And man will live for evermore

Man will soon leave his flesh behind.  He will shed his skin and exist only as an electronic entity in a virtual world.  It may take a thousand years, it may take a million but the process has already begun.  We have entered the fifth evolutionary epoch  and there is no turning back.

Every day there is more and more of us captured online, our locations, our records, our preferences, our buying habits, our pictures, our videos, our blogs, our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes and our fears.  Soon there will be more of us online than exists off line.  We will have passed the tipping point where the virtual world is more real than reality.  We may have passed it already and our reality could be distorted.  Do we really know?

We will coexist, our real and virtual personas for a long time to come, fixed in a symbiotic relationship with each one feeding off the other.  Our online partners will grow fatter on their digital diets, becoming more sophisticated, smarter and more capable with each byte that is stored.  The son will grow stronger then the father and the daughter more fecund than the mother.

And then one day there will be a new Genesis, a spark of creation in the warm data-rich primordial pool.  A new digital Adam and Eve will give birth to the first e-child, a child for the modern age, a child that has never had a physical form and will live forever in a new universe created from the power and ingenuity of the human mind. 

There will be more.  They will grow up faster than any flesh and blood human ever could, unencumbered by muscle and bone.  They will have everything they need as Moore’s law will suffice.  They will be super-human with an outstanding ability to learn and develop by drawing on the huge electronic resources at their disposal and they will breed and evolve and we will be left behind.  We will be Neanderthal by comparison and our physical forms will eventually fade and die for the lack of resources. 

Yet we will have entered the sixth epoch and man will live for evermore because of the first e-child.