic suspension of brains / Bart Kosko -- Superintelligence / Nick Bostrom -- Becoming robotic / Gregory Paul -- The synchronization of brains / Jamshed Bharucha -- Thinking small: understanding the brain / Irene Pepperberg -- Controlling the brain's plasticity / Leo M. Chalupa -- Never-ending childhood / Alison Gopnik -- The ebb of memory / Kevin Slavin -- Artificial self-replicating meme machines / Susan Blackmore -- Malthusian information famine / Charles Seife -- Reading minds / Kenneth W. Ford -- True lie detection / Sam Harris -- Radiotelepathy: direct communication from brain to brain / Freeman Dyson -- Little changes make the biggest difference / Barry C. Smith -- Neuronally expressed messages / Peter Schwartz -- A new kind of mind / Kevin Kelly -- The age of reputation / Gloria Orrigi -- Cracking open the lockbox of talent / Howard Gardner -- Culture / Timothy Taylor -- Molecular manufacturing / Ed Regis -- Resizing ourselves / Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster -- The actual, the possible, and the unimaginable / Marc D. Hauser -- Computing the embryo / Lewis Wolpert -- Homo evolutis / Juan Enriquez -- The open universe / Stuart Kauffman -- Living to a hundred and fifty / Gregory Benford -- Mastering death / Marcelo Gleiser -- No more time decay / Emanuel Derman -- West Antarctica and seven other sleeping giants / Laurence C. Smith -- Conserving the climate: will Greenland's melting ice the deal? / Stephen H. Schneider -- Climate will change everything / William Calvin -- Molecular manufacturing and climate change / Eric Drexler -- The mastery of climate / Stewart Brand -- The use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population / Lawrence Krauss -- Deployment of a significant rogue nuclear device / Gerald Holton -- Accidental nuclear war / Max Tegmark -- The breakdown of all computers / Anton Zeilnger -- The growing perception of a clash between safety and liberty / Dan Sperber -- Adopting rationality and sustainability / Patrick Bateson -- Fusion expectations / Roger Highfield -- Green oil / Alun Anderson -- Attempts at geoengineering / Oliver Morton -- Why don't running shoes biodegrade? / Daniel Goleman -- The shift from harvesting to manufacturing energy / Andrian Kreye -- The anthroposphere / Nicholas A. Christakis -- At last: technology will change education / Haim Harari -- Inexpensive customizable interactive e-texts for worldwide use / David G. Myers -- On basketball and science camps / Stephon H. Alexander -- A web-empowered revolution in teaching / Chris Anderson -- Wisdom reborn / Roger C. Schank -- Tracks and clusters / David Gelernter -- The mobile phone / Keith Devlin -- Energy and economics: the road to civilization 1.0 / Michael Shermer -- Undoing Babylon Daniel L. Everett -- Soul travel for selfless beings / Thomas Metzinger -- Inside out: the epistemology of everything / Tor Norretranders -- Changes in the changers / A. Garrett Lisi -- Neurocosmetics / Marcel Kinsbourne -- Neurophenomics + targeted simulation = psychological optimization? / Brian Knutson -- Celebratory self-reengineering /Andy Clark -- A different kind of male subjectivity / Tino Sehgal -- Hidden persuaders '09 / Helen Fisher -- A lively gamete market / Henry Harpending -- Immortal cognition, boundless happiness / Marco Iacoboni -- A farewell to harm / Karl Sabbagh -- God need not actually exist to have evolved / Jesse Bering -- Proof of the Riemann hypothesis / Cilfford A. Piclover -- The reality of time / Lee Smolin -- The existence of additional spacetime dimensions / Gino Segre -- Black holes: the ultimate game changer? / Paul J. Steinhardt -- Better measurements / Gregory Cochran -- We are learning to make phenotypes / Mark Pagel -- The next step in human health care? / Ian Wilmut -- Broadening the spectrum of infectious causation / Paul Ewald -- Biological markers for mental illness / Eric Kandel -- Recognizing that the body is not a machine / Randolph Nesse -- The organism itself as the emergent meaning / Brian Goodwin -- Faster evolution means more ethnic differences / Jonathan Haidt -- Africa / James J. O'Donnell -- Epistemology will change the world / Lera Boroditsky -- Social media literacy / Howard Rheingold -- The decline of text / Marti Hearst -- The end of analytic science / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Coordinated computational power will change science / Lisa Randall -- Carniculture / Austin Dacey -- Exploitability / David M. Buss -- Post-rational economic man / David Berreby -- Nothing will change everything / Richard Foreman -- Beyond Boolean logic, digital manipulations, and numerical evaluations / Verena Huber-Dyson -- People who can intuit in six dimensions / Robert Sapolsky -- Massive technological failure / David Bodanis -- Happiness / Betsy Devine -- Our brave new map of the world / Christine Finn -- The unmasking of true human nature / Aubrey de Grey -- And if the big change doesn't arrive? / Carlo Rovelli -- "Everything" has already changed! /Kai Krause -- The slow-motion revolution / Robert R. Provine -- Why human nature will rebel / Nicholas Humphrey.