The dream of immortality has become reality. OK the technology isn't here quite yet but before you die it will be. That means that anyone born within the last thirty years has a good chance of catching the age wave and sufing that fucker all the way to hari kiri, cause this is one wave that's never going to hit the beach. And with infinite lifespans we will be forced to look at how we run the show: we'll realise like a dog that's had his nose rubbed in it, that you can't crap in your own living room, and we'll reach for the pooper scooper and clean this planet up! And when the bio-chip gets here and we all have satellite cellphones implanted in our brains and "the net" has become the BrainNet and we're all telepaths, we'll understand the world from all possible points of view simultaneously and no-one will hurt anyone ever again, not that you could, 'cause by then bodies will be as clothes are to us now; shred one and you can just get a new one, in any size you like!! Some techno-naturalists won't even wear them, but will just live on the net, naked as the day they were cloned! Yes, this is the way it's going to happen, this is the way evolution works; not as a smooth process of gradual change but in fits and starts, all the necessary mutations piling up until the potential is there and then -WALLOP- you are now a proud member of the new species -HOMO TECHNOLOGUS. But there is one variable not yet taken into account, the most important 'genome' in the modern selection process. Every gene you have inherited up until this point has had one purpose; to propogate itself as far as it can in time and space. Some genes make you strong, some make you smart, some make you attractive to the opposite sex, but it is the elusive money-gene that will decide if you are a candidate for elevation to that higher state of being. Let's face it, if you aren't rich you're going nowhere. With population levels the way they are, you think they're going to give you the chance to live forever? Who are you trying to kid? And as for all that other stuff, the telepathicancercurebraincloning stuff, well that would be just wasted on us. But we'll be sufficiently close genetically, at least at first, too make damn good guinea pigs for all their new cybertech. BELIEVE IT!! Put yourself in their place. They will be as Gods to us, but they will still call themselves Human! And we will be as animals to them, because we will be a different species! And the money-gene that seperates us; the "I just want to make enough to be comfortable" ethos, with it's unspoken but omnipresent "and FUCK everyone else" clause that will decide who lives forever and who gets to hang with the dinosaur and the dodo. FUCK all the gurus that told us money was no substitute for enlightenment; have you noticed that they're all stinking rich? Or at least rich enough. The joke is that until you have had riches beyond your dreams you can never see their point of view; you live in twilight-world where every peg of truth you see is sanded down to fit into the round hole of your poverty. And they've planned it all! They invented the InterNet -a major mutation- in '73 as a proto BrainNet, but suppressed it until they had the MoneyNet in place: a Yang for every Yin, an evil twin, life and death; the world system has to be in chaotic equilibrium in order to spawn new forms of life. You may think I'm a crank but at least I'm cranking something. At the very least you should by now be trying to think of some get rich quick scam to balance your karma for the next stage of evolution. What's that you're saying? You don't want to live forever, anyway? Well either you've got a bad gene or you're just plain lying, cause what you've failed to grasp is that now immortality is actually here, if you can't make it or don't want to, you're looking at extinction. And we're not talking about your puny 'individul conciousness' which never existed anyway, not in the way that you believe, but your entire genome , eventully your entire species, will be wiped out. If you don't believe a word of this, read on; you might get a laugh. If you're too old or too poor to live, and you want revenge then read on, because revenge is sweet, especially if there's widespread death and misery involved. And there will be, because the Money Net and the BrainNet can never reach equilibrium; the planet's resources are sucked out through commerce and converted into information and when the Mothership's fuel runs out you end up with a world of people who know everything but have nothing to eat. This is the law of Entropy , not as taught in schools, but as laid down by the quantum theory: the massive energy of the big bang is never lost, but instead is bound up in increasingly complex molecules. Eventually these molecules cross the boundary of what we call life and organise themselves in increasingly complex configurations. The amount of information needed to describe the Big Bang is small in mathematical terms; the 'chaos' of the initial state is in fact more ordered than the complex state we exist in now, which takes a great deal of information to describe. We watch this self-organisation of matter and see it as an increase in the orderliness of the universe because we are part of the system, not realising that as life creates itself, the universe dies. We feed on the energy of the Big Bang and create information as a waste product. All the internet does is allow us a means of producing this waste more efficiently, thus depleting the earth's resources even more quickly. If you take the total cost of all the energy from photosynthesis of the sun's rays, through the formation of fossil fuels and their extraction as fuel and plastics that went into the manufacture of this computer and all the machinery needed to produce it, and add to that the total cost of everything that went into life-support of all the people involved, and add to that the holistic effects, it works out as 1013 US dollars for you just to be reading this article! The "free" magazine it is printed in is a 'wealth' of information beyond your wildest dreams! The imbalance between avaliable resources and our needs is the cornerstone of all barriers to human evolution, and is responsible for all conflicts; personal, racial, national, whatever, but it is not a consequence of scarce resources, rather it is our inability to harness them effectivley which holds us back. Physical waste like extraneous packaging, deforestation, overfishing, loss of land to pollution and all the environmental stuff we all know that shit could be managed better, but soap operas, computer games, Christmas movies, talk shows, fashion magazines and the rest all represent an even more massive expenditure of resources for zero return. It is this vast consumerist pit that needs to be filled, and the only way to fill it is to create as much useful information as possible, to convince Them to put a stop to the horrendous mis-managment of resources and bring the rates of energy use and information production into a synergitic equilibrium which will provide the complexity required to propel us to the next evolutionary stage. If this turn out not to be possible the next best option is to gather as much of the avaliable resources as you need and get the hell out of here.