That's true. Kurzweil and friends overestimate the speed in which science advances. We don't even nearly understand our own biology yet, as we're still learning a lot from nature.

Kurzweil's "We can upload ourselves in 30 years" is basic hubris. Our brains turn out to be more complicated than we thought every time scanning tech advances.

But once we fully grasp how our own bio-"machinery" works, we may be able to develop something that can survive on Mars. That is probably a long haul from now (>200 years).

This is getting off-topic but... I don't think it's just underestimating the rate. The problem is that they're just way off, and their hype has a defocusing effect. I don't think it's harmless.

If you look into where real innovation happens, it always happens where people are engaged with the world. It happens where people are trying to solve real rubber-meets-the-road problems.

You don't get innovation by speculating in a vacuum and then throwing around ivory-tower abstractions.

Take the old Bell Labs for instance... it was so phenomenally innovative because they had a good supply of hard real-world problems coming from the telecom buildout. Problems are just as valuable as solutions... maybe more valuable. Problems are the fuel of engineering. The closer you get to the expanding wave-front of real applied technology, the meatier the problems become.

If Drexler-esque nanotech ever starts to happen, it won't be because of hand-wavy speculation about consciousness uploading. It will be because someone somewhere has a hard problem that demands a nanotech solution. As an example I can think of one currently very relevant candidate: cleaning up nuclear contamination. (Of course, bio-remediation coupled with genetic engineering or selective breeding might work there too...)

There seems to be an epidemic of defocus in engineering right now. I keep seeing press releases from certain well-respected universities like "Scientists develop method of using viral particles to harness (tiny amounts of) energy from the vibrations of bull testicles on Wednesdays." A lot of people seem to have no intuition for practicality.

... which brings us back to the topic at hand in a meandering way ...

This is one of the reasons I love the space program. It's an endeavor that supplies us with an ample supply of hard real problems.

Historically, betting against Kurzweil hasn't been that good of a bet. He actually predicted the victory of a computer over the top human player as happening a year and a half later than it did. And yet in the 80s, when he made the prediction, it was largely rejected as a fantasy. People thought it wouldn't happen until decades later, if at all.

Similarly, his support of and predictions related to the human genome project at its beginning drew a great deal of skepticism. Once again, he was right. Ditto for wearable computing (i.e. iPod touch).

Kurzweil hasn't been right about everything, of course, but I think we'd be hard pressed to find another futurist with as good of a success rate with pubic predictions.

Consciousness uploading?

Consciousness uploading is to the iPod as interstellar starships are to commuter aircraft.

Actually, it might be worse than that. Right now I think we have better ideas about how to build an interstellar starship (Orion nuclear pulse propulsion, light sails, etc.) than we do about how to upload human consciousness to a computer.

I'd like to just send vials of our hardiest cold-weather organisms to smash against Mars and see if anything manages to survive. (Some folks would probably object to this until we manage to confirm that Mars doesn't have any life of its own.)