The closest approach to our future I have found yet is not even a story or a movie, but Secondlife, a world created by it’s users for other users. I’ve traveled through stargates, flown an X-wing fighter, sat in Kirk’s chair on the bridge of the Enterprise, and even have my own paired set of light sabers.

And to top it off, I walk through the world on a pair of cloven hooves, with a tail wings and horns, a virtual demoness, and no-one bats an eye. Even my Anthropomorphic black Egyptian Jackal girl with her neon green glowing hair and Tron inspired Mecha armor is complimented regularly even by those who would never dare talk to a fursuited cosplayer at a convention.

We are the product of generations of stories, immersed in endless creative dreams, and yet no sci-fi story I have yet read even comes close to properly envisioning a future in which the human race has achieved control over their very form. Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair is the sole Sci-Fi I have read in decades that even remotely comes close with it’s various “genetic upgrades” mixed freely with advanced cybertechnology, yet even it is supposedly a world centuries in the future, when I can see it’s reality within just a few decades, if that.

We are about to enter the era of VR. The technology now exists to immerse us into a fully virtual environment without the need for cumbersome and specialized equipment. The Xbox is releasing a motion tracking system in 2010 which combined with the Emotiv Epoch EEG input device could capture and model a human being completly in VR in their own living room. Once the Epoc is merged with a set of VR lenses, which with the ability to print electronics and create curved OLED displays, will not be long in coming, we will be able to experience the immersiveness of such 3d movies in our own homes.

But when you combine the ever increasing power of our portable networking devices, the so called “smartphones”, and their rapidly increasing utility for AR applications, it is readily apparent that VR will not STAY in the home for long. And when the world begins to resemble Secondlife, it’s going to lead to a massively increased demand to reshape or very reality itself to match VR.

Floating islands? Sure. But well also have dragons and unicorns, starships and cyborgs, steampunk and stormtroopers, anime cat girls and Klingons, and ten million Angelina and Brad clones.

And from there, it’s going to get REALLY imaginative.

Harnessing nanotech to be our slave as humanity lives in luxury forever is as much a pipedream as Metropolis’s machine city. Why on earth would we chose to live in idle luxury when we will be finally be free to explore an endless cosmos and create an infinite number of paradises?

While I have no doubt that the governments would love for us to remain in our little cubicles under their control, it’s not going to happen unless they utterly destroy everything that makes us human.

From Utility Fog Mage battles to Succubi like me, we’re going to become everything we have ever dreamed, past present and future.

And beside that… yeah, sci-fi seems awfully dull these days.

“I found the speculations absurdly anthropocentric. Here we have machines millions of times more intelligent, plentiful, fecund, and industrious than ourselves, evolving and planning circles around us. And every single one exists only to support us in luxury in our ponderous, glacial, bodies and dim witted minds. There is no hint in Drexler’s discussion of the potential lost by keeping our creations so totally enslaved.”

– http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1986/drexler.mss