What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

“We will begin to use science and technology not just to manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as well,” Bostrom said. “The changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution.”

Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. “Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years,” he said. “It is very hard to predict.”