Only Forwards

It’s happening. All the time, all around us, things that were once Science Fiction are becoming real. Cell phones are ubiquitous, where they were once Gene Roddenberry’s pipe-dream. Virtual worlds are springing up and sucking up the processing cycles of millions of minds, in using them, exploring them, and building them. We’re reaching up into space and down into our genetic code in ways we could only imagine 50 years ago- cloning animals, designing bacteria and crops, expanding our understanding of the nature of reality, and our ability to master it.

It’s evolution- of ideas, of technology and understanding, passed down through generations, and it moves in only one direction: Forwards.

Global Seed Vault, Svalbard

The Global Seed Vault on Svalbard archipelago way up near the icy North Pole is not in Japan, nor have I ever been there. It is however a very cool post-apocalypse place, an insurance policy for the Earth and human-kind in the event of rampant global disease or massive nuclear fallout, and as such belongs on a site mostly about ruins as much as anything.
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Cyborgization	Extra Senses

Technology and the realm of ideas are the new playing field, where idea battles idea for favor, under the pressure of an Earth with finite resources and conflicting ideologies, a hard-wired human desire to acquire ever more and build ever higher, and a biology under constant assault from virulent micro-organisms.	Cyborgs will have access to a much more massive range of sensory input data than we do. They will think nothing of spreading their sense of touch out through the Internet, their sense of vision up through the infra-red or telescopically out into space, or their sense of smell into degrees of precision down to the molecule.
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