1. In the future, CEOs of merging corporations will be surgically
fused into single organisms.

2. Solar systems live and die on a time-scale of billions of years;
civilizations rise and fall over mere millennia. If intelligent aliens
are present on Earth, they have probably been here for a long time;
in fact, longer than we have. It is much more likely that homo sapiens
arose through an experiment in genetic engineering (mixing artificial
with simian DNA), than that aliens got here just in time to see us
invent the airplane.

3. If cheap time travel is ever invented, it will be put to trivial
uses: catching up on sleep, cheating deadlines, etc. The time-travel
addicts will be easy to spot: they'll be the twenty-five-year-olds
who look like they're eighty---because they will be eighty. Demand
for cosmetic surgery and organ transplants will soar. (Fortunately,
doctors will have no trouble making time for these extra patients.)
Some will seek help through twelve-step programs ("My name is Arlene,
and . . . I'm a time-traveler").

4. How might a born telepath learn to distinguish his own thoughts
from other people's?

5. The ghosts of certain canceled TV series---classics such as Mister
Ed, Bonanza, and Gilligan's Island---haunt their former time slots.
You can see them, too---but you have to have watched a lot of TV.

6. Go seventy years into the past, throw a rock through a window,
and return to the present. You disturbed the past: what will have
changed? There will still be a United States of America, a New York
City, jets, refrigerators, computers. But the odds are very good
that no one you knew, of your generation, will have ever been born:
you will be surrounded by strangers. (You'll know your parents, but
they won't know you.) This is because the conception of a human being
is a highly chaotic event, depending not only on who mates with whom,
but when; and how the genes are shuffled in meoisis; and which sperm
gets there first.

7. If there are any Neanderthal ghosts, they have probably forgotten
their own names.

8. You can get free Internet access by allowing advertisers to flash
banners across your computer screen. You can get free email the same
way. In Sweden, you can get free long-distance telephone calls by
letting advertisers interrupt your conversation every minute or so.
In the near future, some people will get free food and shelter in
exchange for having light-emitting microchips planted under the skin
of their foreheads, from which advertisements will be continuously
displayed.

9. In the near future, computers will know us---or most of us---better
than we know ourselves. I come home, and I can't decide what to have
for dinner. The house computer, which has been monitoring my meals
for the last N weeks, suggests, "Chinese." Exactly right---that *is*
what I wanted---I just couldn't put my finger on it. What sort of
music do you want to listen to? Most of the time, you know; but
sometimes, when you can't decide, the computer will make the perfect
suggestion---gently, of course. What *shall* we get so-and-so for
his birthday? Ask his computer. Your computer will be your best
friend.

10. A computer that possessed intuition, imagination, and a sense of humor
would also suffer from human frailties: self-doubt, stubbornness, dry spells, 
boredom.

11. Who would mount an interstellar expedition? Not a government:
the voyage could take a thousand years, and the country wouldn't
even exist when the ship returned. But a church might do it. Our
first alien visitors will probably be missionaries, who will, without
intending it, give us one-sided and innaccurate views of their society
(think of Jesuits among the Hurons).

12. In the future, NASA will contract with McDonald's, to rocket
self-contained restaurant-modules into space along the trajectories
of proposed manned missions. Each module will have a complement of
fast-food employees, in suspended animation. In deep space, whenever
a ship from Earth is approaching, but a few days before it reaches
the module, the employees will be wakened, to spruce the place up
and get the burgers flipping. The astronauts will stop, take some
refreshment, and be on their way, after which the employees will
go back into hibernation.