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What wonders are there in simplicity? The human structure, compared to the vastness of the universe, is a simple system, relatively easy to master. Any reasonably technological civilization will soon learn to alter genes and prolong their natural spans. It’s very simple. It’s amazing that the sci-fi writers of the 20th century almost all envisioned star travel coming along soon; none of them spend much time with humans achieving near immortality.

The genome will be charted by 2003. With the internet, the dynamics of the proteins will annotate the records for the genes at a rate that will astonish all. Barring catastrophic reductions in research and development worldwide, the technology for significant life extension therapies is one generation away, at most.

Our simple machines will live longer and longer. In altered bodies we will begin to tinker with mortality, with natural life expectancies. Aging will be slowed, then arrested, eventually reversed. Biocomputers will begin as brain-interface implants, possibly someday becoming receptacles of consciousness.

Ours will be the last generation that doesn’t expect to live at least one-hundred years, or even much longer, but ours is also the generation of the planetary population boom, the technology boom, and the alteration of the ecosystems of the earth at a fundamental, epochal level. This last generation of mortals like none before on this world, must find something of value in the planetary wilderness, or see it lost forever. This last generation of mortals is charged with the task of husbanding what is left of biodiversity, and passing it forward in time in thriving shape. Preserved and available for sustainable shared exploitation.

Our generation is fated to preside over the end of the population boom, and the establishment of a sustainable world population. Our generation will define how this transition is made. When we are gone, how many people and peoples will remain and continue onward in this new world of longer lives and clean, thriving planetary ecosystems? Wouldn’t more be better?

The rich may well be the first to sample the medicines of immortality, but they will also be the guinea pigs, they should be left to their devices. For vitality and longevity, during the 1920′s many wealthy patients indulged in mineral water spiked with radium, with painful consequences. Eventually everyone, rich or poor will be able to receive already tested life-extension therapies, if they so desire.

Our last generation of mortals has an inspiring, epic choice that must be made amidst and in spite of the disruption and doom that is part of this overnight metamorphosis of our species. We can save biodiversity and we can clean up our planetary ecosystems. If we fail our planet will yield greater and greater realms of wasteland, if we succeed our planet will run with rivers you can drink from and salmon will run healthy and happy even in the year-round culverts and canals of megapoli. Trees hold water and soils. Carbon sequestration carbon schmiequestration! Where trees are the lands don’t slide, and the springs run strong and clear. Save the earth! We can save the earth, along with ourselves.

We have the unique opportunity to save biodiversity, cultural diversity, ecosystems – the earth. This can unite us, and give us a common purpose. Save the earth can be incorporated into the ideology of peoples, and provide a new framework for prosperous negotiations between governments enjoying good relations. Save the earth can be incorporated in religions, furthering ecumenical accord. Mullahs and liberal christians who promote contraception, Mahants who want to save the Ganges; religious forces can work together. Save the earth can be incorporated into capitalist ideology, where sustainable is synonomous with perpetual profit, and compassion is in fashion. Save the earth can give the peoples of the world a peaceful war to fight together. Saving the earth can make the lives of the last mortal generation also be the lives of those who participated in humankind’s finest hour. How lucky we are.

We are creatures with a simple life, a short life, a simple system, we humans, when measured against the vastness of the immortal intergalactic infinite web of universes. But we are on the verge of exploring way beyond this world, when we begin to use our new life extension and consciousness augmentation technologies and our new space bending physics. How much will we bring with us? How much of our rich cultures and how much of our biodiversity can we bring to that newly opened universe? Wouldn’t God and Gaia agree that more would be better?

Capitalists will often accuse environmentalists of worshiping the earth. In their eyes, environmentalists are a type of religious cult. To many capitalists, environmentalists don’t merely see ecosystems, they see a sacred, harmonious unity of earth, water, weather, plants, bugs, beasts, watched over by a sentient, metaphysical presence; Mother Nature, Gaia. These are environmentalists for whom trees are conscious beings and high elves walk silent and immortal in the forests. All of this is silly, the capitalists say, and maybe they’re correct.

It’s probably true that some environmentalists, maybe some of the deep ecologists, are people who worship the earth. But pure capitalism also becomes a form of fundamentalist worship when it becomes the only principle to govern all actions of civilization. To say that capitalism is the only path, the only road for society, the inevitable, triumphant endpoint of civilization, requires a religious leap of faith.

The health of the earth and the health of all living things upon the earth is also the concern and the cause of the environmentalists – all of them. Measures to improve the health of the earth and the health of all living things on the earth should not be judged solely against the backdrop of pure, fundamentalist capitalism.

An environmentalist businessperson who is willing to sacrifice higher short term profits in order to embrace sustainable, perpetual profits, does not necessarily think the tree is hugging
back. When a staunch capitalist lionizes a businessman who is strip mining arctic krill to use for fishfood on aquaculture farms, and baleen whales are starving, that’s capitalism pretty deep. Capitalism that praises someone who for a bit of nonsustainable profit will starve and exterminate whales and let the carrion birds pick their beached and wasted flesh before they’ve even finished dying, should be redirected, we think.

Capitalism today has conquered the planet not only because of the efficiency of its practice, but with the power of its ideas. To a free market environmentalist, the vast majority of the ideas of capitalism are good ideas. The triumph of capitalism cannot however blind us to the need for governments which have ideologies that include preserving the planet; governments that will send marshals to arrest the men who still
overharvest the krill.

Driving over the Sunol grade, bound south west on Interstate 680, is driving into the heart of the Silicon Valley. The south estuaries of the San Francisco Bay stretch out to the north and north west, and the vast Santa Clara Valley forms an all encompassing plain, with distant mountains covered with clouds blown up from the Pacific shore.

Driving into the Silicon Valley, in the summer of 1999, is driving into a place which is the epicenter of the greatest civilizational shift in human history. For the first time, humans are acquiring a collective information nervous system. We may end up like Borg, or we may end as bundles of pure, metaphysical energy, or something else, but our race is changing.

Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1939, we lived on the brink of World War II, and the epicenter was somewhere between London and Berlin. That our race could engage in total war between all industrialized nations, across the entire face of the planet, in a cataclysm that culminated in the dropping of two atomic bombs, was also part of this epochal shift in the human race. That was nothing compared to 1999.

Seventy years ago, in the summer of 1929, we lived on the brink of the great depression, on the eve of the first world wide financial collapse, and the epicenter was New York City. That the world could invent such international financial interdependence, and such fantastic speculative financial tools, was also part of this epochal shift in the human race. That was nothing compared to 1999.

The Silicon Valley in 1999 is home to the best and brightest technical minds that have ever been assembled, from everywhere on earth, and in all the labs and on the manufacturing floors and in the programmers cubicles we are recreating ourselves. Humans are using technology to create memory and sensory and logical elements of our minds, and the energy of this shift pours out of the buildings onto the freeways when you drive in the Silicon Valley. All I could think about was how much I’d like to have one of those Humvees.

The internet took a stock market that was strong, and made it soar, and there are scores of thousands of millionaires, and quite a number of billionaires, driving the freeways and renting videos and dining out, in the Silicon Valley. Coming into the town of Palo Alto, driving on University Ave., I was looking at the Magnolia trees and nearly hit one of the Humvees. Next to me at the stoplight was the founder of an internet goliath. Behind me at McDonalds the hacker who wrote a Red Hat hit, flush with cash.

We are in the long boom of technology growth, experiencing the internet iteration. The iteration that overshadows all the others. For the first time, all the souls in the world can communicate with all the souls in the world. Overnight, compared to previous epochal shifts, the human race is evolving from sentient primates to something higher.

Imagine the tentacles of technology spanning the earth like the arms of an octopus around a watermelon. The grip of a feeding octopus on the fragile sides of our earth, this moist watermelon, has been more apropos as a metaphor for technology than the more recent internet derived concept; an infinite web of conduits pouring consciousness amidst and between some six billion souls.

Up till the dawn of the internet, it was tough to argue that technology, in general, helped the environment. Up till the dawn of the internet, all that technology meant to most environmentalists was steel saws and steel tractors, dams and salinization, concrete, clear-cut logging, air pollution, poisons in the water; technology had benefits, of course, but technology could easily facilitate, unwittingly, the destruction of all life on earth.

With the dawn of the internet, the tentacles acquired a brain. Perhaps at last the octopus would nurture faster than eat. Imagine sensors and servers spanning the earth dedicated to a specific purpose, measuring earth information to become part of a new Gaia, the technology enhanced Gaia of this earth. Like an embryonic global nervous system, the internet grants every place on earth the potential to communicate and aggregate environmental data. More than six billion souls are so linked and all of them can see this data.

With such measureless new abilities for humanity to collectively meld its consciousness with the state of the earth, everywhere, the flow of the waters, the qualities of the atmospheres, the output of the forests and the fisheries, new ways to save the desecrated wastes can be contemplated. We have new ways to imagine and build a world with nature and technology in harmony. Our exploding knowledge of digital ecosystems can be put to use to help our biological ecosystems.

Not only can the tentacles of technology create a global ecological nervous system of sensors sharing data on the web, technology can also be used to make restoration efforts possible on a greater scale and lower cost that anyone could possibly have imagined even twenty years ago.

Sensors and computers can be used to manage customized irrigation systems of continental proportions. Their network would become the nerves of the new forest, acquiring and distributing water with coordinated precision. Transfering vast quantities of water between continental watersheds not for industry, but for new forests. Unlike industry, forests begat rain, meaning giant aquaducts used to nurture new forests will cause overall increases in available water. Why not let technology Gaia and technology networks nurture new forests along Lake Chad, or the delta of the Syr Darya, or in Mato Grosso, and along the Orange, and Borneo, and elsewhere.

The places where the early waves of technology slaughtered the forests will never regenerate without help from the newest waves of technology; the technology Gaia, and the expression and will of this technology enhanced Gaia, such as continental irrigation systems. On the edges of the slaughter, on the borders of untouched forests, nature can regenerate by itself. But on the shores of the tragically diminished Aral Sea, and countless elsewheres, only technological assistance will restore life to the earth. Meanwhile, the internet has bestowed the ability to bring precision and sensitivity to continent-wide irrigation systems that had before been inconceivable.

With nature and technology in harmony, we can refill the Aral Sea. Why not dig a tunnel from Tobolsk south through mountainous Siberia to empty into the Aral Sea? The Ob-Irtush could spare a few cubic kilometers of water each year. Give drip systems to the Cotton Farmers along the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, and get more water back to the Aral Sea from the original sources. Even the mighty Volga can be tapped with a short tunnel east to the Aral Basin, and why not, if the Caspian is rising?

Turn the water flow on and off or reverse the flow, depending on the seasons in the regions. Share the water. A cubic kilometer of water here, a cubic kilometer of water there. Highly technological. Where the Kalihari marches south, even to the delta of the Orange, let new nerves of technology help humans move water. Where the Sahel becomes the burning Sahara, let the new nerves move water by the cubic kilometer. Run a tunnel north from the bountiful Ubangi, and water the Sahel. One hundred years ago, some mad Englishman thought it up. Now we have computers to manage the flow, and embattled lakes in the Sahel that cry for water. More trees, more rain, more water, more life. Good global cooling.

The rapid development of a digital ecosystem across the planet will allow the best thoughts of all humans everywhere to be captured and concentrated, allowing everyone to have the benefits of data, design, technology, and deployed systems, that can help ravaged natural ecosystems regenerate. Along arteries of well traveled and well settled humans, technology can still and even more easily be harnessed to assist natural ecosystems, creating new rivers and forests in the middle of the metropolis. More shade. More soil. More moisture. More life.

Imagine nature and technology in harmony.