Love this thread,
I have been reading a new book that is blowing my mind. It is called "The Singularity is Near" By Ray Kurzwile (Sp) And it is awesome. He plots human innovation, computing power, economies, population. Pretty much every litmus test of human progress and it is a straight line on an exponential scale. This means that we are living in exponential times. More data was created, transferred, and processed in the past 2 years than all of human history combined. Moores law dictates that computer power doubles every 16 months. We have millions of times more computing power than just a few years ago.
Anyway, we are on the "heal" of the curve. Meaning that up to this point human innovation seamed linear beacuse the start of an exponential curve is linear then it goes almost vertical. Basically hold on to your fucking tits because what is going to happen in our lifetimes (which could be thousands of years) is going to drastically change everything we know.
Nano technology, molecular computing, in 40 years we will have computers more powerful than the human brain and be able to directly connect with computers. Think about this for just one second. If you are directly connected with a human strength computer, then connected to the internet, you could communicate instantly with any one in the planet and have instant, seamless, access to the entirety of human knowledge. Even uneducated people could solve proofs that today stump even the brightest scientists. There are no hard problems there are only problems that are limited by levels of intelligence.
Anyway I highly suggest the book and I also recommend that you get a degree in math and science it will be worth exponentially more than a degree in communications or some bull like that.