Future shock in the present tense, Singularity University in Mountain View, California, is a Moore’s Law-loving educational institution and business incubator that may be expensive folly or the future–or perhaps a little of both. Eric Benson of Buzzfeed graduated from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis’ school, which promises abundant energy, the end of illness and even immortality, and filed a report. The opening:

“It was the final night of classes at Singularity University’s March 2013 Executive Program, and we, the students, had been given a valedictory assignment: Predict the future.

For the past six days, the 63 of us had been immersed in lectures on the nearly limitless potential of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and bioinformatics, and now the moment had arrived for us to figure out what we really believed and ponder the big questions. Was a transhuman future — the Singularity — really only three decades away, as SU’s chancellor and co-founder Ray Kurzweil had prophesied? Were we really on the brink of a cure for all viruses and an era of radical energy abundance? Would we soon be able to choose to live forever? How many glasses of wine would it take until our group of entrepreneurs, executives, and hippie mystics got impatient and just resolved to build a time machine?

Inside Singularity University’s airy classroom on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the SU staff distributed about 50 sheets of paper, many bearing newspaper headlines from this radical but not-too-distant future. (A future that, shockingly, still included a print newspaper industry.) We were instructed to break up into small groups to decide when in the next 20 years these world-changing milestones would come to pass.

‘LIFE EXPECTANCY REACHES 150 IN AMERICA’ blared the first headline. I stared at it incredulously. Life expectancy in the United States was currently 79. For the life expectancy to hit 150, that would mean… I started to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations. One of my fellow classmates, the 66-year-old chairman of an international law firm, was quicker to formulate his answer. ‘According to a gerontologist in England, the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born,’ he told us. ‘I’m not sure I believe that, but everyone thinks that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. I’d even say the first person to live to 200 has been born.’ The other five of us nodded our heads. We collectively decided that U.S. life expectancy would reach 150 within the next 10 to 15 years.”