What will the future look like? A mind-blowing sneak peek:

Designer and architect Neri Oxman is leading the search for ways in which digital fabrication technologies can interact with the biological world. Working at the intersection of computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology, her lab is pioneering a new age of symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, our products and even our buildings.

THE FUTURE: SO, WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE?

Neil Gaiman: What kind of world do we want to live in? “All utopian futures are broken, because all utopian futures are built on and contain human beings — and we are broken,” says author Neil Gaiman. That, he adds, might not be as bleak as it sounds.

Juan Enriquez: We need to learn to rebuild our bodies Juan Enriquez, director of Synthetic Genomics, doesn’t pull punches. “If you believe in human rights and you believe in humanity being something truly special, we all have a moral, ethical responsibility to get humans off this planet,” he says. And that’s when things will get really interesting.

Sara Seager: Here’s how we’ll get to other planets — by printing humans “For now we have no way of getting to a planet far away,” says Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at MIT. Her solution? Forget hibernation or multigenerational spacecraft. Think DNA printing.

Jason Silva: How technology and human will finally become one“We wouldn’t be who we are without our technologies,” says media artist and futurist Jason Silva. And as our tools get better, faster, cheaper, we humans will change alongside them.

Tom Wujec: How we’ll plant a seed … and grow a table “Technology allows us to augment human capabilities,” says Autodesk Fellow Tom Wujec. It also allows us to rethink everything, even things we think we’ve pretty much nailed by now, like the design of a chair.

Nalo Hopkinson: Who gets left out of the future? “We need a better world,” says science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson bluntly, and those who live on the fringes of society need that more than anyone. She uses her work to examine the present — and by extension, the future.