To me, a prediction in the shorter term seems more like a bet than a prediction. Raymond Kurzweil is a very interesting author who I think is making such a bet (perhaps because he wants to believe that immortality will be gained in the seizable future). The difference between speaking about how life should evolve in the long run (billions of years) and betting that it will evolve in a particular ways in the next decades is, to me, akin to the difference between explaining how a roulette game works and betting on the roulette. I have no personal interest in betting. I like the beauty of the game but I think any particular outcome is the result of an incalculable interaction of myriads of choices. It would be amazing if someone could predict accurately what will happen in our planet in the next fifty years or so. What seems clear to me is that Kurzweil correctly found the consequences to a capitalist society, based on a blooming global economy and yearning for gadgets. If any of these things change then the consequences will change.
A more general idea that Kurzweil and others uphold is that evolution does not progress in a linear fashion, instead it happens faster and faster, growing exponentially (evolving faster and faster until it reaches a "singularity"). So, for instance, today we are discovering things at a faster rate then what happened two hundred years ago and at that time we were discovering things faster than fifteen hundred years ago, etc. I really don't think this is obvious, because what we see when we study our own history is that evolution is faster when conditions are ideal for it to occur (free speech, absence of dogmatic governments and ideals, absence of epidemics or wars, etc) and then it slows down or even retracts (like in centuries surrounding the destruction of the library of Alexandria) in other periods. The ancient Greeks of the fourth century before Christ had much more developed conceptions and alternative theories regarding the world than what we could have in the next two millennia! In ancient Greece a couple of centuries of "illumination" were followed by two thousand years of dark ages. There is nothing to prove us that we are not living in just another similar oasis. That, in a short time, narrow minded people will take control again and, in the name of traditions, superstitions and authority, will bring back again the fear with which they choked the human mind. We have done it many times before, and, if the Nazi ideals had won the war, we would be living in that kind of world. We chose to pursue a free world then, the US gave many lives so that the world could be free, and we are still reaping the results of that sacrifice. But I find it hard to believe that an evolving world is just unavoidable and we just need to get on the train and relax. By the contrary, we are given an opportunity, sometimes we will take it, sometimes we won't. Only when very large numbers of individuals and events are taken into consideration can we take into account all these failures and successes and establish that eventually the thing progressed. Therefore, the particular fate that the human race will face is, as far as I can see, just a big question mark. I have no idea if we will survive our own prejudices and limitations, if we are going to embrace or fight the new technologies, if we will create wars or peace... If I had to bet I would say that a mixture of all these things will occur. Some people will embrace transhumanism, while others will reject all forms of technology, some will embrace science, others religion, etc. My bet is that diversity will occur, and that we will occupy many of the possible perspectives or ways of living that the opens to us, but I also think that we can easily take ourselves of the map. As far as I can see, we can only be sure that, in the very long run, life will evolve, expand and diversify, but this can only be know for sure if applied to a set of planetary systems amiable to life. But even with all these limitations, it should be clear what the role of man in the general picture of nature is: we are another step, perfectly in tune with the rest of nature, in the expansion of life in the universe.
I should also present Sagan's quote taken from the Dragons of Eden,
"The most instructive way I know to express this cosmic chronology is to imagine the fifteen-billion-year lifetime of the universe (or at least its present incarnation since the Big Bang) compressed into the span of a single year. Then every billion years of Earth history would correspond to about twenty-four days of our cosmic year, and one second of that year to 475 real revolutions of the Earth about the sun. [...] On this scale, the events of our history books - even books that make significant efforts to deprovincialize the present - are so compressed that it is necessary to give a second-by-second recounting of the last seconds of the cosmic year. Even then, we find events listed as contemporary that we have been taught to consider as widely separated in time. In the history of life, an equally rich tapestry must have been woven in other periods-for example, between 10:02 and 10:03 on the morning of April 6th or September 16th. But we have detailed records only for the very end of the cosmic year."
According to this perspective it is not that more interesting things are happening now, it seems so to us because we have no record of what went on in the past. Now, obviously the moon is a place where change happens less frequently (unless we are seeing it at the Planck scale or something like that) then on Earth. It is arguable that to describe the changes of the Earth's mantle in just one nanosecond would take more books than to describe the changes in the Moon's mantle in a million years. So it is very different. On the other hand it would take even more books to describe the changing details in Jupiter's oceans and atmosphere in just one nanosecond. So it is clear that there are places where change occurs more frequently, perhaps on the morning of April 6th, in the cosmic calendar envisioned by Sagan, there were other planets already built where life was taking many steps, the consequences of an asteroid smashing into a forming planet would also be an event of an incredible complex description at the molecular level. In fact, at the fundamental level of elementary particles it is not at all clear that the complexity of the description would change from the initial state of the universe to the actual state.
Relation with ever growing entropy at the scale of the universe. (??)