In my book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves I discuss various forms of extinction. Many humans will morph tremendously in 50 to 100 years. In a sense, this is a kind of extinction. We’ll enhance our senses using genetic engineering. Within this century, some of us will extend our visual and auditory ranges and have synesthesial senses that we can barely imagine. We’ll be in constant contact with one another through wireless mindlinks.

At first, we’ll see the nascent seeds of these mindlinks in the form of implantable cell phones. Shortly thereafter, we’ll become more sophisticated. Already, technologists are creating vocoders that convert nerve signals in the vocal chords to computerized speech. Cochlear implants convert sounds into neural signals that the brain can interpret. By interfacing the vocoder and cochlear implant with radio transmitters, we can take the first steps to e-telepathy, kiss the acoustic age good-bye, and enter the realm of thought-to-thought communication.

Cell phones and e-mail began to transform the planet around the year 2000. Imagine the transformative potential of e-telepathy in the next fifty years. Scientific, artistic, and political collaborations that took months a hundred years ago, could be done in a flash.

Musing about these kinds of direct mindlinks, George Dvorsky of BetterHumans.Com notes:

"On the surface humanity appears to be spreading outward, venturing across continents and into space. Yet in actuality, we are journeying towards one another. Our globe has never appeared smaller and our proximity to each other has never been closer. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, pointing the way to a remarkable interconnected future."

Within 15 years, stopwatch-sized Vagus Nerve Stimulators (VNSs) will be prevalent as a means of making us feel happier. (Temple University’s Jake Zabara showed over a decade ago that the VNS can stop epileptic seizures, and today we believe the VNS can also cure depression by zapping the vagus nerve in the neck.) Several research teams in the US and in Europe are already engineering new varieties of mosquitoes whose bite actually prevents malaria and other diseases by injecting antibacterial toxins. Other scientists are designing silkworms with DNA from humans so that the worms spin proteins like collagen that have pharmaceutical and industrial uses. Within 20 years, genetically modified creepy crawlers will push humanity into the Superbug Age in which insects inexpensively create a limitless supply of novel materials for our buildings and bodies. Right now, genetically modified tilapia fish are churning out lifesaving human blood-clotting factors. The fishes, an early symbol of Christianity, will be our saviors.

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Categories: Future, Technology, Humour, Internet, Society, Consciousness, Human, Time, Conceptual Time-Capsule...