M 16 - The "Eagle Nebula"

Consciousness is a potential technology; we are exquisite machines, nothing less than sentient patterns. As such, there's no convincing technical reason we can't eventually upload ourselves into matrices of our design and choosing. It's extremely likely the phenomenon we call "intelligence" will cease to be strictly biological as we begin to merge with our machines more meaningfully and intimately. Philip K. Dick once wrote that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." I suspect that in a few hundred years, separating the animate from the inanimate will probably be an exercise in futility. Ultimately, we have two options: self-mutate by venturing off-planet in minds and bodies of our own design, or succumb to extinction.