Technology. Where would we be without it? Probably extinct by now to be honest. Humans don’t have claws or fangs, the ability to change color or shrink to the size of a bloat fly. But what we do have is far more interesting and has kept us on top of the food chain for thousands of years. We have big brains.

Brains capable of rationality and abstract thinking. Brains capable of conceptualizing ideas and ideals like death, culture, freedom and morality. Our brains have the capacity to think about the future and the past. We're not stuck in the moment as animals are. This ability is both a blessing and a curse, but regardless of how you slice it, it has resulted in the thriving world we occupy today.

But above all, our greatest strength has been our ability to adapt and use tools to compensate for our lack of claws, fangs or camouflage. Humanity has been inventing new technologies ever since it was able to think even somewhat rationally.

From sharpened stones and sticks to rudimentary irrigation, technological advancement has been what’s kept our species plodding along the evolutionary path with only a few hiccups here and there.

But never was there such an explosion of technological advancement than during the Industrial Revolution, christened as such because it completely changed society as we knew it. Already being referred to by some as “The New Renaissance”, the Industrial Revolution made possible the sprawling civilization we live in today, complete with buildings that touch the sky, metal monstrosities that move with internal combustion, and an invisible network that connects the entire world.

So what’s next for us? Every half century or so, humanity has been irrevocably changed by a new wave of technological advancement. In the 19th century, it was the railroad, connecting the oceans and the continents in between. In the middle of the last century, it was the Interstate Highway System, consummating America’s 20th-century love affair with the automobile.

Physicists and Futurists alike have speculated about the forthcoming fate of humanity and many have come to similar conclusions. One of these theories, made popular in part by Ray Kurzwell, distinguished author and futurist, is that of an impending event referred to as "the singularity”.

The technological singularity theory was proposed in response to the observation of Fermi’s Paradox. The Paradox, made famous by Enrico Fermi, the Italian inventor of the world’s first nuclear reactor, relates to the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

It purports that:

1. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are similar to the Sun, many of which are billions of years older than Earth.
2. There is high probability that some of these stars will have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some might develop intelligent life.
3. Some of these civilizations would develop interstellar travel, a step we are investigating even now.
4. Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in about a million years.

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens. In an informal conversation, Fermi noted no convincing evidence of this, leading him to ask, "Where is everybody?"

Many have tried to answer this question and the solutions have been as off the wall as the “ancient alien theory” and as simple as “we are too primitive to even detect them.”

But The Technological Singularity Theory is unique in that it employs evidence both from our current sociological trends and the pattern of technological advancement mentioned earlier. Each new wave of technology underpinned a half-century of economic growth. Yet each wave also reached its inherent limits, in part by causing adverse side effects and in part by being overtaken by a new technological revolution. And so it will be with our generation.

Consider the iPhone. It's a million times smaller, a million times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than the first computers which cost 40 million dollars and took up half a building in the 1970s.

So you have a billion fold increase in productivity and miniaturization in a stretch of only 40 years. The theory claims that eventually the human race will invent devices that are a million times smaller than the smallest and most powerful microprocessors can be.

This process is called "S.T.E.M. compression": Space, Time, Energy and Matter compression. All of this technology, and the people who build and design it, become more intelligent. More dense. They command more energy and are composed of less matter.

The matter we’d require to exist would become smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, until you’d end up with entire beings living at the nano scale. One atom containing an entire consciousness more sprawling than our minds could even comprehend.

These incredibly powerful and advanced beings would have brains a trillion times more efficient than our own and, eventually, these entities would be able to compress their matter and advance to the point where they could escape the bonds of space and time.

Kurzwell claims that this is why we’ve neither been contacted by extraterrestrials, nor found any evidence of their existence. They’ve all transcended already. They’ve disappear from the third dimension and escaped to the fourth. This higher dimension would be populated by every species that has ever existed in our Universe and has already undergone the same process. Once they became a type two civilization (a civilization that has colonized the galaxy in which they live), they stopped concentrating on outer space and started worrying about inner space.

While this theory is still just a theory, trends have already emerged recently in our society which continues to collaborate it. For instance, last Tuesday SanDisk announced the prototype of a new SD card that can hold 1 terabyte of data (one thousand gigabytes or one trillion bytes). That’s enough space to store 2 million high res photos on a card smaller than a postage stamp. STEM compression in action.

We‘re also seeing the advent of self-driving cars which have already been tested in Pittsburg and will appear on the streets of Boston by 2017. And we’ve had simple robots like Roombas performing rudimentary tasks for years now.

So what will the future hold? Will we become a dystopian civilization similar to iRobot, complete with with self-driving cars and self-actualizing robots? Will we become cyborgs and redefine what it means to be human? Will our technology shrink to the point where we disappear completely from this Universe and end up somewhere in the fourth dimension? Or will we destroy ourselves along the way, unable to reconcile our violent nature with increasingly advanced technology.

I suppose only time will tell. What do you think?