In his eye-opening presentations, Stephen Petranek gives us reasons to be optimistic about the future, while mapping out what could go wrong, and how to steer clear. For the first time in history, we can control our environment, our health, even our own evolution-but, Petranek cautions, we need to use those capabilities intelligently. The wrong decisions could lead to a diminished population clinging to a meager existence on Earth. A different set of decisions, however, could lead to an enlightened human race drawing on nearly limitless energy, information, and tools of exploration.

Stephen Petranek is the former Editor-in-Chief of Discover, the leading general interest science magazine in America. He is currently its Editor-at-Large, focusing on assigning and expanding Discover's coverage, adding major investigative and in-depth articles of a kind not seen before in science writing. Previously, Petranek was Editor-in-Chief of This Old House, Senior Editor of LIFE, and Managing Editor of The Washington Post Magazine.

Petranek is currently working on a book called The Flood, about rising sea levels in major American cities. In no less than 70 years, most of the world's coastal cities may be partly or completely under water. Washington, D.C., Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities will be severely impacted. Petranek has also just sold rights to ABC for a prime time documentary based on his popular talks, "10 Ways the World Could End Tomorrow and 10 Reasons to be Optimistic About the Future," that will air next fall.

Petranek asserts that all ten threats are incredibly real yet there is little or no political support for addressing them. In most cases these dangers could disappear if we just invested some serious human and monetary capital. For example, the cataclysmic threat of a giant asteroid impact can be dealt with by establishing two observatories (one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern) that do nothing but search for Earth-approaching bodies and by building a spacecraft that can intercept an asteroid, land on it, drill a hole in it, insert a bomb, and set off the charge to alter the asteroid's course. All of this would cost no more than the "missile shield" under development in Alaska that is unlikely to protect us from a single warhead. Even in well-studied areas such as global warming and infectious disease, agencies shy away from funding research into low-probability risks that could have hideous consequences.

We live in a golden age of science, an era in which discoveries are occurring more quickly than most of us can keep track of them, much less comprehend them. Stephen Petranek believes that this big bang of enlightenment leaves us in a peculiar and unique place in human history. We have a sudden new awareness of the threats, both local and cosmic, that could effectively snuff out our species tomorrow. At the same time, we have the incredible opposite sense that our science is becoming so good we may be able to take charge of our future. Among other things, Petranek believes we will learn to stop aging, and forge life on other planets—what other huge, largely unreported choices lie ahead?

Petranek offers a look at the future that shocks and pleases. Examples: There will be no pilots in aircraft within 20 years; Computers will soon be more intelligent than people but only at the things people aren't good at; Pollution (and climate change) will get a lot worse before it gets better; Artificial limbs will be so good that people will buy additional arms and legs so they can do more things better; Population will peak at 9.5 billion this century then fall dramatically; All surgery will be robotic within a decade; People will take a pill to stop aging. And so on ... Find out how our world will change—in ways that will dramatically impact your life and the lives of the people around you.