Outward changes force human adaptation to new conditions. Creative responses to new means of communication, transport, energy sources and technology are in a continual process of recombining the intellectual and material 'DNA' of our societies. To stimulate change and introduce new possibilities in every field from computation to neuro-interfacing, scientific development and basic research are the key elements for tangible progress. Their economic share of national and international resources is therefore accelerating continually as demand and need magnify to maintain the complex balance of services and support required by post-industrial civilization.

The parochialism and dogma which have molded our thoughts and civilizations have become frighteningly obsolete. Extraneous and absurd ideas continually transmute into physical reality . As reality and inner space converge, reflecting the increasingly mercurial state of existence that we inhabit, a very fundamental convergence on another level is at work.

It is interesting that this complicated and ever more diversified process of development is almost never discussed in terms of the biological phenomenon that it represents. All invention, whether straight from an individual's hand or the product of a large multidisciplinary research department employing advanced design equipment is human motivated - something so obvious that its deeper implications are generally overlooked.
All mechanisms and information systems derive from human perception and its interpretation of the physical (and insubstantial) universe. The pattern of an invention spreads across human minds and elicits a wide variety of responses from the aesthetic to the artistic. Inevitably there are minds that can refine that pattern in greater or lesser ways - improving that invention and even making whole new uses of it that the original design did not anticipate. And all the permutations of philosophy, ethics and political doctrine are the same; inventions and constructs of thought as galvanically powerful - sometimes more so - than all the machines humans ever created. Concepts and ideas associated with an invention and/or its peripheral features expand through the brain-community, sometimes redirecting patterns of thinking and introducing new aspects to the collective conciousness. The more sophisticated the technology (or thought-construct) the more diverse the response and the more radical the economic and intellectual reconstructions that will happen in physical and psychological space. Biologically the cumulative effects are ambiguous, but potentially colossal. For scientific knowledge is in a state of perpetual convergence. All matter and energy is related and interacts according to the same fundamental laws. From the study of heliodynamics to the investigation of the very structure of reality beneath the level of the quark, there are operative forces and entropy that govern everything. Biology is Chemistry is Molecular Science is Atomic Physics is Celestial Mechanics. All barriers of understanding are ephemeral, requiring only sufficient time and ingenuity - and perhaps faith - to penetrate them. Human senses have expanded across the entire spectrum of light and radiation. Human perception encompasses macroscopic and microscopic space. The possible mutability of time and the theoretical basis of conditions that created our universe are seriously debated. We have even divined the common genetic heritage of this planet's animate life and proven our own relationship to it. The parochialism and dogma which have molded our thoughts and civilizations have become frighteningly obsolete. Extraneous and absurd ideas continually transmute into physical reality . As reality and inner space converge, reflecting the increasingly mercurial state of existence that we inhabit, a very fundamental convergence on another level is at work.

Bacterial and viral evolution appear to be outdistancing even the stunning breakthroughs of medicine, and we face the real possibility of great plagues in the next century. Famine, which abets viral and bacterial proliferation is going to be a global crisis of much grosser proportions than even the horrors of today.

Impermanence is an unavoidable condition of human life in general now - and accepted as such. Building and demolition perpetually realign the urban labyrinth. Transport systems encroach hard on the countryside. Domestic interiors change as new trends of decoration and appliances are invented. Communication networks are an electronic storm of hyperactive imagery and elastic morphing mindscapes absorbed by increasing numbers of brains. All civilization is melting and reforming at a tremendously dynamic pace that forces continual acceleration. Spheres of molecular science and genetic design and industry are similarly melting into each other.
Nature provides a cornucopia of nanoengineering techniques far in advance of any miniaturization that mechanical science has achieved; and this is well-recognized. Experiments in organic circuit-architectures and cellular materials-factories and biochemistry adapted for specialized chemical production have been important areas of study for years. Biotechnology is crucial to pharmaceutical and even materials science.
Many convergences are happening. But the most important is that of molecular and genetic engineering. Artificial genetic material is on the threshold of invention. Probably within the next thirty years the interplays of genes and chromosomes that generate the multiform architectures of biological growth will be so effectively researched and understood that it will be possible for genetic designers to create DNA structures containing traits, abilities, morphologies and sensory apparatus that do not exist in Nature. Biological equivalents of neurocomputerized instrumentation, microdetection systems and sensing devices of every imaginable kind and sophistication will be designed and layered directly into the basic organic structure of a lifeform. No messy and inefficient cybernetic modifications or interfaces will be necessary in the process. It will be direct, integral and quite natural on its own specialized terms.
Current genetic engineering relies on the creation of hybrids and the transplant of genetic characteristics between species. The process cannot result in breedable new species, however. It requires methods of artificial insemination and injection to produce these results. To the geneticists of the later twenty-first Century, these methods will be appear as crude as a wax cylinder recorder compared to digital broadcasting. Genes will be constructed atom by atom and arranged in that classic stairway pattern with the most elaborate care. Nature has provided the blueprint, and the next few generations of computational machines will interpret those plans. New forms of life will be built this way, and they will inherently have the ability to reproduce themselves. The concept of gender itself may become unfixed. Self-reproducing artificial organisms will become necessary both as an object of further genetic divergence study and plainly economic factors. For whatever reason they are bred, 'artorgs' could only be manufactured at great cost asexually. Nature will have its way through an entirely natural process of competition - the commercial.
Inevitably some or all will come into the biosphere. We cannot know the results, but potentially they will be ecologically catastrophic. Our planet's collective genome will become a vast mining site as the natural kingdoms are meticulously combed for useful traits and properties. Bioengineering will enter every aspect of life. An organic residue or vital element may be found in every kind of common appliance, tool or durable. The incredible tolerances and musculatures in the bodies of insects may drive the engines of industry. Houses and buildings and cities powered by photosynthesis. Common tools and vehicle-shells made of chitines and insectvorid armors grown to order. Bioluminescent lighting and videoscreens. Domestic electricity from chemosynthesis. Creative bodysculpting in the sublime and grotesque. MEME-addictions and brainsex and mindnets. The limits are only in the imagination. Evolution is in a complex and multifaceted process of manipulation between humans and their machines and the new genetically-based power of creation.
Convergence of life and machine sciences can have only one ultimate result. The organism and mechanism having become joined in the achievements of the twenty-first century, it will be only a matter of time before humanity will begin evolving in a biomechanical direction away from the purely organic and carbonaceous. Humanity will probably have no choice on a variety of different levels. Bacterial and viral evolution appear to be outdistancing even the stunning breakthroughs of medicine, and we face the real possibility of great plagues in the next century. Famine, which abets viral and bacterial proliferation is going to be a global crisis of much grosser proportions than even the horrors of today. It will affect even Western countries. Resource scarcity is going to further impoverish global society and maldistribution of resources will become more blatant. Mining operations on the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids plus the deep ocean will have to be implemented to keep civilization from harnessing biomechanics in a desperate and monstrous future warfare to seize those dwindling resources.

The danger of a kind of lawless megacity-wilderness of self-multiplying biocommunities replacing a civilized governance will be close at hand through the transition from fully human to mainly biomechanized states.

Survival has never been fair or just, but we may be forced to employ the redesigniing of the human body and mind at the genetic level to prevent the destruction which our own pollution and mismanagement are preparing us for. Resistance to disease and hunger and injury may come to seem very desireable to inhabitants of the more apocalyptic possible futures. Equally, economic disruptions in the best-case scenarios of the next century are likely to be even more profound than those of the last seventy years - and without any major war involving the Western powers. Enhanced abilities equivalent to the advanced tools and mechanisms of science might, incorporated into the human body and manipulated as easily by the mind as any sense or limb we now have, come to be seen as a partial solution to the poverties and economic perversities we can only guess at from this vantage.
Survival and prosperity may dictate that humans be given or have forced upon them new inherent abilities, senses and powers of expression. The body could ultimately become whatever the imagination can accept. Governments and corporations will attempt to reserve genetic and biomechanical innovations to themselves, but this will likely be only a temporary phenomenon. Patents and security laws and oppressive regulations will shatter, as will those governments and corporations when the new forms of life and intelligence they have created begin to procreate. Even the most hardheaded totalitarianism could not stem the tide for long - their creations would hunger for liberty like any human. Tomorrow's slave is the next day's minority. Minorities grow. A new and mutable human race accommodating these minorities and naturally interbreeding with them would transfer new characteristics and produce new successive genrations in the same way it has always done.
The combination of biomechanics with sexual reproduction and genetic randomness is a very weird and alarming prospect. It savors of a kind of revved-up mechanistic sexual madness, but civilization would have no choice but to accept it. Issues of race and law and rights and social entitlements - the definition of the state of legal and actual Humanity itself would dominate society.
Reactionaryism and social proscriptions may make the eugenic history of the next hundred years a melancholy one. The achievements that may come could, however, outweigh the evils, in view of the ultimate absorption of biomechanical characteristics by virtually all humans in the centuries ahead. Characteristics that may include textural sonar, infrared and ultraviolet vision, radio and UHF compatibility, neurocomputerized braincases with their own adaptations, improved reflexes, organs, pheromone detection, immune systems and skeletal structure, heightened tolerances of heat and cold and radiation, enhanced responses and sensory ranges, marine amphibianism, greater pressure resistance, electromotive force-diversion abilities, chameleonic talents, and broadened mental horizons touching a kind of ultradimensionality.
With these and so many other capabilities projecting themselves through an amplified genome, the human race will be in a constant imbroglio of mass mutation and biocybernetic reconversion. And all the time evolving. The human mind and brain, perhaps the spirit also, will be in flux. Direct mind-to-mind communication will emerge, and the landscapes of dream, emotion, psyche and personality will for the first time be shared intimately without the barriers of vocabulary or physical distraction. Forms of communication presently accessed by machines like computers and telephones will become inherent to the individual. The Worldwide Web and Internet of the future may be entirely a cybermentalic phenomenon; experienced and used and created by individuals without any machine interfaces. It would be as much a part of conciousness as background noise and visual impressions; easily focussed on and participated in by individuals capable of receiving its universal transmission - a limitless theatre for collective intelligences.
New levels of empathy and understanding between intelligences freed of bodily demands will evolve conglomerate intellects whose composition and powers will be in the realms of the fantastic. As easily imagined are the abuses of such intimacy; violations and torments unlimited by physical constraints that evil minds and bodiless intelligences could inflict. The introduction of genetic bionics and the practical divorce of mind from body will not operate in the service of an inherent good. The danger of a kind of lawless megacity-wilderness of self-multiplying biocommunities replacing a civilized governance will be close at hand through the transition from fully human to mainly biomechanized states. Future society will have to find its way and establish an equilibrium against a pace of evolutionary change far more vibrant and disoriented than any mechanical reengineering going on in our world.
The character of that equilibrium is not likely to be anything remotely parallel to the cultures and civilizations of the past; maybe more akin to biopolymorphs or intelligent hives. Relationships within such a biological communism would owe little to family and community as we understand them - the sharing of common experiences and degrees of empathy would derive from an entirely different basis. Many anticipating images of this future world portray a kind of phantasmagoric Gotham - doubtless it would appear so to us. Operating within these new environments however would be a social biology far more intimate and subtle than familial or racial identification. Such hive-societies and colony organisms would be as diverse as human culture now - probably more so, and like wombs nurturing further evolutionary mutation as they work out their own relationships to others of their kind and what the natural environment beyond has then become.

ANYTHING will be possible for these heirs to the human experience, and the pulsating universe around us will beckon to them. The fate of the rest of the human family will rest in their collective mind's eye.

The predatory instinct in what may by then be a very precarious world will be strongly reinforced, and take wildly divergent forms. Benign and evil communities would arise that nurture or vampirically and mentally exploit their members. Individuals will choose between and become entrapped by such biocommunities, trying to find suitable niches. Physical and psychological slaveries might be a hideous way of life for many; a new pattern of old abuses that might be called (or cursed as) Biofeudalism. Higher intelligences and entities would act as hosts or parasites according to their nature and create whole symbiotic subcultures around themselves in