That is not to say they'll never happen, but rather that those things are so out in the horizon as to be beyond the dividing line between prediction and speculation.
But stay tuned! Human intelligence is now modifiable. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been done for a while, and increasingly is done with SNP arrays. That means you can use the polygenic scores from past GWAS studies on intelligence. I've been modeling this, and with a fairly realistic model of how IVF & PGD works and the best current polygenic score publicly available, an American could expect a gain of ~0.2 IQ points right now if they used PGD to select for intelligence, which is potentially cost-effective even. This will go up as additional GWASes come out (SSGAC has one coming out soon which should at least double the gain).
More strikingly: CRISPR has already been used to edit human embryos fairly successfully. Once CRISPR is finetuned to the point of being safe enough to use for 1 edit, as the several planned human trials point to being the case now or very shortly, then 1 edit will buy you 0.5 IQ points (the effect of the largest identified gene), and as CRISPR improves linearly, the gains will scale nicely with the number of edits you can do; progress in CRISPR is so fast that it may be able to go from 'irrelevant' to 'game-changer' in a few years, somewhat like the NN Go players recently went from 'terrible' to 'amazing' just a year or two by constant improvement.
(In contrast, embryo selection is easy to implement technically, but highly limited in its potential power because you turn out to be bottlenecked by how many eggs you can extract from a woman and how many of them will survive fertilization and implantation to yield a live birth.)
Also even accepting the idea that GWAS studies for IQ yield real and useful results (a claim most people I know in the human genetics field find highly dubious) CRISPR isn't a panacea.
I posted a more detailed description above, but in short CRISPR causes a massively disruptive amount of damage in a cell. It does it very accurately, but a double strand break is definitely a Big Deal for a cell. This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology.
CRISPR is an unbelievably useful tool for research and a huge advance, but it's not the Solution to Human Genetic Engineering. We're still a long ways from that.
It's not 'highly dubious' at all, I don't know who is telling you that or why. The twin studies have told us for a century that there are a lot of intelligence genes for us to find; the family studies have told us that for a century; the GCTAs have told us for half a decade that there were a lot of SNPs for us to find; the polygenic scores from the early GWASes told us there were a lot of SNPs for us to find once sample sizes got big enough; when the sample sizes reached the hundreds of thousands, the hits started coming and many of them were on genes already associated with the brain; the hits replicated in other samples (often using different but still highly g-loaded constructs) and had predictive power within-family too; followup GWASes replicated them, and they've been shown in Swedes, Englishmen, Chinese, European-Americans, African-Americans; the phenome studies have shown that intelligence SNPs and polygenic scores predict not just other cognitive constructs (both phenotype and polygenic scores thereof) but things already correlated with phenotypic intelligence like longevity or schizophrenia; and so on. The results are about as dubious as the height GWAS results - not at all.
> This means it only works when you've got lots of cells to play with, a near-impossible task with human embryology.
We'll see what sort of yields we get; embryos also have the advantage of being small, smaller than a whole body or even an eye. I'm sure you already saw the Chinese paper... Since one gets a median of ~9 eggs from each egg extract and about half of them will be implantable, one could afford to lose a decent fraction of them in exchange for a big enough payoff, and check with sequencing.
True, because incrementally better treatments for cancer or heart disease just mean that you die at 84 instead of 82. But we've only recently started trying to prevent or repair the effects of aging, which has a much greater potential payoff.
Oncolytic Viruses seem very promising to me. CRISPR sounds like the invention of the transistor for genetics technology.
AI research is advancing at a scary pace and that will enhance all the other cylinders.
However, while I don't disagree with the potential for space activity in the coming decade(s), it makes a pale comparison to the first two-thirds of the 20th century, where humans went from largely ever living on the surface of the Earth (plus or minus 100 meters or so, for the eternity of humankind) to flying on a rocket to the f*ing MOON.
[1] "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
There's actually been some recent improvement following the 1990s, but the vast bulk of life-expectency / mortality improvements came prior to 1920. Predating virtually all of modern medicine, but benefiting tremendously from antisceptics, sewerage systems, municipal garbage collection, refrigeration, and some early food safety and disease control, especially over cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.
As Charlie points out, he makes a living fanatasising about this stuff. But it's hard:
Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable.
Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
How close to a century?