The problem may be solved with cybernetics. We might discover in the future that solid-state systems can readily expand our mental capacities. As soon as that happens we will quickly extend outselves into a more-or-less virtual reality. And very very quickly we might discover that we are 99.999999 percent machine. What if we decided to discard our bodies as too difficult to maintain while immersed in virtual reality, or that our physical bodies compose only 0.00000001 percent of our being, too small to bother retaining? What if we grow so enormous mentally that we can transcend the physical? We may whittle away at our physical forms until all that is left is a soup of microbial cells, self-maintained. And then we discard the machines and live as ethereal spirits emergent from the chaos of the totality of nature, unconstrained by Earth, or water, or even space. We become timeless, loosed from the shackles of the universe, having reduced it to a mere single dimension of the transcendent realm.

I'd sell books if I could write more than a paragraph of this crap.