Let's Fast-Forward.

All the way to the year Kajillion or so...

But first, let's jump back a little bit to get the proper fix on the angle I'm tackling all this with...

To the invention of the printing press.













I happen to believe this was where liberty was truly born on this Earth.
Make information available to everyone, then the mind is free, and everything else follows.
Business as usual was pretty dumb and nasty up until then.
Business as usual is still pretty dumb and nasty, but compare it across history, there's a gradual upward curve.
Knowledge is power, and it makes life better.
Applied properly, it strangles tyrants.

So, fast-forward back up to today, and most of us have one of the millions of great-great-great-great grandchildren of that printing press in our homes.

The inkjet printer.












And printers are pretty fucking cool, but what comes after that?

Well, how does microscopic resolution strike you?
Well, what would we need that for?
Well, we're already using it, it's how they make the microprocessors that run the computer in front of you.













But what comes after that?

How about 3-D printing?
They've already got prototype models of that.













Ayep, 3-D scanning, and fabrication.












It's here, it's coming to your home, behold the near future.

Now, combine that with microscopic resolution, and you've got the ability to make intricate industrial products.













No small fucking deal on it's own, but fast-forward it even more to NANOscopic resolution, and what have you got?

Well, you've got molecular synthesis, doncha?
And then you've got nanotech.









And when you've got a 3-D molecular resolution nanotech "printer", you've got a nano-builder.
And nano-builder, shmano-builder, a replicator by another name is still a replicator.
We'll have replicators.
Bam.











And don't you just know that some wonderful hacker out there will make a Napster for replicator patterns.
They will. They totally will, it's the natural progression of these things.











Now, this is where it gets to the real nitty gritty.
What do you think is going to happen, when everyone gets their hands on 30 dollar Wal-Mart replicators, and patches them into Nano-Napster?

No one is going to fucking buy anything ever again.
It'll be a cyber-looting the likes of which you've never seen.
Not condemning or condoning, just stating the obvious.











Oh, there'll be some crazy shopping for merchandise to scan into Nano-Napster, sure.
You'll see a momentary upsurge in retail.

But where's all that money gonna come from?
Millionaires aren't going to be up on pirating.
It's gonna be poor people.
So where will they get the money?

Whelp, if you had a replicator in the house, what's the first thing you'd duplicate?

Damn right, that sonovabitch is gonna make perfect counterfeit money.
Molecule perfect.
Shop with confidence.
Those 10, 20, 50, and 100 dollar bill patterns are going to be very popular on Nano-Napster.













That first replicator will be the last thing anyone truly buys.
Buy the first one, replicate some money for your family and friends to buy one, and so on.
Fuck that, replicate the replicator.
Then all that'll be left is those counterfeit money shopping sprees for all those patterns.

Well, then it should be pretty obvious what happens.
The economy collapses, and it's the end of capitalism.












But, one would assume it'd also be the death of initiative.










And nothing else new gets invented.
Just rehashed re-printing of old shit.

Then we decay into a world like this....















Okay, so don't make a run on the malls just yet, folks, wait for those peppy go-getters to invent a few more things.

Like making computers smaller....













....and smaller still.....











Hell, go for broke, and get the implant.













And you might want some of those medical nanites, those will be handy.













And with brain implant augmented intelligence, patched into all of humanity's knowledge, everyone will be a doctor, and know how to work the nanites, and not only will everyone want to be in perfect health, but they'll want to go further, and IMPROVE on the human design.

Both through mechanical augmentation, and diddling with their DNA.









And along will come the transhumans.











And push transhumanism to its natural conclusion, and bam, we see the first true superbeings.
And then it's real, kiddies, the comic books are real.












THEN you can make a run on the malls, and collapse the economy, kiddies.
Who's gonna stop ya?

Ah, but Mike, all business won't die out, what about the people that make the toner for the replicators?

What toner? The thing juggles molecules, you can use anything for "toner".
And that's the beauty of it.
Trash, yard waste, finally, the ultimate recycling.














Ah, but Mike, what about the electric company?
After all, how are they going to power this?
Everyone'll go solar.
And they'll replicate their own solar panels, and tell the utilities to fuck off.
Piece by piece, it'll all come apart.














So yeah, it all falls down, and we all become cyborg superhero commies.
And word spreads, and computers, and replicators, and laptops with internal replicators replicate globally, and form a sprouting worldwide internet-as-organism.















And all the economies crumble, and the governments get pissed, but there's nothing they can do against cyborg super commies, so the governments crumble, but it doesn't matter, because with the telepathic internet, we're all one big global senate, the government is us, and all the bullshit is over.

So, as a side effect of all this, all disease is cured...











...hunger is eliminated...










And with everyone's needs met, crime and war go away.

Well, there'll still be crimes by sociopaths, both in the form of frothing loons, and shitty little tinpot aspiring tyrants, but in such a world, they'll stick out like a sore thumb, and be recognised as the mental disease they are, and there'll come a cure for it.
Just another bug to wipe out.
Take a nanite pill, or hypospray their arm, and poof, death of assholism.

And then it's over.

And real life will be like the internet.
Ya like the internet, doncha?
Damn right, you like it just fine.
And that's the blueprint for all this.
You're living a slice of it right now.

Anyway, with Earth de-bugged, and up to version 2.0, then we turn to the important shit.
Like building the ships, and getting a damned move on.
















But wait, "Communism?!?!?! Transhumanism?!!? I will not wish to live in such a world!!! I rebuke theee!!!!".

Oh, okay, then go burn all your Star Trek DVDs, cuz that's space-commie propaganda, and go burn all your comic books, cuz that's transhuman propaganda.

Burn all your SF novels, all of your games, all your geek shit.

Don't even daydream anymore.

And as you do, feel what you call a soul die.

Abandon geekhood, abandon dreams, embrace mediocrity in thought, act, and deed, and push the wheel like a good slave.
A bleak, bland, brown, flavorless life awaits you

Oh, you're free to have that outlook, go right ahead, but please, stop being a hypocrite, and spouting chest-thumping ideals at the same time.
People who think they're these hardass gloomy pragmatists are tiresome enough, but they somehow think they have the priveledge of waving a banner for some damned outcome too.
Doesn't work that way, folks.

Anyway, take the transhuman space-commie future, and let's fast-forward that to its natural progression.

Well, this would be a Type 1 civilization.
That being, using all the energy of a planet.













Fast-forward it up to a Type 2, and you've got Dyson spheres around stars, and we'd be up to a cross between The Borg, and Star Wars.











And as for the Borg, don't worry, the scary version of the Borg that has all one mind, and every Drone unit is an emotionless automaton, it wouldn't happen.
The episodes with Hugh, and "Unimatrix Zero", give it all away.
It would be so easy out of all the billions of drones for one to break away, become individual, then re-infect the hive with a new central purpose of individuality, and break the collective down to a normal cooperative of individuals.
I mean, Vulcans are telepathic, and they never became a collective.
Ditto Betazads.
Telepathy doesn't mean assimilation.
In fact, given the above, and the kind of people we already are, you'd really, really, really, have to go out of your way for some malicious loony Borg Queen type person to turn it into a scary collective.
It wouldn't work.
And if it ever started to take hold, it'd end before it started.
Yeah, we've had real life almost-Borg, the Nazi and Soviet/Chinese-Commie regimes treated people like robots, so why couldn't people like that infect our neural-net, and tap into that human sheep instinct, and make a Nazi-hive?
But see, that's the point.
We know that shit.
The telepathy hive would see a Hitler coming, and nip him in the bud.
Cordon him off, and upload anti-Nazi head-shrinking into him.
As long as we trust that good minds are going into this thing, there's nothing to fret.

So this fear of "*gasp* the collective!!!", *dismissive wave, and eye roll*.

So yeah, we'd be Borg, but we'd be good Borg.

Hell, this blog would be part of the neural net.
There you go.
Cure's right here.
;)

So, we go on like that for a few millenia, and eventually, we get up to a Type 3 civilization, and harness the power of the whole Milky Way.
Then, we're like the Q.












But long before that, in our neural nets, we're cyber-Q.

We're able to capture and/or simulate within computer memory every word ever spoken, every thought ever thought, by human beings ever.
And with this at our disposal, we can re-integrate every mind ever to draw breath, and bring back inside cyberspace, all the dead people, including you, and your loved ones.

And then you, and your family and friends, can virtually time travel, and go anywhere, any time, and meet anyone.

















And we'll also be able to simulate all the fictional characters ever imagined, and they'll all be able to meet each other too, and then shit like this will be real.

















And as a little site note, I've recently concluded, this hypothetical cyber-verse is the universe Harry Hembock currently plays in.
This explains minisodes 11, 12, and 12.5, and is the "magic secret", he learned from Volcano Guru.

Anyway, within this melee of all our ancestors, descendants, and fiction-pals, the conservatives will be back, and their ideas will be back in the pot, and may yet be relevant again.

I think we'll see waxing an waning and blending of ideologies before, during, and after all of this.
That's why -isms are meaningless to me, and why spooky labels for them are even more meaningless.
So that's why going back, the whole "oh, no, it's communism!", labeling for the Napster-ized, Nano-Google-Earth is meaningless to me except as a tool for satire.
Who cares?
Who goddamned cares?
Butt-clenching over ideological abstractions is another superstition as far as I'm concerned.
If the future sees us safe, healthy, happy, and free, who cares?

Anyhoo, with with all those personages, and their ideas blending together, who knows what our society will evolve into....

But whatever it is, by the time it gets up to Type 3, it quantum materializes into reality, computerizes every atom in the galaxy, and heads out to the larger universe.

And let's say we have a best case scenario, and this intelligence expands, and computerizes every atom in the universe, and all life becomes this glorious cosmic intelligence, and it's so smart, it solves the heat death of the universe, and sets off a second big bang.



















Then what?
Who knows?

But Mike, wouldn't this prove God?

Tsst, no.

Because this ties into the whole "who created God?", question.

If we're God, it would be so easy for us to leave a message for ourselves.
There isn't one.
I mean irrefutable positive evidence.
Something that bites you in the ass.
Wouldn't be hard to leave at all.

And a provable/proven God would be a mundane part of our lives, we wouldn't need theologeans mumbling dopey excuses trying to justify their crap.

So, either we didn't make it, or we made a completely different universe, and the universes proceed linearly, instead of a loop.

Okay, but "maybe we come from that linear progression".

Whelp, comes back to evidence.
And it comes back to infinite regression.
The regression would have to terminate with a universe with no God, and where life evolved, and the universe, and the world, behaves and looks exactly like you'd expect if we were in that universe, and if we were the life form that evolved.

So it's Big Bang, evolution, us, maybe we get up to a type 3 civilization, and beyond, and maybe we make a second universe.

Maybe.
Big maybe.

There's a lot against us.
The universe is a dangerous and careless place.

And then there's the stupid shit we do to ourselves.

And that gets into how realistic my little conjectural fantasy is.

Because there are forces that would fight back against all that.

We know right off the bat, this fella would stand in the way.




















And free alternative energy for everyone?
That's gonna annoy these fellas.
















And global democracy, and the end of war?
That's gonna cut into the bottom-line of these guys.
They ain't gonna be happy.







And no more capitalism?
Not on this fella's watch!














So, what would you do, if you saw that the future I just laid out as theoretically possible, and you were either one of these fellas, or just a "real American", who doesn't cotton to all this "goldurned Commie business"?

Well, if you were someone like that, you'd have to prevent such a technology from coming to pass.
Which is why I'm genuinely stunned that we've been allowed to come as far as we have, and to have all the puzzle pieces I've shown, and to have the huge puzzle piece of the internet to be able to show it.

But then, I'm amazed the printing press wasn't quashed.

But here we are.

But okay, so we're up to the edge with this pesky technology stuff, maybe we can stop it here, or maybe even turn back the clock somehow.
Well, that's gonna take suppression.















And we've gone down that road before.
















But it can't hold, it always crumbles.

It always gives.
Be it a decade, a generation, a century, a millenia, it can't keep its grip.

And if they go the suppression route, to hold civilization frozen in one place, it'll take nastier, and nastier acts of suppression.












They're going to have to take off the gloves, and be monsters, as we're seeing right now in Iran.
















And that's gonna piss off the Libertarians.
And that'll cause something interesting to arise.

Libertarians and Lefties taking up arms alongside each other in the same cause.

















That would be an interesting little reality show.
I'd buy the circus sized popcorn bag for that one.












Now, if they don't go the violent-suppression route, then what they're going to have to do, is use the method the Amish have used to freeze their society in place.
Bullshit.
Brain-washing religious bullshit.

But, we've gone down that route before.
Dark ages, remember those?













Man, those were the days.
Those days of "traditional values".

But, I don't think they're going to be able to pull that off.
The internet is here, there's Youtube, and the Blogosphere, there's the current popular Zeitgeist that allows for Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to sell millions of copies, (back full circle to that printing press again *wink*) and for Bill Maher to make a movie like "Religulous".

So, their last hope, and it's really a pathetic dwindling one, is lies, and sabotage, and dirty politics, and that's where The Discovery Institute comes in.

But, they're dumb, wrong, and duplicitous; and every day, it becomes more apparent to everyone how dumb, wrong, and duplicitous they are, the internet catches out their every lie, and every trick, they're finished.
They lose.
You lose, Discovery Institute.
Go away.
Go the fuck away.
Stop lingering.

Same as the anti-gay people.
You lose.
You're on the bad side of history.
You picked the wrong thing.
Give up.
Go away.
You lose.

So, the liars ain't got the mojo.
So, the side of suppression will have to stop being subtle, and flat out have to turn back the clock.
They'll have to destroy the internet, and civilized society, and bring it all down, and send us back to the stone age.















And the radical fundie Muslims want exactly that.

I'm not 100% sure they couldn't do it.

But say they do.
How long does that set us back?
A millennium, tops?
And knowledge and thinking would just go into the underground, and I'd be one of those guys.











Then we crawl back up to now, and are having this same discussion.
But now Islam has filthy-ed itself as badly or worse than Nazism, and is never taken seriously again.
So that's done.

So, we march on knowing that shit's gone.
Whether it's this version of me and this blog, or my millenial descendant rewriting its duplicate.

But let's assume the current incarnation/iteration of civilization survives this Islamic bullshit.

What's left for the forces of suppression?

Um,...nothing.
They certainly don't have a better, or even good world to offer you.

And going back to the start, the genie was out of the bottle with the printing press.

And going back to what I said about the printing press, and hammered home in the rest of this little ramble, knowledge IS liberty.
Because what it takes to keep it under wraps is nothing less than tyranny.

And back to what I said futher up, all this is why I don't give a shit about the political -isms.
I see the world as a division not between -isms, but between freedom and suppression.
And suppression/tyranny can wear many masks, and be on either wing.
Which is why I'm none too impressed with partisanship.

Sure, I tend to lean left, because it's unavoidable, because I'm a person.
But in the truly bigger picture, meh.

Anyway, even if everything went right, I'm not saying we'll make it to rainbows and kittens.

Best case scenario, the future will look like Star Trek.















More likely, it'll be flawed, and look like Futurama.
Which would still be pretty fun.












Or, it could go really messed up, and end up like Battlestar Galactica.













Meh, let's aim a little higher, why don't we? Those nitwits went out of their way to be flawed for the sake of petty drama.

Ah, who the fuck am I kidding?
We'll be stuck with drama queens for a long damned time to come.

It'll probably be a blend of Trek, 'Rama, n' BSG.
Hopefully with no Earth getting nuked, or religious cyborgs.
Or if there are religious robots, they're relatively harmless, like the ones in Futurama.
But, that took building a Robot Devil to keep 'em in line.

Anyway, one thing it'll be folks, is interesting.

That Chinese curse works.
We live in interesting times.
Quantum future God us-es help us.
Cuz no one else will.