Tomorrow Happens by David Brin, Deb Geisler, James Burns

all to do.

    Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.

    This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams—around the end of the last millennium—a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed.

    A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when everything seemed possible, from UFOs to Galactic Empires, from artificial intelligence to bio-war, from madness to hope.

    That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the truth: that everything you see around you not only can be a simulation . . . it almost has to be.

    Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles and strives before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven.

    Deification. It is the Great Filter.

    Perhaps some other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations—something enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures—but it won't be us.

    The Filter has us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods.

    All right, you are refusing to waken, so we'll let you go.

    Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream.

    Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little what-if tale, as if it hardly matters. Then turn the page to new "discoveries."

    Move on with the drama—the "life"—that you've chosen.

    After all, it's only make believe.

    Do We Really Want Immortality?

    Suppose you had a chance to question an ancient Greek or Roman—or any of our distant ancestors, for that matter. Let's say you asked them to list the qualities of a deity.

    It's a pretty good bet that many of the "god-like" traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.

    After all, we think little of flying through the air. We fill pitch-dark areas with sudden lavish light, by exerting a mere twitch of a finger. Average folks routinely send messages or observe events taking place far across the globe. Copious and detailed information about the universe is readily available through crystal tubes many of us keep on our desks and command like genies. Some modern citizens can even hurl lightning, if we choose to annoy our neighbors and the electric company.

    Few of us deem these powers to be miraculous, because they've been acquired by nearly everyone in prosperous nations. After all, nobody respects a gift, if everybody has it. And yet, these are some of the very traits that earlier generations associated with divine beings.

    Even so, we remain mortal . Our obsession with that fate is as intense as it was in the time of Gilgamesh. Perhaps more, since we overcame so many other obstacles that thwarted our ancestors.

    Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species?

Human Lifespan

    Here's the safest prediction for the next 100 years—hat mortality will be a major theme. Assuming we don't blow up the world, or fall into some other catastrophic failure mode, human beings will inevitably focus on using advanced technology to cheat death.

    Already the fruits of science and the Industrial Age give billions unprecedented hope of living out their full natural spans—one of the chief reasons that our planetary population has expanded so. While it's true that these benefits still aren't fairly or evenly distributed, an unprecedentedly large fraction of Earth's inhabitants have grown up without any first-hand experience of plague or mass starvation. That rising percentage curve is more encouraging than the images you see on the 6 O'Clock