On a dark and stormy night in London, I step out of Kentish Town tube station and walk towards the light of The Assembly House Pub. I've come along to attend a meeting held by 'The London Futurist Society'. This is a group set up by a pub chef Richie who, between serving up grub for pub patrons, ponders the future of our planet Earth... and decided he'd congregate others like him to discuss the very latest thinking on human destiny.

This is a topic that has fascinated me for some time and when I stumbled upon the Richie's website I quickly decided it was worth investigating.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Would I find a group of well-informed Jules Verne wannabes? Would I find a bunch of weirdos who'd watched The Matrix too many times? Or would I find a lair of crazy scientists plotting to take over the world?

Upon arriving at the bar and not seeing any obvious collective of geeks and nerds, I asked a bar maid where 'the meeting' was being held. She said, 'oh, push through that door over there and go up the stairs'. Through the door I discovered a dilapidated staircase lit by candles that led to a grand old room with wall paper peeling off the walls which made me feel like I was in a haunted mansion. 

There was a group of guys standing around a computer and scratching their heads while trying to figure out why it would not project a PowerPoint presentation. Ironic.

Eventually, the computer and PowerPoint was abandoned and we reverted to a good old fashioned discussion about the topic of the evening... The Audacious Space Elevator (essentially a mad-capped scheme to extend a very long cable into space and climb up it instead of being rocket-propelled into orbit). A fascinating conversation ensued. We rambled on into the night straying into the topics of alkaline diet, transhumanism and asteroid mining. 

There was a broadly varied collection of characters seated next to me from the inevitable too-much-sci-fi types to very clever university professors and scientists. All of which had some very interesting things to say and I was entirely satisfied that I had found exactly what I was looking for.

The next meeting I attended last Saturday was a more formal occasion held at The Birkbeck University of London. Here we were treated to a talk by Dr Shane Legg - a scientist from New Zealand (funnily enough) who is at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence technology. And I'm now looking forward to an upcoming session with the head of The Immortality Institute. Wow.

It all makes me feel delighted to be living in such an exciting city in such an exciting time in human history. Just so long as I remember to keep it real and don't become too much of a geek!