To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.

To-Do List for Futurists: Become Posthuman

1. Today: Download the Rosetta@home program, and let your computer crunch data on protein shapes while you're not using it. Like the SETI@home program, Rosetta@home is designed to harness the power of thousands of PCs to take the data that scientists have gathered about how proteins in our bodies are shaped, and churn quickly through that data to figure out how we could design new proteins that might fight disease or turn us into posthuman, flying, megabrainiacs who don't need to sleep.

2. This week: Read all about what posthumans and transhumans want in James Hughes' fantastic book Citizen Cyborg.

3. This month: Volunteer to participate in neurological experiments at your local university. No, we don't want you to get the zapper, we just want you to volunteer to sit inside an MRI brain imaging machine and do various tasks so that neuroscientists can learn more about which parts of your brain are responsible for which activities. The more we understand the neurology of the brain, the better we'll be at preventing its degeneration through age or disease. And maybe we can get closer to those awesome Google brain implants. Most labs and universities have helpful websites that explain who can volunteer and how.

4. This month: Get a high-tech implant. Want to feel electro-magnetic waves? Get a magnet implanted in your finger. Want to be machine-readable? Get an RFID implanted under your skin. You can save all kinds of useful data on that RFID, but just be sure you keep it encrypted!

5. This year: Get your genome sequenced and donate the data to a public research institution. Companies like Knome and 23andMe will do it for some cash, and then you can take the data they get and give it to the International HapMap, an open database of genomic information used by researchers all over the world. The more data they amass about human genetic diversity, the sooner you can get a drug tailored specifically for you to cure your cancer, or make your legs move at super-speed.

To-Do List for Futurists: Create a Moon Colony

1. Today: Find out more about what's necessary to create a moon colony by reading about two experiments in contained-atmosphere colony life. On Earth, a group of people tried to live inside a completely sealed biodome to test out theories of dome life on other planets. They stayed inside Biosphere 2 for over two years. Read the first-person account of one of the survivors of the experiment, Jane Poynter. Her book is called The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2. Last year, a team at the International Space University came up with a plan for how they'd create an 11-person moon base. Their document is free online, and is called the Moon Colony Blueprint [PDF].

2. This week: Grow plants with LEDs. LEDs are low-energy, high-efficiency lights that feed your plants the exact chunk of spectrum they need to grow, without all that extra stuff that sucks up energy. For these reasons, it's almost certain that moon colonists will use LEDs to grow plants. You can help by starting an LED plant farm in your own home, and demonstrating the benefits. Instructables has a great tutorial on how to set up your own LED moonfarm.

3. This month: Many scientists believe that the best way to establish a moon colony will be to set up a space elevator which allows people to travel between Earth and the Moon very rapidly. A few companies are already prototyping materials for space elevators, and the Spaceward Foundation has an annual contest (with lots of prize money) for people who want to test components of a potential space elevator. Read all about it and get a team together to enter the space elevator competition this year. [The Spaceward Foundation]

4. This month: On the moon, colonists will have to recreate Earth nature from scratch, inside an artificial environment. They'll be trying to make a biosphere, containing plants, animals, and a system for recycling all waste back into the environment. Now you can help advance knowledge about biosphere dynamics by building a tabletop biosphere, a tiny version of what colonists might create on the moon under domes. Of course, Bre Pettis from MAKE magazine can explain it all for you. [MAKE]

5. This year: Enrich your brain and support the burgeoning commercial space industry by visiting a real-life space port. [Mojave Space Port]

To-Do List for Futurists: Creating A.I.

1. Today: Tag everything you can on the Web. Many A.I. theorists believe that the first steps to creating a sentient computer involve teaching it to recognize information in the same way humans recognize it. So, for example, if you tag images on photo-sharing site Flickr, you are building up a database for a future A.I. who can look at a picture of a car and say to itself, "90 percent of people called this a car, so it's most likely a car."

2. Today: Along the lines of the "tag everthing" task, you can also teach future A.I.s how to evaluate what they're seeing in a subjective way too. For instance, you can start generating data that will teach A.I.s to recognize the difference between science fiction and science by using services like StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us, where you have a chance to categorize and rate any Web page. Find an excerpt from a novel about computers by Neal Stephenson? Categorize it as "science fiction." Find a book about computers by journalist Steven Levy? Categorize it as "science." The richer our metadata is, the closer we come to creating machines that can evaluate images, text, and objects in a human-like way — simply because the machine will have so much data about how humans have already evaluated them.

3. This month: Tutor a kid in math or computer science. You may not be the next big genius who is going to invent the nice A.I. who does an anti-Skynet and stops all war through rationality. But the kid who lives in your neighborhood who doesn't have the cash to buy her own laptop? She might be. So help out by tutoring — you can often find opportunities via services like VolunteerMatch.

4. This month: Help make statistical machine translation of human languages as natural as possible. A few hours' worth of work with MIT's open source MOSES software project, and you can help A.I.s of the future gain a nuanced understanding of how to do idiomatic translations from one language to another. This will, of course, also help A.I.s to gain a feel for speaking in natural languages themselves. Basically, you upload "training data" to MOSES — usually two texts, one an original and one a translation — and then you give MOSES feedback on whether the translated phrases it has now learned work in all situations.

5. This year: Many experts now believe that A.I.s will only evolve if we can place them inside robotic bodies, because sentience is so bound up with being able to move around in the world. (So say goodbye to the idea of an A.I. that just sits in a giant box.) Get educated about robotic intelligence by visiting a robot show (Robogames is a good one, and you can look for others like it in your local area). If you can't make it out to a robot show, try reading up on the future of robotics in a great book by MIT AI lab researcher Rodney Brooks called Flesh and Machines. It was written a couple of years ago, but it's still up-to-date in terms of what the most cutting-edge research is.

Yesterday's to-do list: How to Build an Ecotopian Society
Tomorrow's to-do list: How to Colonize the Moon