Something is happening, it has never happened before in the entire history of the human race. No I am not talking about McDonalds opening in China, what I am talking about is the joining of technology with humans. Oh sure, we know that almost everyone has a tv set, but I am not talking about technology on that level either. So what am I talking about? I am talking about technology joining with us on a much more intimate level. On such a level that it becomes part of us. It can be a device that has a portal inserted right into our brains or somehow ties into our nerves and muscles. It is an enhancement in some cases, to our natural bodies. This is the kind of stuff that made up a lot of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember a story that was on the Outer Limits, a scifi program, that depicted a person putting nanites into his body to keep them young forever and to fight all disease. Nanites are tiny robots that can be programmed to perform tasks and are usually small enough to be able to travel in the blood stream. This backfired in the story and the man died a horrible death, but in real life, this is actually being thought about.

We are definitely reaching a point in human development where it will become commonplace to augment our body with mechanical and electronic devices. It may become so prevalent, that a person coming from this time period might not recognize someone from 500 years in the future as even being a human. When we look at what is being done experimentally in the lab, we realize that nothing we can think of is too far out, or to absurd. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. The study of photosynthesis is ever ongoing. When the exact mechanism of how plants change sunlight to nutrients is found, it might lead to some device in the distant future that will eliminate the need for us to eat. Maybe we will have something inserted in our bodies that will do the same thing and nutrients will be created internally. I hope that you like chlorophyll? A second device will probably be needed to convert the chlorophyll to something more agreeable for our bodies. I know that this scenario sound really far out and that is because it is. I purposely picked it to show that nothing is going to be beyond out reach.

A good example of what may someday be, is illustrated on the tv show, Star Trek The Next Generation. The Borg are a race that enhances their young with devices at birth. Might not this be true for humans in the future? One might get nanites at birth to keep them healthy, have chips inserted into their brains with the entire knowledge of the human race and have strength enhancements. Everybody might be equal in knowledge, the only difference will be that since people have different personalities some of us will be more aggressive in the use of this information, while others will not. There may be no need for specialists in any fields, because we will all have that knowledge. We will all be doctors, scientists, engineers and auto mechanics, rolled into one. When you go for a job there will be no need for the boss to ask you if you are qualified, because you will be qualified to perform any task if you so wish. Since power and wealth are carefully watched over by a certain class of people, you still probably won't be able to get the really professional jobs, because you still will have to be connected. The fact that everyone will be qualified, will mean that connections will be required more than ever. By connections I mean knowing people of influence that can help you get these jobs

There is something else that might happen, however. There could be different grades of chips, such as an A chip and a B chip. A chips might only go to those that are of a certain social class and the rest of us might receive B chips. The A chips might contain all the specialized knowledge, while the B chip might only supply you with the knowledge of a high school education. Yes that is right, there will be no more schools. They won't be necessary if you already have the knowledge of what you would have learned. There may be some way that in rare instances a B chip can be upgraded to an A chip or even a modified A chip. That would be an A chip that didn't have quite all the information of a regular A chip, this would still keep you out of that social class, but allow you to advance your career and make some good money. Fantasy, sure, but it could easily become reality. The chips I am talking about have already been talked about by different scientists. No, they haven't mentioned different classes of chips, but it does sound as if you might need to be rich to afford a chip at all. That would put a lot of people at a disadvantage and be just as bad as having a B chip. It might even be worse, at least with a B chip everyone would be brought up to the level of a high school education.

Today you hear about all sorts of dangers threatening the Earth. Scientists talk about such things as meteors and asteroids hitting us and say that if they are of sufficient size, they will cause a cloud of debris that will block out the sun for years and kill everything on the planet. Nowhere in this scenario has anyone considered the fact that if this does happen in the future, man may have been so improved that he would survive, unless he was in the area where the giant rock actually hit. At this point I don't really know what improvements would be needed to survive this, but I can guess. There will be no light. so scientists think that plants won't grow. of course this may not be true in the future because some other method might have been found for growing them and they might not even be needed by that time, because we might just get all of our food from the lab. Let's assume thought that they are right and we still grow crops the conventional way. Our bodies might have some power source by then, that will bypass the method of changing food into energy and create that energy directly, thus eliminating the need for food all together. We might also have some sort of air filtration device built into us to screen out all those particles floating around from the impact. It could still be life as usual for most humans. We might beat this thing just because of the improvements we made to our bodies.

One thing that I have thought about was the continuation of some of the great scientific work of the past. Intelligence will still be needed because what we will have is knowledge, which in itself doesn't increase our intelligence. Think of it this way, a computer has memory and a processor, these are two distinct things. Such is true for humans, we have our memory, which may contribute to our intelligence, but it is not our intelligence. You might know what Einstein did, but you might not be capable of continuing his experiments. This would be true for almost all of the general public. Here is the thing, there may be scientists brilliant enough, that armed with all that knowledge will be able to pick up where Einstein left off. In a way that is what Einstein did, he continued what Newton did. If you think that advancements are coming quickly now, imagine what it will be like in the future. There could be new discoveries ever day that would modify life on this planet.

Many people have speculated about our future as a race. Not many have gone as far as I have, because they probably think that what I have said is ridiculous. Well that is a matter of opinion. I think that one has to remember that we are now discovering more in science than ever before. The scientific discoveries are increasing exponentially. Just look at computers for example. They have gotten to the point where even the home computer is far more powerful than most people need. Computers have now been tied into the brains of paralyzed people and they can move the cursor and operate the computer with just their thoughts. If I told you 30 years ago that this was going to happen, you would have thought that I was a kook. I think that we have to take all this in context. The human body is on the verge of getting improvements, there is no doubt about it. How long will it take, probably years, but it will happen. The US Army has announced research on implanting chips into soldiers brains and they expect this to happen within 5 years. Hey, it is coming and we have to realize that this is not a pipe dream.