The book Year Million explores several possible scenarios for the universe a million years from now. Some of these possibilities aren't happy! Rats running the world, gray goo wiping out life on Earth. I just want to read the kick-ass ones! Because predicting the future at such a distance is almost like picking superpowers; your usual analytic skills are stretched to the point of absurdity. For example, some of the essays predict humanity evolving into shapeshifting superbeings; another predicts we will build baby universes. But the most immediately relatable describes a brain-embedded "Internet on crank," albeit one that might be clogged with spam. Actually, wouldn't that be possible in a couple of centuries?

Even without accepting futurist Ray Kurzweil's theory of an imminent singularity (in which technological progression advances so quickly that 60-year-old Kurzweil will still be around when scientists learn to indefinitely prolong life), looking at how far we got in the last century (punch cards to iPhones), it seems like it'll take under a hundred years to make an implantable Internet-ready device connected directly to the brain.

As for spam, I'd like to assume there'd be more of a lock on that before I had the Internet in my brain, but of course there won't. But that's a fair trade-off for being able to look up anything. Just today I needed to check IM logs to remind myself who the hell I was talking to; I could really use a way to instantly look up people at parties. Not in a creepy way; just to remember all their damn names.