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Where was I? Oh yes, the lie. It’s not so much that the truth hurts, it’s that it’s so boring and pompous. Yes, the Cadillacs may go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, but that’s no way to encourage the young people. Endlessly telling them that the most ecologically sensible thing to do is commit suicide is no help. So we’re going to lie and see if we can turn it into the truth.

There are two competing trajectories, critical paths if you will, amongst the futurati. The most popular at the moment is 6 degrees of Apocalypse, you oil drunk fools, you will die horribly. The other, much less well known, is the Singularity: Humanity stands on the verge of the most thrilling period in its history. Now I ask you, which sounds like more fun?

In case you’ve been on a Buddhist retreat for the last 150 years in a Bhutanese cave I’ll run through the anthropogenic climate catastrophe for you. We were running out of whale oil and it looked grim, until Colonel Drake discovered real oil, which was a great relief to us, and the whales were thrilled to bits. We made Cadillacs and giant roads to drive ourselves to death on. We built towns in the middle of nowhere for no other reason than that we could. We found that Oil was the greatest aphrodisiac ever, so we all had way too many babies. We invented plastic which is shiny, cheap, lives forever and now we have a giant island of floating plastic rubbish in the Pacific the size of America. In the process we pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and poisoned the ocean, which turns out to have been a mistake. Now it looks like the average temperature on earth will make Reykjavik look like St Tropez  and civilization will drown in warm plastic soup. Which sounds terrible of course.

Okay, now for the lie, the Singularity. It’s really about the convergence of computing, space travel, biology and nanotechnology. Or utilitarian transhumanism if you want to get philosophical about it. Here’s what happened – just the highlights.

Computing: In the second world war a gay English cryptographer called Alan invented computing. Which was pretty incredible considering he was busy beating the Nazis at the same time. After the war the English, rather than develop a gigantic new industry and make billions, hid the computer, called Colossus, in a colossal warehouse like the one where they put the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and refused to talk about it. When they realized Alan was gay they took away his security clearance in case he became a communist and he was so miserable he committed suicide. Which tells you a lot about the English.

But luckily computing continued to develop in America and we got ENIAC, IBM and mainframes. The spooky part is that in the mid 50s some boys were born within about a year of one another: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and of course Steve Wozniak. Between them they gave us pretty much all the rest of computing, including the internet. Makes you wonder about cluster reincarnation. Nah, probably just a coincidence.

Anyhow by 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, realized that semiconductor capability was doubling about every two years. He called it Moore’s Law (no surprise there) and the amazing thing was that it seemed to work not just for semiconductor capability, but the whole course of technological development for the last 40 years. In a few years it’s very possible we’ll make a machine smarter than us. Not science fiction, but really.

Biology: Then shortly after the war four scientists at Cambridge discovered DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin. There’s an argument that Rosalind Franklin was really behind it all, but we’ll never know. We all know how guys are about girl scientists. Suddenly we could understand everything Darwin had been trying to say: we had a language of biology – molecular biology – and it went ATCG. Everything changed in the lab. By 2000 we’d mapped the human genome, three years earlier than anyone thought possible. Thank you Mr. Venter, who is now finding genomes all over the world’s oceans on his giant yacht Sorcerer II.

Nano: In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a talk called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom in which he said he saw no reason we couldn’t manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Not only was he one of the funniest men in science, he was also one of the smartest. He’d discovered Quantum Electrodynamics so when he started talking about molecular size engineering no one just laughed him off. But it wasn’t until the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope that we could see what we were doing. By the 80s Eric Drexler had published Engines of Creation and really got down to some detail about how we could proceed. 20 years later and we can build things at the molecular scale. It’s called Nanotech because it deals with structures less than 100 nanometres in size. That’s 0.0000001m. We are on the verge of mastering matter. In 10 years we’ll be there.

And then there was space. Space got off to a good start and when I was a kid lots of us thought we were on our way. It wasn’t to be. Arthur Clarke was maybe the only one who foresaw that there would be a hiatus after the moon landing. Me? I was packed and ready. We were going to live in space stations at the Langrange points and go out into the Galaxy. It was disappointing, but in the meantime things were going on. We got very good at satellite technology and NASA sent probes out into the solar system. What most people don’t know is that in the background big things have been happening: space drive. One of the overwhelming problems with space travel is the time it takes. 2 years to Mars. But a Venezuelan Chinese astronaut, Frank Chang Diaz, has developed plasma drive – VASIMR – and it works. Okay, it’s not Warp Drive, but it’ll get us out there.

You see what’s going on here? While a lot of us were having sex in the back of the Cadillac, some of us were getting some work done. In the last 50 years we’ve discovered more than in centuries before. I talked the other day about how the human cognitive system doesn’t like a downer, well it has a worse problem. It doesn’t have a good intuitive grasp of exponential change. It’s an evolutionary thing. We’re built for a linear change environment, so exponential change sort of creeps up on us and then we get surprised.

For the last half century technology has been accelerating – but it’s been the slow acceleration. Exponential curves have this inflection point where it’s going along slowly getting bigger and then boom, it heads for the sky. That’s where we are, the inflection point. These technologies are at the point of converging and the rate of change becomes almost instantaneous. Science fiction stops being in the future.

So what was the lie? It wasn’t. I was kidding you.

But doesn’t that sound like more fun than hunkering down in the disused nuclear bunker with the last three cans of organic carrots?