This was on Yahoo:

Isn't that amazing? That dog was so lucky, but even more than that…

The kid!

The kid made me think of how lucky the youth of today are to be living in a time when technology is opening up vast new horizons for everybody.

Seeing that kid sit next to such a cool device just made me think back to the old saying, "The future is now!"

Recently I updated my blog. I can't believe how different the administrative interface is. It's awesome. They must have worked forever, because it looks amazing. And seems faster!

I got to thinking… The more things change, the more we have to think in order to keep up.

But I think I'm getting used to it. Maybe too much. Sometimes I catch myself wishing a newly upgraded technology would hurry up and come on the market. Like a faster CPU! Come on, where are the 10 Gig-ers?

Or…where's the hydrogen fuel cell?

Or…where's the voice responsive AI in the glove compartment?

KITT, they drugged me…Get me outta here now!

[I'm on it, Michael.]

Heroes is absolutely incredible. They have the option to make it complex, and they do so brilliantly. Monday, amnesiac Peter took his Irish gal pal for an unplanned trip to 2008, where over 90% of the world's population has been ravaged by disease. Peter and his lady are separated, and she is deported back to Ireland.

Then, Peter goes back to some other time, possible present-day, possible the time of the previous generation of heroes, Linderman's, generation. He meets Adam, the immortal samurai Hiro just made an enemy of, 400 years in the past.

All right, so the guy's immortal. That means all healers are immortal. That means Claire and Peter are immortal, and previous future Sylar was as well.

Back to the issue at hand. Peter left the future where "9 out of 10 dentists agree…that they're dead," but his girlfriend is still there! And you just know they're going to save the world again like they did at the end of Season 1. They stopped the bomb, and prevented the devastation and ensuing development of an anti-hero police-state. So they'll stop this disease too. But where does that leave Peter's lady?

In "Back to the Future 2," old man Biff in 2015 traveled back to 1955 giving his younger self a sports almanac with all the winners in every major sporting event for the next 45 years. 1955 Biff got rich. When Doc and Marty left 2015, they returned to 1985-prime, which was a Hell version of the time they once knew. Doc and Marty left Jennifer, Marty's GF, on a porch swing in 1985-prime. Then they went back to 1955, fixed history, and returned to the original 1985. There, they found Jennifer on the same porch swing.

How did that work? If Doc and Marty fixed the timeline in 1955, then the versions of them that were in 2015 a few days prior would have ended up back at the original 1985 to begin with, and would have brought Jennifer home and probably woken her up at some point. Like, "Here, your home now. Good night." How did she jump from 1985-prime to the normal 1985?

Well, anyway, if Heroes does that, and Peter never goes back for his GF (like that would happen), then she'll first show up in Ireland in the diseased 2008, having been missing for a few months. Then, Peter and co. will change history, cleaning up 2008. At that point, his GF will be in Ireland in the clean 2008. Or will she?

I think what could happen instead is that she randomly appears in clean 2008 at the time and place where she showed up with Peter in dirty 2008. She'd randomly appear in NY, and wouldn't be sent to Ireland because there wasn't any disease to mandate deportation. But does she show up without Peter? Hmm…

The way around this conundrum would be to have Peter go back to diseased '08 and bring GF back to 2007. I think they'll do that.

Alternatively, Peter and friends could first save the world, and then Peter goes to clean 2008, picks up GF, and returns with her to the present (by that point, the present would probably be the end of Season 2).

But man! I wish they'd explain what would happen if she were just left there, in a future soon to be rewritten. I'll bet there are a lot more interesting possibilities than what I've come up with.

I came across this book today, and all I can say is wow. It describes how the five mass extinction events of the past worked. Four of the five, including the one that killed all the dinosaurs, involved greenhouse gases reaching a level that we could reach in 100 years if we're not careful. That would mean the death of over half of earth's inhabitants.

The way things work now, there's a cycle in the ocean, with water moving around enough to be oxygenated, allowing the right creatures to live. If it gets hot enough, that cycle will stop, the water will no longer be oxygenated, and those creatures will be replaced by bacteria. These bacteria will produce hydrogen sulfide, and much of the ocean's life will die. Worst case scenario? In 100 years, humans will have caused the 6th mass extinction event, and the sky will be green.

So this got me thinking. If we've got all the evidence, and all the reason in the world to change our destructive ways and clean up emissions, what's stopping us? Are there forces at work manipulating the belief of the public, and if so, why? What do they have to gain? How does one profit from the destruction of a planet?

Unless you're an alien!

Lately I've been getting the feeling that we could achieve great or terrible things in the near future. Our economy, our world politics, and our rapidly advancing technology all seem to be coming together to say, "Something big awaits just beyond the horizon." But will it be good or bad?

The Bible says no man shall know the end of days, and maybe that's why things seemed so "normal," even while unprecedented actions were being taken by our President, both at home and abroad. What if we're just accepting it all as not an "end of the world" kind of thing because we simply don't see how it all fits together? I realized that there is a definite possibility that there's a method to this madness, and that everything that's happened in the news has taken place for a reason. But of course, that's how pure paranoia is born. "Everything matters! It's all a massive conspiracy!!" Haha, right.

Ok, so if we forget that road for a minute (the idea that we're already on the path to Armageddon), and focus on a more golden scenario, what do we get? A pretty awesome outlook. That's right, even in the face of famine, war, poverty, climate change, and disease, we can still be optimistic because we've got something that just might have the power necessary to trump all our woes. Technology. We keep moving forward at an ever-increasing pace. Pretty soon, we'll likely have a global wireless network powerful enough to provide poverty-stricken nations with the ability of linking to information and resources that can pull them up and greatly improve and enhance their lives. If we made an effort to do something like that a few years ago, we'd have had to lay a ton of cable. Now, with satellites and new "I'll beam you the movie in 2 seconds" technology, a massive effort like that will be far easier.

But of course, anything that is powerful is not necessarily good, or even bad. It's what is done with it that is good or bad. Sure, we've got incredible technology, but we could seriously screw things over for everybody by not using the foresight to prevent the undesirable scenarios. We might clean up the planet and improve the standard of living for all 6 billion residents…or we could dig ourselves a deep hole of war, omnipresent surveillance, and misery. I guess it's really all up to us. Let's hope we don't blow it!

This article spells out how inventor Ray Kurzweil, who's been making frighteningly accurate predictions about the future for years, sees our future. His whole take on the level of society's progress differs from your Average Joe's concept of the same in one basic way: Joe sees things moving linearly, but Ray sees them progressing exponentially!

Take for example the human genome project. Originally scheduled to finish up in its fifteenth year, it had only completed mapping 1% of the human genome by year 7. Nobody thought it would be on time. But every subsequent year, the amount of progress doubled, until it did indeed encompass 100% in year 15.

Kurzweil says that most people can't comprehend the nature of the future as he sees it, because they look at things from a point of view ground in the present rate of things. But if you take into consideration things like, "Moore's Law," which says that processing power for computers will double each year (as it has shown to be doing), then within 20 years we should have computers that are smarter than people.

Kurzweil predicted back in the 80's that some sort of computer network would arise to connect us all, and he was right. He also said that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998. It did happen, but in 1997!

Among Kurzweil's ideas for the future are the interconnectedness between humans and machines. By around 2045, if you're not hooked in in some way, perhaps with nanobots complementing your brainpower, you may not be able to understand the changing technology. At that point, he says, we'll likely have reached the Technological Singularity, in which AI is coming up with new technology faster than ordinary humans can contribute.

What's the best part? Kurzweil sees nanotechnology, genetics, and robotics reaching a point where human life can be sustained indefinitely. He takes a lot of vitamins, and for good reason. If you take care of yourself, "you may just live long enough to live forever."