Facebook gives sneak peek into sci-fi future

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Mike Schroepfer is sitting in a conference room inside Facebook's Frank Gehry-designed headquarters. His ultra-modern surroundings—22-foot ceilings, raw steel beams, polished concrete pathways that flow through acres of open desks—suit his responsibilities.
Schroepfer, the company's  known around Facebook as "Schrep," works on the stuff of . High-alt vazhduaritude drones that blanket swaths of the earth with Internet access. Computers that think like humans. Virtual worlds where you can hang out with friends on the other side of the country or the planet.

All are big technology bets that sound like they were just beamed down from the USS Enterprise, not dreamed up inside the Silicon Valley company that built the world's largest social network. But this is what Schroepfer has been asked to do by Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg: To peer 10 years into the future.
The assignment clearly energizes Facebook's techie in chief, whose eyes sparkle when talking about these three major initiatives that he says will propel Facebook—and technology—forward. He says even the notion that people will gather in virtual spaces when they are miles apart will one day be commonplace