Biosense describes the fact that every organism is in permanent exchange with the environment. It represents a new model of ecological design that is aware and alive. For example, think of a plant’s stomata, located on the underside of its leaves. It is sensitive to environmental cues and reacts as a gateway to supply water and nutrients or, in conditions such as drought, it closes tightly to prevent dehydration. Moving forward, objects will biosense, they will be able to detect and monitor invisible substances and apparently nonsensible phenomenon to give people on-demand control of their health and environments. For instance, one of the new features on the iPhone 3.0 update is LifeScan, from Johnson & Johnson Co., which monitors glucose levels through a Bluetooth enabled blood testing device allowing users to make insulin-adjustments. Or imagine a mobile that uses technology developed by Gentag, Inc. that can detect pollen in the air, and since it knows you’re allergic, instruct an alternative route for safe-passage home. Or a car with a carbon meter that indicates the toxin level that’s spewing out from its tail pipe. And then there’s emotion recognition technology. Toyota, working with Stanford University and Affective Media, has designed a car that reads your feelings so when you’re stressed, it responds by cooling the inside climate and plays your favorite music so you can chill out. And to prevent accidents due to road rage, its headlights change colors to indicate the driver’s mood. While right now, sound is made visible in the form of captions or voiced descriptions for the hearing impaired, in the future there will be advanced transduction mechanisms that transform one sense into another. For instance, we all know we feel euphoric when exercising, which is a side-effect of certain endorphins and hormones, and although we can detect the feeling, imagine if there were detectors paying attention to these types of signaling and chemicals that are important for your health or monitoring your state of mind. These feedback loops, where people will become informed about their state of well-being, is a sense that we don’t have right now, but will be artificially created.

It is believed that every organism is “living of light.” That DNA, which is inside of every cell within every organism, not only codes and stores genetic information, but absorbs, stores and emits a low-intensity light called “biophotons.” This theory, proposed by Dr. Fritz Popp, founder of The International Institute of Biophysics, suggests that nature uses low-intensity light to effectively transmit information. Since our planet is fueled by the sun, it is suggested that sunlight, an incoherent light that behaves like a flashlight diffusing and spreading light onto the world, is transformed into coherent light or directed-light inside of organisms where it acts like a laser-pointer that’s able to remain stable over long distances. The result is the idea that inside of every organism there is a light-based communication network which serves to rapidly transmit information between cells for the purpose of maintaining life. Like us, plants are organized by the sun, and Popp suggests that plants store light in their DNA during photosynthesis, which means that when we eat vegetables, for instance, we are not consuming calories but literally “eating sunshine.” Healthy foods, like a healthy body, transmit ultra-weak emissions of coherent light, whereas when there is stress and disease, the body has too much light, losing its necessary ability to constantly improvise and adapt. Today, there are over 40 scientific groups working on biophotons, and with the use of instruments such as CCD cameras that are typically used in astrophysics, images of biophoton emissions have been captured. Currently, researchers are exploring various applications, ranging from biotechnology and agricultural solutions, to food and water quality testing, to non-invasive medical diagnosis. The idea that our body is a light-based quantum coherent network, where biophotons are distributed throughout the body in a range of vibrations that feed each cell its required frequency so that our bodies may function harmoniously, may sound radical. However, what may sound even more incredible is the suggestion that the biophotonic network in our body behaves like an electromagnetic field that connects to the electromagnetic field of the Earth, which serves to produce an optical hologram of every living organism on the planet. Wow. “Here comes the sun.”

Emotions sometimes speed out of control before we can define them, and suddenly we’re transported inside of Steven Spielberg’s celluloid world, only to find two hours later, physically we haven’t traveled at all. Dreaming is similar. Your physical body is sleeping, but your mind is somewhere else. The ability to be in two places at the same time is no doubt the role of imagination, but increasingly a mission of technology, evident by our everyday telephone that allows us to feel joined in another space, to our now-future where holograms beam CNN reporters and Telstra executives in real-time. While it’s believed that many mystics and saints could bilocate, such as Padre Pio whose doppelganger would be seen simultaneously around the world, the stealth tactic of remote viewing is more secular although lesser known. Remote viewing, the ability to perceive and obtain information about a distant person or event armed with only geographical coordinates, was the objective of the 1972 CIA-sponsored project led by scientists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and conducted by now-famous remote viewers Ingo Swann and Uri Geller, among others, for the purpose of espionage. Although the operation ended, as it did at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) where remote viewing experiments as well as other mind-matter scientific studies occurred for nearly three decades, investigation into the tools and techniques continue and are freely accessible to the masses. Now, despite the fact that astral projection and out-of-body experiences make skeptics like James Randi chuckle, it’s apparent that culture’s desire to behave like a quanta and be in two places at once isn’t going away. And as to whether or not technology can make us omnipresent like God himself-herself-itself-yourself, well, I guess we’ll “see.”

Behave? Tell that to the strange, the freaks, the weirdos, the atypical. These are the people who live futures that others will later have. The people who imagine new possibilities, and empower people with the power of their imaginings. These are the people who, says science writer Howard Bloom, turn science fiction into science future, inventing novel devices like cell phones. Although large scale human behavior is fairly predictable, and there’s a reasonable chance, according to mathematician Ian Stewart, that over the next century mathematics will reach a point where it can make real predictions about the future and the way people behave, what it can’t provide, is a good prediction of what a particular person will do. The problem with free will is not that we behave in completely random ways, it’s that we behave in coherent ways, but we strongly feel we have a choice. The inherent behavior of pine cones, on the other hand, even though considered dead as they no longer have a metabolism, can still open and close in response to humidity changes in the environment, and is currently seen as an inspiration for designers, according to architect Michael Hensel, for the development of highly, sophisticated performative architectures that won’t require the standard plethora of mechanical and electrical devices. And while we find that molecular, self-assembly is revolutionizing material science, due to the pioneering research of chemist George Whitesides, aiding the development of rapid, inexpensive fabrications of ultra-small devices, C5 Corporation, a data research group, says that in the future we will find that not only does all “data behave” according to 4 types of characteristics: “fold, spread, blossom and loner,” but there will be a 7-11 for algorithms, because algorithms will become the fabric of every transaction, every device, every single appliance, even clothing. In fact, Alisa Andrasek, in her fashion project, Genware, has already developed an algorithm, or what she calls, “bodyscapes,” which allows customers, after scanning their bodies, to pick different patterns that will “grow” on their physical geometry, adjusting to their various, specific body behaviors. As we move forward into an era where our objects and technology behaves, computer scientist Vernor Vinge remarks: “Humankind has thousands of years of experiences with biological systems in life-critical situations. For instance, a horse rider going through the desert. He’s depending upon that horse. The fact that the horse is biological and sort of a flaky system, that’s too bad. Do we really want technology based upon biological systems that are notoriously fickle and irresponsible?” Oh, behave!

All life evolved from bacteria. Billions of years before humans evolved, these single-celled organisms managed to transform the planet’s surface and atmosphere into a chemical state that allowed life to emerge. Without bacteria, there would be no air to breathe, no soil for growth. In fact, our bodies are colonized by bacteria. There’s actually 10 times more bacteria in our guts than cells in our bodies. Plus, bacteria can talk. The term is called “quorum sensing.” When a crowd of bacteria get together they communicate through chemical signaling, and by using their receptors like an antennae, they lock-on to signals, change their behavior by altering their gene expression, and stop acting like individuals and begin thinking like the group. And, if it serves the purpose of the collective, a bacterium’s dedication is so intense, it will even commit suicide. Of course there are bad bacteria, but many are friendly, in fact, experts say that germs are our future, and probiotics or good germs, are slated to be the antibiotics of the 21st century. And now, with the advent of synthetic biology, bacteria are being hacked. Currently, scientists aim to create everything from edible bacteria that can fight cavities and produce vitamins to microbial fuel cells powered by glucose and sewage. But considering that researchers at J. Craig Venter Institute have already engineered a bacterial genome from scratch, it’s evident that bacteria will be tomorrow’s factories, programmed to carry out a range of tasks such as manufacturing pharmaceuticals and sequestering carbon dioxide. Even information technologists are dreaming of encoding Earth’s history inside the artificial DNA of bacteria in case of catastrophe. For years, bacteria has had a bad rap. But those days are over. (Just ask biologist Lynn Margulis.)

The Earth is not a pile of rocks. The Earth is alive. Based upon the chemical composition of oxygen and reactive gases in the atmosphere produced by the various dynamic processes of life on Earth, The Gaia Hypothesis, proposed by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, suggests that the Earth is a living organism. In fact, our body is like the planet in that its temperature is regulated. Like the Earth, we shiver to make ourselves warm, and when it’s hot, we sweat to cool ourselves down. As the world focuses on global warming, the Gaian understanding that not only are people connected to the rest of life, but life is connected to a system, has become paramount. The reality, however, is that man is not that special. People have been around for less than three million years, and the Earth has been spinning for about four thousand million years, and in that time, it has seen lots of species come and go. And while industry turns to renewable energy as the solution, Lovelock, in his recent book, “The Revenge of Gaia” says we’re too late, global warming is irreversible and we should expect, by 2100, 80% of the world’s population to be wiped out. However, optimistic scientist Freeman Dyson, who was slated as “The Global Warming Heretic” on the cover of the New York Times magazine disagrees, as does now-deceased famed author Michael Crichton who stated, after the release of his book, “State of Fear” on Charlie Rose, that he doesn’t believe humanity is headed for catastrophe. And although Crichton said that he liked Al Gore, he said he was wrong, in both facts and attitude, and suggests that if science can’t predict what the weather will be like next month, long-term climate forecasts are impossible, and what we are really witnessing today is that drama and crisis gets attention. Whether or not global warming is a “party line” as Dyson proposed or as serious as Lovelock prophesized remains to be seen. Perhaps, the best solution for us right now is just to sit down for a second, look around, and “breathe.”