HOW BRAVE A NEW WORLD...?

While we worry about the world around us -- and we do with every new edition -- there also exist worries about the world within us. Long after presidents and court decisions, long past the expiration dates on terrorism alerts and global warming signs, the human race is destined to deal with what its boldest innovators hand us in their next series of hand-held wizardry. One especially bold leap we seem about to take -- directly connecting our brains to our personal communicators...!

Here is science-fiction with far more science than fiction to it. And It's taking place in university campuses and think tanks all around us. This involves vastly more than family photos, favorite music, and intimate tweets. Now when you die, you will pass on to you children the complete experience of who and what you have been in this life. Just as, in helping create them, you passed on your genetic structure. Only now their heritage will not be your money or your property or even the cherish-able cliches from your wake. Instead, it will be the actual heritage of a life lived. The experience of a unique organism traveling through its unique human environment. All there encoded in a billion billion hand-held gigabytes.

So while we live, love and learn during our time here, really the only thing we can ever own and pass on is the experience itself. Which is what scientists promise to place in the palm of our children's hands. Ready to be conjured up anytime they may wish!

I've spoken with my adult children about such a Star Trek legacy. I don't believe they've yet processed the possibilities. Or the problems. Would yours? Perhaps once around for each of us is enough. And yet, progress never asks permission. To paraphrase another president: This generation has a rendezvous with deification.