How big is your world? What is emerging is a growing sentiment that desires to be a part of a bigger, greater community. It’s the understanding that we are simply one species floating on this tiny pale blue dot. That we are not only citizens of the planet but, in fact, children of the solar system. That our home is merely one star among 30 billion trillion stars, which scientists now even suspect is really just a speck of a much greater yet-unseen totality. For this is the time where planets are being discovered every day, and according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there have been 342 planets found outside our solar system to date, 289 which are stars with planets, and 0 that are Earthlike. And while NASA’s Kepler spacecraft soars up-up-and-away to spend three-and-a-half years surveying 100,000 stars inside our Milky Way, scientists realize that our universe is just one bubble born out of quantum fluctuations and that, perhaps, there are other bubble universes out there where life is possible. This desire to be interconnected has led to the development of the Interplanetary Internet, the first deep space communication network developed by NASA and computer scientist Vint Cerf, which will enable signals to maneuver with celestial motions to provide delay-and-disruption tolerant communications between planets and astronauts, and from Earth to space. And as we begin to wire the cosmos, scientists will continue to search for clues as to what our civilization may look like, hundreds, thousands, and millions of years in the future, because according to physicist Michio Kaku, we are a Type 0 civilization today, whereas type 1 civilizations can harness and manipulate planetary energies like hurricanes and volcanoes; Type 2 civilizations use the power of stars; and Type 3′s are interstellar, capable of expanding across multiple star systems utilizing energy on the scale of galaxies. Undoubtedly, it’s going to be fun dropping a few white dwarf stars into our cars and off-we-go, but the chance that sooner or later we’ll bump into an extraterrestrial, well, perhaps only the birds of The Aviary, an elite group of individuals with extremely high national security clearances working on various aspects of UFO research knows. Up, up and away!

It is believed that in the next 10 to 20 years, there will be people who are smarter than we are today, and the comparison will be so drastic, that the rest of us will be seen as intelligent as a goldfish or a chimpanzee. Provided we manage not to destroy civilization, it has been suggested by computer scientist Vernor Vinge, that we are headed towards the Singularity, a hypothetical point in the future where the pace of technological development becomes so rapid that it leads to the creation of a never-ending feedback loop where intelligent systems breed more intelligent systems, resulting in a world where there’s super-human intelligent critters running around. Considering that university students are buying and selling prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin not to get high, but to get higher grades, a tomorrow-now future where the brain becomes real estate doesn’t sound so trippy. According to science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, instead of the psychedelic revolution we will enter the cognitive revolution, and once there’s a combination of computer science and a real understanding of how neurons work, our mental processes will become retail items, able to be changed for $8, or $3 or 30 cents. In addition to human-enhanced intelligence, the goal of the newly-formed Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is smarter-than-human intelligence, as their objective is the development of recursively self-improving machines that are able to automatically implement upgrades to their own functionality. The negative side, of course, is that these critters might not like us very much, whereas the hope is that if we program them to value humanity and consider us as their ancestors, they will. And while many readers may be thinking of HAL’s behavior in 2001 or shaking your head doubting this will ever occur in your lifetime, the fact is that one of the many advisors of SIAI includes venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and beyond being the founder of PayPal, he was also one of the first investors of Facebook. And if the rumors about the Indigo Children are true, and there is a set of children on the Earth who have been born with paranormal powers, well then, we are surely in store for a world transformed. The Singularity is Near.

If you look close, all sorts of things are happening, they’re just hidden in plain site. For instance, in the room you are sitting in right now, there are molecules bouncing off the walls, yet when you look, the air is still, doing nothing at all. So, what scientists do, is use mathematics to make predictions. Because, the fact is, we live in a mathematical world. In fact, currently scientists suspect that not only is nature fractal, but the quantum world is fractal, a hyper-realization that there is a geometric code to life, and everything is interconnected after all. However, this could all be an illusion. Because the fact is, we have pattern-seeking minds, we are hard-wired for pattern-recognition. But it’s likely that there’s more information “out there,” but our brain acts like a filter. For example, science says we live in a multi-dimensional universe. Can you see it? No, because we are trapped in 3D. We can only move forwards and backwards, left and right, up and down. But there could be another universe less than a millimeter away! Perhaps its time, that you and I, develop an eagle-eye, like artist Trevor Paglen, for instance, who uses limit-telephotography to capture covert military operations that our taxes are paying for. Perhaps.

Moving forward, we should think about habitats as organisms. Because in the future, architecture will be programmable. It will morph, respond, and feed-in-and-out like real creatures. The emergence of ecological systems thinking, combined with information technologies, calls for living shelter. Adaptive, semi-permeable materials that respond like sensitive skins. Pro-active buildings that can change shape real-time in relation to the sun. Housing that can breathe, harnessing the power of the wind. As architecture becomes an integrative part of nature, we will begin to see houses not as “containers,” but as complex, self-organizing living systems. And as we increasingly move off-planet, our days of man-in-the-can ventures into the sky and space pod living will be over. We will engineer our biosphere in the stars and create greenhouses 100 feet high so that people and animals can walk right in. Inextricably linked to our new intergalactic terraform, replanted and original.

You are here. Where? Mobile maneuvering and on-demand navigation has enabled civilian cartographers everywhere to create new maps of our world. Whether it’s experimental geographers using mashups like Flickr or Google Earth, or “machinamators” altering the aesthetics of the gaming terrain, landscapes are now environments of interaction. While our media ecologies serve to dimensionalize our sense of place, the graffiti-reminiscent move to tag the journey is also occurring, ranging from digital post-it notes and sticky shadows that direct our sight-seeing adventures initiated by companies such as Yellow Arrow and Socialight respectively, to psychogeographers such as Christina Kubisch, Soundwalk and Neurotransmitter that use soundscapes to explore the invisible topography of space. As alternative topologies are laid upon our real geography, it’s certain that our role as geological agents needs to be reconsidered. The phrase is, “geography is destination, and destination is on-the-way.” May “oh the places you will go” whether virtual or real, be beautiful.

Adjust your frequency. Physicists now suggest that the universe is composed of tiny, vibrating strings. Scientists now propose that the neural basis of consciousness is 40 hertz oscillations. Eighty years ago a man called Dr. Royal Rife said radio frequencies could kill cancer, today cutting edge science aims to transmit signals to cure disease. While phrases like “tune in” and “good vibes” have been going on for generations, if there is one trend that can speak for this decade, with the potential to be the driving force throughout the century, it’s frequency. Because, the fact is, everything animate and inanimate has a frequency. Take for instance the story of how an opera singer’s voice shatters a glass. This occurs because both the glass and her voice are oscillating in resonance. The fact is we are living in an energetic world, and even the definition of a person is based on the word “persona” which means “through sound.” And while alternative practitioners know that every person has their own distinct sound, called the ultrasonic core, treatments like BioSonic Repatterning, developed by Dr. John Beaulieu, that uses tuning forks to realign the nervous system, discharging emotional energies so that one can be free from dis-ease, are now considered avant-garde. In the future, not only will music be a drug, but according to now-deceased renegade scientist Jacques Benveniste, all biological activities will be recorded and digitized for diagnostics and detection, with health and medical applications ranging from the detection of viruses for bioterrorism, to the digitization of pharmaceuticals enabling medicine to be sent via email for instantaneous sonic digestion. Moving ahead inside our cultural waveform, it’s safe to say that we are just beginning to understand the power of frequency. Crop Circle Researcher Colin Andrews even reports that not only do people who witness crop circles forming hear trilling sounds, but the dimensional ratios inside its geometric shapes are precisely the same as the diatonic ratios of the Western musical scale. If sound creates form, as illustrated by the Swiss doctor Hans Jenny in his experiments called Cymatics, then all life, from the architecture of our bodies to the design of every leaf on every tree, is just frozen music. So, go ahead, resonate with the collective.

A flock of birds, a school of fish, swarming ants and human crowds. The study of collective behavior, where there is no centralized control but rather where self-organizing pattern formation is the result of local interaction between neighbors and their environments, is now one of the leading computation models being applied to everything from gaming and social networks to military tactics, robotics, medicine and telecommunications. One programming example modeled after the synchronized movement of birds dancing in the sky is Boids, a simple algorithm that uses three basic rules: separation, alignment and cohesion. Instrumental in swarming architecture, the aim is to design on-demand “living diagrams” constructed by real-time information, where people and space “flock” together to create structures “on the edge of form.” Although the mechanisms underlying flocking have baffled scientists for years, with naturalists in the past even concluding that flocking was telepathy, today we find it’s suggested that birds use magnetoreception to sense Earth’s magnetic field, as well as the idea from biologist Rupert Sheldrake that quantum-field mechanisms may explain this phenomenon, with the suggestion that social groups are organized and directed by fields of energy and information. As to whether or not “the wisdom of the crowds” is greater than individual intelligence, or is stupid and boring, is currently up for debate. However, it is clear that chemical pheromone exchange between ants can be compared to social messaging in networks, and swarms, which have an amazing ability to act like a collective mind or “The Superorganism,” as suggested by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is undoubtedly culturally relevant in today’s interconnected times. Flock on, flock off.

If you are familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla, you’ll know we are surrounded by natural electromagnetic frequencies. Although previous theories suggested that small changes in electromagnetic fields had no effect, scientists now know that electromagnetic frequencies in microgravity cause the human body and cell cultures to respond differently. Here on Earth, holistic practitioners are now investigating if artificial man-made electromagnetic fields, ranging from appliances like microwaves to high-tension power lines and mobile phones, can cause interference with biological processes, suggesting that this electro-pollution is triggering stress, disease, and even, DNA breakage. One particular area of investigation are Schumann resonances. Schumann resonances are the electromagnetic waves that are excited by lightening and occur in the ionized plasma contained inside the cavity formed between the Earth’s surface and the outer boundary of the ionosphere. Although always fluctuating, one of the fundamental frequencies of SR is the standing wave of 7.8 hertz. Since some reports state that at noon time, on all parts of the Earth, SR frequencies have the highest activities, researchers have sought for decades to develop a correlation between SR and Alpha brain rhythms (7-12 Hz) suggesting that when our brains are in Alpha state during dreaming and deep relaxation, we are in resonant feedback with the Earth and our well-being is energized. Due to the recent hysteria over the Mayan prediction of 2012, investigation into SR has exploded, with some researchers suggesting that this primary frequency of 7.8 Hz is rising, and will reach 13 Hz at 11:11 UTC on December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar and the date of the Winter Solstice when the sun is predicted to cross the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Conspiracy theorists also suggest that this frequency rise will be joined by killer solar flares causing the Earth’s magnetic field to collapse, the Earth’s core to stop rotating, cataclysmic end-of-the-world events to occur, and our minds to vanish. Rather than doomsday, others believe that this frequency increase of Earth’s “heart beat” is affecting the biorhythm of our hearts, and will mark the “great awakening” where all of humanity experiences an elevated level of consciousness. Considering that many believe HAARP can modify the world’s electromagnetic field, enabling them to engineer the weather and zap people’s brain waves to manipulate our state of mind, let’s everyone hope that all we’re destined to experience is nothing more than good vibes.

We are all stardust. Or, as Carl Sagan said, “star-stuff,” when he explained in his legendary series Cosmos how billions of years before the sun and Earth formed, atoms were synthesized inside of hot stars and exploded into stellar debris, forming planets, Earth and every living thing. The idea that consciousness is in every atom throughout the universe and therefore consciousness is in everything, suggests a paradigm shift in the way we view the world. It also represents a model for the future, as wireless sensor systems called “smart dust,” no bigger than a speck, will soon be dispersed in the air and become aware. Considering that these “motes” when near each other automatically network themselves, and can convert surrounding vibrational energy or barometric pressure into movement, as well as shape-shift when voltage is applied, these devices, developed at UC Berkeley and DARPA, are expected, with the advancement of nanotechnology, to be used from everything from detailed surveillance such as tracking people’s movements, to monitoring traffic flow, evaluating ecosystem activity, and detecting light and temperature changes for controlling at-home energy usage. In fact, according to a new simulation at Max Planck Institute, electrically charged dust can organize itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave like living organisms, reproducing and transferring information. Moving forward, smart dust could even be used to explore space, traveling throughout the galaxy to detect new worlds or, perhaps, even “awaken” planets. According to robotics engineer Hans Moravec, in the future we may find that these mini cybercreatures have colonized the universe. Considering that their minds and computation power is so astronomical, Moravec even suggests that when they think of us, (as they may miss us since we are their ancestors) they will be able to bring us back to life. Or maybe, as Moravec suggests, this has already happened, and this very moment we’re experiencing right now is a simulation that has been recreated millions and trillions of times. Laughing he adds, “This can’t be real.” Domo-Arigato. Mr. Roboto.

There is a new understanding of what it means to be healthy. To feel healthy means to feel “coherent.” Coherence is a special kind of “wholeness” in which every part of the body is intercommunicating with every other part. And when all systems are in coherent organization, interacting harmoniously with each other, you have the experience of health or well-being. Viewing health as an emergent property of a complex dynamic system means that health is no longer about homeostasis, but rather a healthy body is always on the move, constantly changing, constantly adaptable. This understanding that health is communication is the basis of mind-body medicine and is currently revolutionizing health care. For instance, neuroscientist Candace Pert has concluded that neuropeptides, the tiny bits of protein that consists of strings of amino acids, are responsible for our emotions, and that these “molecules of emotions” are the nexus between body and mind. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Esther Sternberg explains that the science of the mind-body connection, based on her discoveries in brain-immune reactions, proves that stress can make you sick and believing, or the placebo effect, can make you well. Then there’s Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, who unites feeling and thinking with her theory that the body is a “liquid crystalline matrix,” which suggests that the water in our bodies is linked together by a hydrogen-bonded daisy chain able to conduct electricity and transmit weak signals of information, serving as the body’s communication network. Overall, the new metaphor is that biology is a dance, or as Dr. Ho specifies, quantum jazz, with the body being quantum coherent from microcosm to macrocosm, as each molecule plays and improvises together, spontaneously and free yet required to keep in-step and in-tune with the “whole.”