Leading thinkers predict technologies that will turn the world upside-down.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Flying cars, personal jetpacks , holidays on the moon, the paperless office -- the predictions of futurologists are, it seems, doomed to fail. The only thing predictable about the future is its unpredictability.

But that has not stopped edge.org -- the online intellectual salon -- asking which ideas and inventions will provide humanity's next leap forward. In its traditional New Year challenge to the planet's best thinkers it asks, "What will change everything -- What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

World-changing technology has a habit of arriving out of the blue and turning society on its head. The printing press, electricity, antibiotics, the pill, mobile phones and the internet have all transformed human experience in ways that their inventors could scarcely have imagined. So the more than 110 respondents -- including scientists, authors, philosophers, musicians and journalists -- have a tough job on their hands. Their life-changing ideas span everything from new forms of energy, mind-reading and foreign life forms living among us, to the ability to reprogram life. Here's a taste.

Solar power

Ian McEwan, author

By nearly all insider and expert accounts, we are or will be at peak oil somewhere between now and the next five years. Even if we did not have -profound concerns about climate change, we would need to be looking for different ways to power our civilisation. How fortunate we are to have a safe nuclear facility a mere 93 million miles away and fortunate too that the dispensation of physical laws is such that when a photon strikes a semiconductor, an electron is released. My hope is that architects will be drawn to designing gorgeous arrays and solar towers in the desert -- as expressive of our aspirations as medieval cathedrals once were. We will need new distribution systems too, smart grids -- perfect Rooseveltian projects for our hard-pressed times. Could it be possible that in two or three decades we will look back and wonder why we ever thought we had a problem when we are bathed in such beneficent radiant energy?