Technology: Our Finest Tool, Our Legacy

Spencer Belleau English 1A Ms. Luoma May 14, 2012

Research Outline I. Definition of Technology a. Literal Definition b. When non-technology becomes technology c. Technology vs knowledge II. Human Technological Development a. The source of technology b. Technology's effect on our Evolution c. Near Future Possibilities III. Technology's effect on nature a. Pollution and habitat destruction b. Genetic Engineering IV. Technology's effect on Society a. Communication b. Warfare c. Labor V. Learning from Nature a. Biological Engineering b. Nanotechnology c. Antibiotics d. Neural Network Computers VI. The next 200 years a. Cybernetics b. Fusion of humans and machines c. Uplifting d. Virtual Reality e. Brain Backups VII. Far Future a. Dyson Spheres b. Space Travel c. Human Speciation

Belleau 1 Spencer Belleau English 1A Ms. Luoma 14 May 2012 Technology: Our Finest Tool, Our Legacy

Technology is a word that is used quite often in out modern society. Most of the time, it is being used to describe a new electronic or medical device, or some form of gadget, and people never think of it was anything more. An interesting question is, what exactly is technology? Surely, someone must know exactly what this is, as it is so important to today's modern world? Funnily enough, the definition of technology often varies from person to person, specifically on the area between non-technology and technology. For the purposes of this paper, technology will be defined as follows: Technology refers to any device that 1.) Could not have been produced by natural processes besides animal interaction, 2.) serves some kind of purpose, be it shelter, work, destruction, or others, and 3.) is not the byproduct of the aforementioned animal's metabolic, homeostatic or other systems which serve any purpose besides environmental interaction. You may notice, under this definition, that many animals could be said to have some rudimentary level of technology. This is true, and a very excellent example of it is termite mounds. There is no possible way (by known natural processes) that a termite mound could have been produced by anything other than some kind of living cell. The mound is complex, with many different chambers designed to house the insects, and it is not produced unwillingly by the termites. Therefore, it could be said that termites have some form of technology under this definition. An example of something that seems like technology, but is not, is a snail's shell. Belleau 2

While it is a specialized structure that could not have been made by anything but a living thing, and it does serve a purpose, it is produced much like a human's fingernails, and the snail has no say in whether or not a shell is produced. Often, the key leap in between what is technology and what is not, is whether or not it is grown, vs produced, by the animal. The other important distinction that must be made is the difference between knowledge and technology. Under the aforementioned definition, knowledge is not required to produce a technological object, as they can be produced instinctively. Knowledge, however, does have an effect on technology, as it can be used to help a species produce technology that is better suited for a certain task. An example of this is the application of trigonometry during the construction of buildings. I am fairly certain that, if given enough wood and nails, I could put together a basic shelter in a rather small amount of time without using any of my math skills. However, if I were to use a protractor, ruler, and take time to perform calculations, I could produce a shelter that is much more resistant to collapse, uses less material and is generally safer as well. In this way, it is apparent how knowledge impacts technology, it can produce it, but it is not the sole source of it, and can often be used to enhance it. The source of human technology is a combination of instinct and evolution. Our ancestors were descended prom primates, who had the evolutionary advantage of opposable thumbs. This, originally evolved to allow easier locomotion through treetops by allowing the paws to grasp at branches, also had the secondary effect of allowing them to interact with their environment in highly advanced ways. A short time (geologically) later, and our ancestors had left the trees and begun to evolve parts of their brains suited to this exact purpose. Also around this time was the discovery of fire, which allowed us to obtain much more nutrition from food by Belleau 3

cooking it, which allowed us to fuel our larger brains as well, without having to sacrifice some other advantage for the sake of energy. Using our large brains, we acquired large amounts of knowledge about our world, which we eventually used to produce the technological marvels of the modern day. With our technological development being so closely intertwined with our evolutionary development, it is only natural that our technology also affected our evolution as well. One of the most apparent ways this happened is in the advancement of medicine. Due to our ability to cure, or at least treat, many illnesses, we have been able to live in much larger groups that we normally would have. We have also defeated the bubonic plague with almost no knowledge besides how the virus spreads, and have become immune to a great many sicknesses which we originally were not. We get vaccinated against Mumps, Measles, Smallpox, and other debilitating diseases, and our knowledge of how to repair our bodies is nearly at the level of advancement that the only permanent death is brain death. Another good example is our absolute domination of mostly every form of macroscopic life on the planet. By using our technology to create powerful weapons, we have become the apex predators in every ecosystem we live in. This has had many effects, though the one that is important to this particular discussion is the removal of population pressures. If effect, we have stopped evolving because we are near-perfectly suited to every environment on the planet due to our technology. Of course, certain traits are changing in our general population, such as skin tone, eye color and other features, but the likelihood of us, say, evolving the ability to see ultraviolet, or gaining a better sense of smell, is practically zero. Because of the information revolution, our rate of technological development is greatly Belleau 4

increasing. Even 6 years ago, the computing power of the average PC was less than 1/8th of what it is now (this is known as Moore's Law). Our rate of medical advancement is also increasing at an alarming rate, where we are quickly and concisely defeating nearly every disease that has plagued us for the last few centuries. Our energy production capability is extremely high, though we do not use all of it. We can travel into space, outside the safety of our own planet, and if we were sufficiently motivated, could potentially colonize at least one other celestial body in your solar system. All of these things have never been achieved by any other living race on the planet for its entire existence. Technology, however, is not all sunshine and rainbows, so to speak. Much of it can be quite harmful to ecosystems. A good example of this is the damage that can happen when large amounts of ants build colonies in an area. The ground becomes porous and dry, and inhospitable to many types of plant life. This effect is magnified greatly when talking about humans. Deforestation is a good example of this. Many forests, entire forests, have been completely removed by us for the purpose of building more houses and producing goods. This, in turn, removes habitats for small herbivores, so they end up leaving or being over-hunted by carnivores, who then starve due to a lack of food, multiplying the effect up the entire food chain and often destabilizing or destroying it utterly. Note that is is also something we have been doing for literally hundreds of years, and well before we even knew the damage it could cause. Modern day chemical spills have similar effects, but with the added effect of making an area completely uninhabitable for what can sometimes be decades. Nuclear radiation can contaminate whole provinces, making them essentially a region of death for anything more complex than a tree (Chernobyl for example). Belleau 5 This is not to say that the only interaction that our technology has on nature is detrimental

to it. We have also made many species stronger, mostly because it benefited us. One ancient example of this is the breeding of dogs. Originally, there was really only one species of dog and it was more like a modern day wolf than anything else. After that animal was domesticated, it was bred into many different forms to perform different tasks, or to fit different aesthetic ideals of beauty, resulting in the large variety of dogs we have today. Of course, as time has gone on, we have become better at this as well. Today we have more advanced ways of altering species to have traits desirable to us, such as genetic engineering. By utilizing bacteria and complex chemicals, we can infect a species with traits we find desirable. Corn, for instance, is something that we have recently taken to engineering into a better form for ourselves. The changes made are as follows: Resistant to glyphosate or glufosinate herbicides. Insect resistance via producing Bt proteins, some previously used as pesticides in organic crop production. Vitaminenriched corn derived from South African white corn variety M37W has bright orange kernels, with 169x increase in beta carotene, 6x the vitamin C and 2x folate.(Naviq) Also, and approximate 26% of all corn worldwide has been modified in this way, and the numbers are similar for other GM crops as well. The modified version is also evolutionarily superior to the original form, meaning that even in the wild it is more likely to survive. Technology's advancement has also affected our ability to communicate with each other. No longer are we confined to grunting at each other, we have more sophisticated methods than that. The first one to arise was written words, the engraving of symbolic information onto a surface. Nearly every civilization ever to arise on our planet has developed their own version of Belleau 6 this technology, and the dominant ones to day are a combination of several languages that were used in the past. The next advancement that was significant enough to mention was the

development of the telegraph, which is a combination of the previous symbolic representation of information (writing) and the recent (at the time) discovery of electricity. This enabled near instantaneous information transmission between any two points connected by a wire. This was then superseded by the development of the radio, which removed the key limitation of the telegraph, the need for a wire. The information was instead converted into EM radiation and directed toward the destination, where it was picked up by another device designed to interpret it. During this transition, the technology was also made to be able to transmit voices directly, instead of the crude symbolic beeps and bloops of the telegraph. This was used to great effect, and eventually was even made to transmit images, which today we know as television. In the last 20 years, we have also experienced another key advancement in communication technology, the internet. The pinnacle of all our efforts, the internet is a massive database which anyone with a computer can access, and it contains quantities of information inconceivable to people in a previous age. It is used by students, teachers, businessmen and criminals alike. It connects the entire world, and with the internet, is it perfectly possible to have a conversation with a person on the other side of the world in real time. Where communication can possibly go from here is anyone's guess, but it will definitely be remarkable. Warfare, unfortunately, has also been altered significantly by our technological development. The ancient Persians and Romans fought with copper and bronze weapons, cutting edge at the time, that were more powerful than anything else at the time. Human nature being what it is, much of our efforts were devoted to defeating these weapons, so armor advanced and Belleau 7 we made chain mail, which was, in turn, defeated by the sword, which was defeated by plate mail etc. Ranged weaponry followed a similar route with bows becoming exponentially more powerful

to penetrate thicker and thicker armor. Then, around 1500, everything changed with the invention of the cannon. Castles were no longer immune to damage by weapons, and man portable cannons were developed, the ancestors to guns. These required very little training to use, and were amazingly powerful, with one shot being enough to kill most targets. Fast forward 350 years, and the sword is largely gone, having been replaced entirely by rifled firearms, which were long ranged, powerful, accurate and could fire multiple rounds without reloading. Unfortunately, the tactics of warfare did not improve as quickly as the weapons did. WWI is the best example of this lack of tactics, where millions of men died rushing into machine gun emplacements. It was the bloodiest war up to that point, and singlehandedly killed millions of soldiers. Today, our weapons are even more powerful, we fire supersonic armorpiercing rounds at each other from ranges up to several kilometers. We bombard locations with high explosives and devastate them utterly, from rages so far we cannot even see them. We are currently in a time when armor is not truly effective at preventing death, though that is changing, and with that, no doubt another advancement will be made, continuing the cycle of death that has been going on since before history was recorded. Labor has changed with the development of technology as well. At one point in time, one could make a living picking plants in a field for your entire life by hand. Not so in today's world, as we have machines that can do that at a much faster rate that are operated by people who make less money than they would have picking the crops 200 years ago (adjusting for inflation of course). With the advent of machines, many tasks that originally required humans to performs Belleau 8 can now be done by robots which do them faster, more efficiently, and cheaper than humans. We are, in effect, victims of our own intelligence in this regard. Today, if you don't have at least a

college education, you're most likely unemployed. Also, with the advent of the internet, there have been many more jobs created. An example of this is YouTube Celebrities and entertainers. They produce content which people watch, and corporations want to advertise on it to reach more potential consumers, so they pay them money to put ads on their videos. In this way, an independent can make enough money to survive on the merit of their skills as an entertainer, and not require a manager. Bioengineering is a new technology that is just emerging today. The principle of it is this: many times, nature develops very efficient and effective solutions to problems, so why not attempt to copy them for our benefit. For example, cellphone antennas use fractal patterns similar to the patterns of shells to increase their surface area and reception at a minimal cost of materials. Hexagonal structures similar to beehives are extremely durable and are now beginning to be sued in construction. Increasingly, we are finding that the solutions to many of our problems have already come up in, and been solved by, nature. Nanotechnology, the creation and use of microscopic machines for tasks that could not be performed otherwise, is yet another emerging technology with great potential. Science fiction commonly paints it as the miracle technology of the future, with objects being assembled in seconds from thin air, machines curing every possible illness, and making humans completely immortal and invulnerable. Fanciful as this may be, nanotechnology is still in its infancy, and has many risks. One such risk is known commonly as the Grey Goo scenario, where uncontrolled nanobot reproduction consumes all matter on the entire planet. While fiction writers love this Belleau 9 concept, it is unlikely to happen: A grey goo robot would face a much harder task than merely replicating itself. It would

also have to survive in the environment, move around, and convert what it finds into raw materials and power. This would require sophisticated chemistry. None of these functions would be part of a molecular manufacturing system. A grey goo robot would also require a relatively large computer to store and process the full blueprint of such a complex device. A nanobot or nanomachine missing any part of this functionality could not (Nanotechnology) The amount of energy required to process the entire mass of the planet is staggering, and this scenario also assumes that the nanobots are capable of nuclear fission and fusion of any material, which is nearly impossible, and quiet impossible if they are made of atoms. This is also completely disregarding the chance of replication producing errors in the design, as it often does at microscopic levels (DNA mutation for example). Another possible scenario is that a nanobot virus is accidentally produced and made airborne, which results in the destruction of any life that comes into contact with it. This, while also more frightening, is also more likely, as a nanobot could be programmed to disassemble a living cell. In fact, on of their proposed uses it to treat cancer by destroying all damaged cells in the body. This, coupled with the potential for error in replication, means the technology is quite risky. Antibiotics are yet another way that humans have learned greatly from simply observing their natural surroundings. The first antibiotic, penicillin, is produced by the fungi penicillium, and was discovered by accident, when a scientist noticed that many types of bacteria and mold refused to grow nearby it: Belleau 10 Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist, defined new horizons for modern antibiotics with his discoveries of enzyme lysozyme (1921) and the antibiotic substance penicillin function as grey goo.

(1928). The discovery of penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum perfected the treatment of bacterial infections such as, syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis. He also contributed immensely towards medical sciences with his writings on the subjects of bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy. (Hani) Since then, we have discovered and produced many more types of antibiotics, which we use quite liberally to cure ourselves of infections. Perhaps a bit too liberally, as our use of them has begun to produce bacteria that are resistant to them. Still, we are using them to great effect and improving our overall health substantially. Neural network computers. The very words often bring to mind images of steel robots holding machineguns, and panicked survivors fleeing only to be cut down by bullets. At least for those of us who have watched Terminator that is. In reality, these computers are nothing more than another adaptation of a natural design into our technology. Neural networks have a key advantage over the typical computer, and that is that they are capable of learning. By being properly coaxed by researchers and scientists, the computer can effectively be trained to perform tasks, some tasks which are normally too difficult for traditional computers to handle. A good example, while most likely never tried, would be balancing a bipedal robot. By giving a negative feedback when the robot falls, and providing the proper sensory input, theoretically a neural network processor could be used in a similar way to how we use our brains to balance ourselves. This would solve the problem of overwhelming complexity when dealing with the inputs and outputs of a hydraulic system for balancing a bipedal robot. Neural network Belleau 11 computers could also be used to do tasks where some sense of approximation or instinct is needed, such as being able to classify objects by their physical traits. For example, if I made a

computer sort apples and oranges, and then gave it a lemon, it would likely return an error, as it is not prepared for that input. A properly trained neural network computer would examine the lemon, and then decide for itself where to put it, much like a human would. This behavior can be frightening, but it also holds the key to designing a whole new generation of intelligent machines. Now, we pass beyond the realm of predictability, and into the world of speculation. With the advancement of technology being what it is, it's impossible to say what could happen more than a short time in the future. The next section is devoted to possible scenarios that could play out, and is largely speculative. Not to say it won't be entertaining though. Cybernetics is one such speculative technology, and is defined by common speech as a catch all term for machine parts that replace or augment human ones. Imagine a future, where a man accidentally loses a limb working in a factory. Normally, this would be treated as a loss, though for him, it is not very significant. After going to the ER, a doctor walks in and hands him a sheet of paper to sign, and a short while later, he leaves the hospital with a brand new arm, equal in capability to his old one. That is the future imagined by cybernetics. Some even go beyond that. In the 2012 video game Deus Ex:Human Revolution, people voluntarily subject themselves to amputation of arms, legs, eyes, sometimes even internal organs, to have them replaced with augmentations, mechanical replacement parts that exceed the capability of the originals. Augs can run faster than any man, see perfectly in total darkness, even take pictures with their eyes. They can lift hundreds of pounds with a single arm, Belleau 12 run for hours without tiring, breathe underwater, even become invisible using light-bending camouflage. Will this actually ever happen though? It's anyone's guess, though I can personally say I know many people who would line up to have their bodies chopped up if it meant even a

fraction of those abilities demonstrated in the game. Moving on to our next, related topic, with cybernetics comes the possibility of humans and machines becoming increasingly interrelated. In the book Beyond Singularity, a certain story comes to mind, called Border Guards. In the story, a man living in a distant future meets a woman who he is intensely attracted to. After much conversation, he learns that she is, among other things, the inventor of the Jewel. The Jewel is a technological construct that is implanted in the brain of every human at birth. During adolescence, it expands and eventually replaces the brain, and allows for much more storage and intelligence than the natural human brain would allow. The rest of the plot focuses on the woman's suicide, which is quite unusual for the times because the jewel is also designed to be nearly indestructible, protecting the mind from any outside harm. Surprisingly, this is on the less extreme end of what is imagined for human-machine fusions. In Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, the crew of the lighthugger ship are all cyborgs. All have been extensively modified, and have most of their bodies replaced with machinery, their blood is filled with nanites, and they also have brain implants to aid them in running the ship. It would be fair to say that they are definitely more machine than human, and that fact is increasingly obvious by their behavior, which recklessly disregards many things which we would traditionally hold high on a level of importance. But more on that later. Uplifting is the science fiction slang term for artificially enhancing the intelligence of a Belleau 13 species, usually to the point of sapience and sentience. In the book Sundiver by David Brin and its sequels, this concept is explored. In the story, humans have become a spacefaring race, and set out to explore the universe. They make contact with many races of aliens, all of whom have been uplifted by other races. The thought that humans evolved sapience naturally is absurd to them,

and all the species seek any answers they need in a device called the Great Library. The side effect of this is that culture is largely stagnant, and technological innovation never happens for the most part. This illustrates a key ethical issue in uplifting a species: How much freedom do you allow them to have? If you create a new sentient race, are you responsible for their actions? If you keep to tight of a reign on them, they will never advance on their own, and will become increasingly dependent on you for answers and help, but if you allow them absolute freedom, you deny them the knowledge you already have, and will cause them much suffering. This would be the ultimate test of the worth of our ethics, can they support a species besides ourselves? I would be inclined to say no, as we have a hard enough time following them ourselves. Whatever the answer, the experience would be interesting. The human brain is a marvelous device, capable of such huge amounts of computation, such imagination, such brilliant innovation. It is a shame that it is so delicate, and wrapped in a temporary shell. In the book Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, humans have developed devices called cortical stacks. Implanted into the base of the skull at birth, a cortical stack acts as a type of black box for the human consciousness. In the event of death, the stack contains a backup of the user's personality and memories up to that point (usually within 5 seconds of death, the update rate is mentioned in the third book, Woken Furies). With this innovation, the Belleau 14 human outlook on life has been completely altered. People can buy new bodies, nicknamed sleeves, as easily as one would buy a car. People also view death as simply another type of injury, and murder (now known as organic damage) is a common crime in many poorer areas. Real death, by stack destruction, is extremely rare. There are even people who have backups of

their stacks such as Laurens Bancroft, one of the main characters, which they keep in a variety of places. Naturally, with this innovation comes a wave of ethical issues. Among them: Catholics and other religious groups often opt out of being re-sleeved (revived from death) as they believe the soul dies when the body dies; There are underground fight rings where contestants fight to the death for profit, the winner often having to excise the stack from the skull of the loser; There are also cases of animals being implanted with stacks, and used to fight each other for gambling purposes; sometimes, humans are re-sleeved into animals and forced to fight as torture; Meths (short for Methuselah), rich people who have lived for centuries, never die and thus accumulate wealth continuously, while poor people starve in the streets or get put in storage (un-sleeved from a body and put in stasis) to be sold for money. One could say that with the defeat of death, morals lost all meaning in human society. The question is, however, would this really happen? Considering the current state of increasingly degrading morals in first world countries, I would not be surprised. In both Altered Carbon and Border Guards virtual reality is a common technology. Because of the human mind being stored in a small, portable device, the obvious solution to overpopulation is to create artificial worlds for people to live in. Indeed, in Border Guards, the entire story takes place in a universe that is not our own. This possibility is frightening, Belleau 15 particularly when you consider that someone could manipulate the reality at any time. In Altered Carbon, the main character is sleeved into a VR simulation to be interrogated. He finds himself in a woman's body, and his captors proceed to torture him for weeks in VR by dismembering him, burning him, and inflicting every form of harm imaginable, because in the VR, he is unable to die.

All of this, as well, takes place over the course of only hours on the outside, because time in VR is dilated considerably. While this technology could solve many of our problems in the future, I feel that this situation is not far from what could happen if any one person is put in charge of a large group of people who are completely dependent on them. Imagine, if the entire energy output of the sun was harnessed by humankind. We would never have to worry about energy again. We could power every house on the planet for free, we could make every single car run on electricity, we could power entire fleets of spacecraft and explore the stars. This is the concept for a Dyson Sphere. It is a giant network of satellites that surround a star completely, absorbing all of its solar energy and either using it or storing it for later use. It is proposed that if any alien species has attained interstellar travel, it is likely that they have created some semblance of one of these. It's perfectly logical, of course, the best way to maximize the amount of energy absorbed from a star would be to surround it with high surface-area satellites. While unfeasible today, and not even feasible in the foreseeable future, perhaps one day we can truly unlock the potential of the greatest resource in local space, our own star, the sun. Space... The Final Frontier... No, I'm not really about to use that line, but for as long as we have been sapient, we have gazed to the stars. We invented elaborate stories based around them, drew shapes with the space between them, and observed their movements. In 1969, we Belleau 16 made our first foray onto a celestial body beyond our own. While today the dream of space travel seems wholly unrealistic, it is an inevitability for the future if our civilization continues to grow. The problem with it is, space travel in real life is nothing like the idealized version shown by Star Trek. There is no known way to travel faster than c in local space, which is to say, you can't go faster than light, it's just not possible. This would normally not be a problem, but when you

consider that even the closest star is over a light year away, and that our engines cannot even approach one tenth of the speed of light, you see the problem. Even factoring in for the time dilation effects for the crew onboard (they will experience time slower than us, meaning for them the time that has passed will be shorter), the time required for any true interstellar travel is horribly large. Without a shortcut around the speed of light limitation, we're pretty much confined to our solar system. Of course, people have envisioned futures in which we, against all odds, have spread out into the stars anyway. In Revelation Space humans have colonized a handful of world without ever needing to go faster than light. Ship travel times in between worlds are measured in decades, even though the ships travel at near-c velocities. Because of this, crews are mostly their own small societies, and passengers are cryogenically frozen. Most people never leave their homeworlds, and casual space travel is a fantasy. Another, slightly more optimistic example is Altered Carbon. In the book, humans have not been able to travel faster than light, however they can send small amounts of information instantaneously between two destinations. They freeze human bodies and send them to a destination, then send in the information from cortical stacks to allow people to travel to other worlds. While not perfect, this is at least a solution. Whatever the solution that will eventually present itself, space travel will eventually become a reality, or Belleau 17 we will stagnate and die, even if it takes to the end of the sun's lifetime. We often think of humans as being the highest evolved form of life, and if you forgive the humanocentric jargon, this is true for the most part. We have effectively stopped evolving, though in the future, this may change. If we are separated by large distances, our species may once again begin to change and evolve to suit our new environment. In Revelation Space humans have split

into many different forms. For example, there are the Conjoiners, whose minds have been fused with AIs to increase their intelligence; The Ultras, who pilot ships and modify themselves in a variety of strange ways, such as extra limbs, new sensory organs, full body replacements etc. To go even more to the extreme, in Transcendent, by Stephen Baxter, all life in the entire galaxy is of Earth descent, and on nearly every world humans have evolved to become a new species. All other forms of life found have either been annihilated, or have become integrated into an Earth species. One character remarks: A tetrapodal body plan was a hallmark of Earth life, an accidental arrangement that had been settled on early in the development of animals there - including the ancestors of humans - and had been stuck to ever since, even as most of those animals either went extinct or scattered across the Galaxy. But it didnt have to be that way; six or eight or twelve limbs would have been just as effective. A four-limbed body was a signature: I am from Earth. (Baxter) Not all of the evolution was beneficial to our intelligence, however, showing that evolution is not a process of betterment, but rather one of change into new forms. Technology affects all of us, every living thing, big, small, sentient, immobile. The future of all life on Earth is in the hands of its most intelligent species: humans. We carry with us the Belleau 18 mark of our evolution of this world, it is in our DNA, and it is in our very essence. We are the future of life in Earth, whether we accept it or not. It is our knowledge that will protect life from disaster, and it is through us that it will eventually spread beyond the confines of our small world. The future is bright, no matter what they naysayers believe, and we should hold our heads high with the knowledge that we alone have the power to shape our future.

End comments: Many of the definitions and much of the information here has been gathered over the years from a variety of sources that I no longer remember. I have cited what I can, but finding out the exact place I first heard of, say, the Grey Goo scenario is next to impossible.

Works Cited Baxter, Stephen. Transcendent. New York: Ballentine /Del Rey, 2005. Print. Brin, David. Sundiver. New York: Bantam, 1995. Print. Chris Hann, et al. "Nonparametric Control Algorithms For A Pneumatic Artificial Muscle." Expert Systems With Applications 39.10 (2012): 8636-8644. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 May 2012. Dann, Jack, and Gardner R. Dozois. Beyond Singularity. New York: Ace, 2005. Print. Grure, Guillaume P. "Implications Of Nanotechnology Growth In Food And Agriculture In OECD Countries." Food Policy 37.2 (2012): 191-198. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 May 2012. Hani. "History of Antibiotics." Experiment-Resources.com. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://www.experimentresources.com/history-of-antibiotics.html>.

Liparulo, Robert. Germ. Nashville, TN: WestBow, 2006. Print. McDevitt, Jack. A Talent for War. New York: Ace, 1989. Print. Morgan, Richard K. Altered Carbon. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 2003. Print. "Nanotechnology: Grey Goo Is a Small Issue." Nanotechnology: Grey Goo Is a Small Issue. World Care, 14 Dec. 2003. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://www.crnano.org/BD-Goo.htm>. Naviq, Shaista, Changfu Zhu, Gemma Farre, Koreen Ramessar, Ludovic Bassie, Jrgen Breitenbach, Dario P. Conesa, Gaspar Ros, Gerhard Sandmann, Teresa Capell, and Paul Christou. "Transgenic Multivitamin Corn through Biofortification of Endosperm with Three Vitamins Representing Three Distinct Metabolic Pathways." Transgenic Multivitamin Corn through Biofortification of Endosperm with Three Vitamins Representing Three Distinct Metabolic Pathways. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 10 Feb. 2009. Web. 14 May 2012. <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/04/27/0901412106.abstract?sid=24c40170-11c6417b-b25b-dba9a8cf07fb>. Reynolds, Alastair. Revelation Space. New York: Ace, 2001. Print.