SINGULARITY n.A point of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General Relativity. According to the big bang theory, a gravitational singularity existed at the beginning of the universe. Singularities are also believed to exist at the centre of black holes. - The American Heritage Science Dictionary

In a spare, one-room office at Nasa's Silicon Valley campus, a small band of futurists is plotting to save the world. The means to this is not a revolutionary technology, or a new world order (though both may be by-products). Rather, a new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity University (SU) is going to solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change . . . among others. Through a combination of techno-optimism, wide-eyed idealism and belief in the perfectibility of human beings, these well-connected geeks are creating an institution meant to legitimise their most extreme thinking.

Forgive them for dreaming big. After all, we're in the cradle of the personal computer industry, the neighbourhood that brought forth Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Intel. The Googleplex is just north of SU's office; Yahoo's campus just to the south. Nasa tests the wings of its spacecraft here. Stanford University is up the road. And the Singularity team has landed some of these titans as partners in its endeavour.

Nasa offers more than office space: it's the host and will grant access to its specialists and facilities. Pete Worden, director at Nasa's Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Centre, is a supporter and brought the university on campus. Google, the first corporate partner, has contributed $250,000 (€187,000), and Google co-founder Larry Page attended the first meeting on the university last autumn. As one Singularity staffer said: "Here in Silicon Valley, we're at the centre of the vortex."

On a crisp February morning, I made the 45-minute drive south from San Francisco to Ames, hoping to understand how Singularity University might change the world - and why it had backing from such an illustrious group of supporters. After passing through a fortified guard booth, I steered into the heart of the Ames campus, a tranquil collection of sandy, Spanish colonial-style buildings with manicured lawns. The stateliest of these structures, topped with a bell tower, is the Lunar Sciences building, where (funnily enough) scientists study the moon. Singularity University is coming together on the ground floor.

The office has all the trappings of a technology start-up: frisbees and footballs scattered about, a corner full of free snacks and drinks, and a communal table around which all members of the team work. Salim Ismail (his blog's title: You've Got Ismail!) is the school's executive director and veteran of several technology-based start-ups. Forty-something, with a bald pate and an easy smile, Ismail describes himself as "passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine [and] tennis", with "a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy". In other words, he's the archetypal Silicon Valley male.

Ismail and his team are scrambling to get ready for Singularity University's first nine-week course, set to commence on June 29th. More than 1,200 applicants have expressed interest in attending. Forty will be selected for the first term; $25,000 per person covers tuition, room and board. The inaugural class will be a mix of graduate students and businessmen and women with time to spare. Classes are eight hours a day, six days a week.

During the first three weeks of the programme, students will receive an introduction to the school's 10 main areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and futures studies and forecasting. In the same way that a liberal arts education delivers an overview of literature, history and social theory, Singularity University intends to give students a crash course in subjects such as neuroscience and "human enhancement". The second three weeks of the programme will give students a chance to study, in-depth, a subject new to them. An expert in nanotechnology, for example, might take on energy and the environment.

"The biggest innovations in the world happen when you cross two disparate fields," says Ismail. "[Johannes] Kepler looked at the moon and the tides and thought they may be connected. Today, people are doing 3D 'printing' of human organs using stem cells." Linking early astronomy to stem cell technology is a bit of a stretch, but sure, intellectual cross-pollination can spur on innovation.

Will this model really vary so vastly from ordinary higher education? "Unfortunately, today's graduate education is very narrow," says Peter Diamandis, a school founder and chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, which administers multimillion-dollar prizes for advancements in space, automotive and genomics technologies. "You become an expert on a particular channel on a nerve cell. That's great, it allows you to go down deep, but there's no place that allows you to step back, look at the big issues, and think."

During the final three weeks of the programme, students will reconvene and focus on "one of the big, hairy challenges facing mankind", such as hunger, climate change or energy scarcity. One lead contender for the first year's challenge was how to administer telemedicine in remote parts of the world - but that has been eclipsed by the vaguer, Miss America-esque question: "How can you positively impact one billion people in a decade?"

At the west end of the Ames complex, Nasa's kilometre-long wind tunnels (the largest in the world) test the aerodynamics of aircraft and spacecraft. Nearby, control centres support Nasa missions such as the Kepler project, which is searching for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

But beside these high-tech marvels stand some true technological relics, reminders of how quickly the future becomes the past. To the east, flanking a runway, are three gargantuan Zeppelin hangars.

The largest is a modernist revival behemoth and one of the biggest freestanding structures in the world, decrepit after years of disuse. On the edge of these installations is a series of dilapidated offices; next to one, the nose of a retired military jet rusts in the California sun.

Singularity University was inspired by the success of the International Space University, founded in 1987 in Strasbourg, France - by Diamandis. Through a similar series of courses and projects, the ISU aims to prepare students for work in the space industries - everything from space engineering to space policy and law. What began as a quirky programme for aspiring astronauts has evolved into a well-respected, accredited institution. A few years ago, Diamandis and the inventor Ray Kurzweil wondered whether they could do the same trick again, with a school educating students about emerging technologies. Using Kurzweil's 2005 book, The Singularity is Near as a sort of founding document, they got to work, and last year secured a lease at Nasa and a team of three full-time employees and 30 largely volunteer faculty members. It is set up as a non-profit-making organisation, with Kurzweil as the chancellor and Diamandis the executive director.

A few days before visiting Ames, I caught up with Diamandis at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. He was attending the Cleantech Forum, a gathering of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hoping to cash in on green technology. Diamandis hopes SU can contribute to this emerging market. Yet he may be a bit more extreme than his fellow forum-goers: technology won't just solve our energy needs, he argues, but all the world's problems. "People think there is always going to be hunger," he said. "That's not true. There doesn't always have to be hunger." Rather, in the near future, nanobots - minuscule robots capable of performing exceptionally complex tasks - will be able, quickly and cheaply, to produce food from raw materials, say algae or dirt.

"What is food?" he pondered, lounging on a sofa in one of the hotel's dining rooms. It was early in the morning, but Diamandis, a short, muscular man with wavy hair and eyes that fix on you like a tractor beam, declined coffee or breakfast. "It's the rearrangement of atoms in a form the body can take in." Design a machine that can rearrange dust into an apple, et voilà, hunger is eradicated.

The term "the Singularity" was popularised by Kurzweil and is now a tech catchphrase. It describes "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed", according to The Singularity is Near, now a bible among futurists. In it, Kurzweil speculates that by the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will surpass human intellect, and enhanced humans will work in concert with super-smart machines to manage the world's resources.

Kurzweil, a 61-year-old former whizz kid from New York, has a rosy view of world domination by machines. Tiny robots will create abundant energy and food while reversing pollution and climate change. A technological utopia will ensue.

Some critics - those who concede he might be right about technological change transforming the human experience - worry that smarter-than-human robots will turn on their creators, and that a malicious artificial intelligence will wipe out mankind (Kurzweil doesn't rule out the possibility, but thinks it unlikely).

Other critics read about his desire to achieve immortality (he takes hundreds of dietary supplements a day), or his questioning of whether the speed of light is an immutable limit (he thinks not), and decide they'd rather not engage in the argument.

While a race of intelligent robots to rival humans is still the stuff of fantasy, machines are advancing at impressive speeds. Earlier this year, a robot at Aberystwyth University in Wales formulated a hypothesis without intervention by its creators. Then it carried out experiments to test its theory. Ismail says: "This is going to happen . . . but how are we going to manage it? We need to be a step ahead."

Every year, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based, non-profit organisation, hosts a summit focused on the future. Mainstream academics, professionals, entrepreneurs and pundits attend. More mainstream yet, The Singularity is Near is being made into a film (directed by Kurzweil, who also stars). But many who preach Singularity are involved with more controversial movements. Transhumanism, which aims to "extend human capabilities", takes the Singularity as one of its intellectual pillars. Many are also advocates of cryonics, the process of freezing a recently deceased body in the hope that future technologies will revive it. Kurzweil is signed up to be frozen at his death.

Diamandis takes pains to say that the school is a stand-alone ­venture, not affiliated with books, groups or events that also claim the Singularity moniker. "The term 'singularity', for me, is a catch-all phrase meaning that we're dealing with exponentially growing technologies that have huge and powerful implications," he says. "I am not promoting or predicting what people might call 'the Singularity'."

The week I visited, technology seemed to fail both Nasa and Google. On the Tuesday, a satellite meant to study global CO2 emissions failed to reach orbit, scuttling the $278 million mission. The next day, Gmail, Google's e-mail service, experienced a two-hour outage in the middle of the European workday, calling into question an increasing reliance on web services.

Technology remains unreliable, and machines are subject to human error. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has spoken out against rapid technological change, told me he was reserving judgment on SU until it was under way. But he seemed sceptical of its ability to effect serious change. He said success would largely depend on whether "students who end up there want to solve actual human problems . . . or if they are sci-fi, afraid-of-dying types dreaming of the next big score".

McKibben also cautions against overlooking ethical concerns. "It's important to have real, meaningful debates before we cross lines," he says. "The technical ability to do this stuff confers no insight on whether it should be done. I trust the visceral revulsion against 'designer babies' more than the smooth assurances of the boosters of the sleek future."

McKibben is not alone in his reservations - since the university was first announced, both Google and Nasa seem to be shying away from involvement with the school. Worden, director of the Ames centre, one of the university's founders and the man who got it housed on Nasa's campus, declined to be interviewed; in fact, no one from Nasa would speak on the record about Singularity University.

Google, having denied repeated requests for an interview, finally (after encouragement from the SU team) offered up Chris DiBona, a specialist in open-source computing and point person for dealings with the school. DiBona seemed excited at the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group. He felt his speciality, network computing, could help deliver telemedicine in remote parts of the world. But he was mindful of the university's strange pedigree. "Some of the stuff feels very science fiction to me," he said. "But that's not necessarily a bad thing . . . When you try to work on the future, you're going to be wrong sometimes - a little zaniness goes a long way."

For all the sci-fi overtones, SU projects will be well-intentioned, and it seems unlikely that malicious artificial intelligence will be designed in the halls of Ames Research Center. When pressed, Ismail backed away from the assertion that it would be delivering deployment-ready solutions to global problems. "If we do nothing else," he says, "just to bring people up to speed on all these advances is an accomplishment and a full-time job."

What Singularity University can do, he says, is create an atmosphere for dreaming. "You can't pre-script innovation," he said. "You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest . . . often, interesting things will happen." But is Silicon Valley a place where anyone is afraid to dream? Must you pay $25,000 for the privilege? The big dreamers, it seems, may be the SU team, hitching a ride on a popular catchphrase and harnessing it to corporate funding, government aid and a steady revenue stream.

Before I left Ames, Ismail loaded me with swag. He gave me a calendar from Nasa with pictures of the cosmos, a copy of The Singularity Is Nearsigned by Kurzweil, and a handful of SU fridge magnets - a refreshingly simple technology: reliable, very human, and timeless.

This article was first published in the Financial Times