Washington

Direct brain-to-brain communication and the transfer of minds between bodies seem more like the stuff of Hollywood movies than of government reports — but these are among the advances forecast in a recent report by the US National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce.

“Improving human performance has been a dream for centuries,” says Mihail Roco, chairman of the government-funded National Nanotechnology Initiative, and lead author of the study. Dreams of herculean strength and everlasting life are currently constrained by the limitations of the human body. But the report — Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, released on 8 July — says that the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer science and cognitive science may help to break those limits in the next 20 years.

Combining these fields will allow human technology to be seamlessly integrated with biological systems, say the authors, who come from a mixture of academic and industrial backgrounds. They suggest it might be possible to use nanorobots to repair damaged or defective body parts, or to improve peoples' brains so that our memories never fade.

The report doesn't stop there. If technology and biological systems could be integrated absolutely, the authors claim it might be possible to 'upload' your mind from your body and transmit it to another world, such as Mars. Once there, you could download your mind into a different body and experience the planet. And by periodically uploading your mind to new bodies, it suggests, you could live forever.

Other futurist furrows ploughed in the report include the idea of individuals communicating using brain implants, and computer models that could predict how societies behave and evolve. The authors propose that such models could be used to eliminate trends such as fundamentalism or fascism.

Presidential science adviser John Marburger acknowledges that some of ideas may seem a little extreme, but he believes they cannot be ignored. “Topics that seemed far out even a few years ago are much closer than we anticipated,” he says. “It would be irresponsible for us to dismiss these ideas.” Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation, agrees. “It's just a lovely report,” she says. “It provides an awfully good justification for the investments we're making now.”

But not everyone is convinced. “I can't imagine what they plan to do with the damn thing,” says Bob Park, director of public information at the American Physical Society. He believes that the ideas are too far-out to have much of an impact on current research funding. “You can't make plans for technology so many years in advance,” says Park.

Others say that social behaviour is too complex to be reduced to a set of discrete variables. Modelling can help social scientists to understand trends, says Don Brenneis, president of the American Anthropological Association and a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but it won't allow them to engineer ways out of social problems.

→ http://wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies