Because others are replying with their futurist fantasies, here is mine: [taken with a large pinch of salt...] Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda.

Because others are replying with their futurist fantasies, here is mine: [taken with a large pinch of salt...] Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda. They are using the fluffy harmless critter as a convenient smokescreen for the development and testing of large-scale genetic engineering to implement the (inevitable) eugenics program that will create the stratification required for a colonial species. Systems incorporated into our world on the basis of "security", "healthcare" and "culture" will be used to analyse the population for weaknesses using social media databases, soft-tissue scanners, genetic screening and routine psychological testing. And as this conscious stratification continues, the human species will fracture and contract upon a few very highly advanced/specialised branches. Essentially humans have gone from voracious, highly specialised, hunter, to a doe-eyed herd, to a full scale hive. The Internet is the persistent storage medium that humans use to transmit colonial orders, like ants use pheromones, and various testing grounds exist the world over to develop the next generation of technologies that will internalise our virtual world and extend our senses so that humans no longer understand a world without it. Priority is being given to nano- and quantum-technology as this will allow humans to harness their genetic inheritance and use the natural world as they see fit - taking solutions developed over many millions of years through trial-and-error evolution and implementing them for intelligence driven engineering, improving on them and turning them to situations never before experienced in the physical universe. This will begin with the advent of the Techological Conflagration, a war to make all previous aggression look like a fart in a hurricane. In this battle, nation states will effectively dissolve as they will be unable to adjust to the rapid pace of development of those super rich individuals capable of amassing a small private army with a weapons infrastructure built on intense iteration (I call this The Batman Hypothesis). I suspect the testing grounds for this future are already well known: places like North Korea and Afghanistan offer a sandbox environment where the powerful can play. But the chilling part of this is that you have long ago sold yourselves down this river as Plutocracy has taken over the entire world and created a global hegemony that amorally seeks it's own stability and advancement. International consortia offer fronts for the production of infrastructure that will support the transition to this bleak view of our future (modern airports and stadiums are little more than vast crowd management systems and prisons are gulags in all but name) and people are constantly fed subliminal media that prepares them for the changes that are to come. It will begin with your military, but soon things will begin to be outsourced as more and more private entities flex their muscles. More than likely Homo Sapiens will not survive and if it does it will be as an augmented slave species to the Meta Sapiens (no longer affiliating with the branch of humanity) that will have attained god-like powers...