The 21st century could be humanity’s last, according a leading scientific thinker - and what replaces us could be very strange indeed.

Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California argues that three big scientific advances are on the cusp of changing humans forever.

Shostak says, ‘We can eventually produce offspring that are as different from us as dogs are from gray wolves.

‘The haphazard, bottom-up alterations to our species occasioned by Darwinian evolution will yield to the directed improvements of future engineers.

Shostak believes that three technologies - genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and space travel - are about to change the human race forever.

In a piece on the SETI website, Shostak argues that technologies such as ‘designer babies’ and computers which connect directly to human minds will soon change us profoundly.

He says, ‘The development of general artificial intelligence will surely be the most dramatic driver of change, because it is less a matter of improving our descendants than replacing them with our engineered successors.

‘Perhaps we can promulgate our culture and ourselves by putting chips in our brains or simply uploading our brains to the machines. But you can be sure that the result will not be Homo sapiens as we’ve known him for 50 thousand years.

He also says that genetically engineered humans will not just be possible - but inevitable.

Shostak says, ‘The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it’s obviously desirable. But our efforts won’t be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we’ll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.