From: The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today

1. We'll all know our personal DNA sequencing, allowing medical treatments and health-prevention strategies to be tailored to our genetic profiles.

2. Life spans will reach triple digits as we learn to reprogram cells to compensate for failing organs.

3. Five to 10 percent of children will be born with genetic enhancements, speeding human evolution. Part of the motivation will be to keep up with fast-evolving artificial intelligence.

4. The recognition that infection causes most chronic diseases will lead to vaccines against schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, heart disease, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, obesity, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, dental caries, autism and some cancers. AIDS will be eliminated.

5. Pets such as cats, hamsters and birds will become rare as it becomes clear that animals are a major source of transmission of chronic diseases. The exception is dogs, which have lived with humans and shared their pathogens for 14,000 years.

6. Hand-held neuroimagers will reveal when people are lying.

7. People must have government approval to marry and have children, based on their genetic compatibility, or face a huge tax burden for any sick or disabled children they produce in defiance of a ban.

8. Children of the baby boomers will work into their 70s because of a labor shortage -- and because they can.

9. The merger of real and virtual worlds will allow people to meet holographically and to feel, smell and taste products they buy online.

10. Nanotechnology will let us turn information files into physical products. For example, we can e-mail a toaster and print it out on a desktop "nanofactory."

11. Integrated, hand-held devices will coordinate appointments, track family members, even plan vacations by matching our wish list of destinations with free blocks of time. Many people will vacation in virtual worlds.

12. Global interdependence will allow people, capital and information to flow freely across borders, eroding the power of nation-states. Simultaneous translation will let us talk with people of any language.

13. Goodbye, privacy. Data from cameras, biometrics (retinal scans, fingerprints, face recognition software), full body scans and perhaps microchip implants will be sent to intelligence "fusion" centers to tell governments where people are going and what they're doing in the public realm.

14. We may be able to add memory to human brains, just as we do to old computers, and download human memory into remote storage devices.

15. Thanks to research begun in the early 2000s, a child who is born blind can have nerve signals wirelessly rerouted to the brain's auditory cortex, which will process both sight and sound. A child born deaf will undergo a similar procedure, routing impulses from the ear to the brain's visual cortex.

16. Nanotechnology will allow paralyzed people to walk. Molecules injected into the spinal cord will form into nanofibers that prevent scar tissue and promote new cell growth.

17. People can get artificial retinas that let them switch (simply by thinking) between "reality" mode and virtual reality, including the ability to see real events in other locations -- say, checking on Mom in the nursing home.

18. Handshakes and other types of human contact will be reserved for family members to avoid spreading disease.

19. Animal diseases such as mad cow will reduce meat consumption and lead to germ-free, engineered meat.

20. We will understand the origins of life and re-create it in the laboratory.

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