Destiny identifies a future for Humanity that is so far from our present state as to seem totally impractical to address seriously in the current time frame, even if you concede the possibility and accept the goal. It is natural at the outset of any major undertaking to feel uncertain or doubtful. That is the part of us that leads to caution and extreme care in planning and execution, once we decide a major goal is worth pursuing. And we develop expectations regarding progress early in our deliberations, for it is foolhardy to start a long journey without identifying mileposts along the way that let us measure our progress.

One absolute requirement for substantive progress is an invariant attitude regarding overall purpose and commitment. The extreme difficulties that will be encountered in stabilizing our present world politically, economically and environmentally to allow dependable progress call for behaviors that are not typical of us. We tend to be impatient and very short term in our thinking and our expectations. So learning to manage our expectations is critical to maintaining a positive attitude and an action oriented approach to progress.

The two most essential activities for progress are to stabilize our present existence and to promote research and technological development. Two other essential changes are promoting education for all of us and learning to discard those activities and beliefs that have kept us from being effective. Think of these early efforts to promote Destiny as preparations for the journey. The journey itself waits on the use of technology to improve directly our functioning capabilities, both our minds and our bodies.

It is reasonable to expect profound advances within the next 20 years from genetic engineering. However, we must first develop a cultural and political climate to support that activity and then use it's results. The next twenty years are our opportunity to get humans ready to advance into a far superior future, and the means available to most of us to effect that now are primarily political. Thus, a significant part of this book is devoted to identifying specific societal issues that demand our attention and which must be successfully addressed. They are a precondition to rational and regular progress.

Enticements to be yielded from genetic engineering include, among others, tissue maintenance and regeneration, such that you can literally grow a new body organ and maintain or enhance muscular and overall fitness without devotion of time to exercise. Problems of overweight people will cease to exist. Cancers, diabetes, congenital heart problems and most of the traditional diseases will cease to affect us. These are merely a few of the obvious expectations with very high probability of success within twenty years, but only if we demand and support the research necessary now to accomplish those tasks.

It is less certain when technology will advance to the point of enhancing our mental prowess across all the population, but make no mistake, that will occur within 50 years unless we allow religious oppression or political and subsequent legislative processes to deny us that essential tool.

Skeptics will doubt that genetic engineering and applied medical technology can accomplish the very difficult process of understanding the workings of the human brain well enough to develop enhancements to it. Such is not the case. Consider mental prowess enhancement as taking place in two steps, starting with use of DNA from individuals whom we already know possess very high quality minds with equal left and right brain development. That step alone can be used to supply thousands of high quality researchers and societal leaders, provided the children born with those abilities receive proper education and career opportunity.

The second step follows from the first, and yes, there will need to be further breakthroughs in taking the minds of the very best, as represented by their DNA, and engineering them to be even better. Best of all, there is a logical path to accomplish that goal. For example, the complexity level of a problem can be seen in the number of near-simultaneous concepts and facts that a person needs to access within their brain to grasp and then solve the problem. We are well aware of the differences between people in ability to solve multivariate, complex problems, and each of us has experienced that frustrating point where we lose effectiveness as problems become more complex. Yet there are wide differences across people, although we appear to be one species, so it is reasonable to project that we will identify the physical basis for near-simultaneous concept or fact processing. We will determine how to increase our abilities in that regard by orders of magnitude through genetic engineering. It is, underneath, simply an existing physical process, a matter of comparative physical differences in human brains, which needs to be discovered by us. We are getting tantalizingly close.

Once we do know how to enhance the human brain, there will be no good reason to deny that growth to all of us. No one will be a bit player except by choice. We will have the depth of understanding about our potential and about our difficult past to change the course of human history. This is the most critical juncture in empowering us to pursue Destiny. We will have created and become a superior species, all of us.

There is the key to eliminating that most fundamental human dominance problem. The pursuit of wealth and power by conquest and oppression will become meaningless, and will be understood for what it was ... a growing pain that was finally outgrown. Yes, this is the path to changing the rules in the book of life. Believe it or not, our most powerful people will understand that our evolution will not diminish them, for their goals and values will grow with the recognition of them having increasingly real power over existence.

Technology in other areas, if allowed to develop now, will eliminate our present use of fossil fuels and nuclear fission energy for most present and high consumption purposes, within 10 years. We can operate almost every device electrically, and the electricity can come either from focused solar energy from outside our atmosphere, or from hydrolysis of water, possibly using tidal and weather forces or solar energy to drive that process. One device to use the resulting oxygen and hydrogen from hydrolysis to produce electricity is called a fuel cell, and its waste product is pure water, plus heat. The obvious benefits relate to pollution. An alternate and intermediate method to provide fuel to a fuel cell is via methanol, ethane or propane, with the advantage of using existing petrochemical investment and the continuing disadvantage of carbon dioxide pollution.

The obvious problem is not a matter of technology. It is a matter of displacing, permanently and globally, the business activities that provide energy from fossil fuels as coal, gasoline, kerosene, diesel and fuel oil, and nuclear fission sources. So we must provide for those people to modify their current occupational activities and capital investments with corresponding activities in the acquisition and/or supply of new or modified sources of energy. Many companies worldwide and the USA Federal government are investing significant funds in fuel cell commercialization, but more needs to be spent to reduce purchase costs via large volume sales of fuel cells.

We are currently conducting our most advanced energy research effort on nuclear fusion studies. That endeavor is potentially the highest payback path in terms of providing essentially limitless energy, provided we can harness it. However, I do not believe that we will manage that resource safely if it is developed and distributed around the planet within the next 20 years. My concern is that knowing the best way to use a resource is very different from actually using it responsibly.

Chernobyl is a minor example of our misuse of nuclear fission by the Soviets. Our military experiments in the USA with exposure of our servicemen to nuclear radiation in the 1940's are another example of our applied stupidity. Yet, it would be wrong to halt the study and potential use of nuclear fusion. The location of the experiments and subsequent commercial development are the important issues. That form of energy should be explored here but developed outside our terrestrial environment, to protect us from potentially disastrous mistakes and from military threats due to broadly disseminated, potentially lethal information to today's nations of malcontents.

Yes, there will be a time when that knowledge will be okay for general use, but we need other critical developments in other areas of human knowledge to occur first. Nuclear fusion, like all forms of research, needs to be studied and, if possible, made effective, but with the understanding that we do not know if a successful and useful fusion can be contained outside an orbiting satellite laboratory environment. One star is enough for our solar system, for now. One might wonder about the origin of some of the binary star systems we have discovered elsewhere in the universe. Why, if this is a natural event, do we not commonly find ternary star systems?

It is the concept of fusion, however, that leads us to understand that chemical elements will be formed in quantity as needed in the future. The dreams of the alchemists can be realized by using both fission and fusion to create necessary elements in environments outside Earth. This means our potential population problem on Earth will be addressed by our colonizing other, presently uninhabitable planets and star systems. That endeavor is likely more than 100 years into our future.

There are people who state unequivocally now that solar radiation or harnessing tidal or weather forces are impractical, due to the relatively small amount of generated power opposite our consumption. Mostly, those individuals are stating their fear that existing investment will be lost in conventional, fossil fuel production and facilities, ergo, oil well through gas station. They are right on one point. Some of the investment will be lost. Just as it was with buggy manufacturers at the turn of the last century. They are wrong about the issue of practicality. However, they do not have to prove that, as long as no one invests enough capital to commercially develop those alternate sources for electricity. In addition, our consumption of electrical power will continue to be high as long as no one works on simpler challenges, like replacing conventional lighting with more power efficient methods. Consider, however, the impact on our societies when we change the fundamental need for artificial light by using genetic engineering to improve our eyesight, i.e. our night vision.

These types of technological changes are what will underwrite our ability to provide improved quality of life to the five plus billion people alive today, without destroying our environment in the process of global economic development. Failure to develop and use technology for our advancement is thus a clearly stupid mistake. Our political processes in all countries must be levered into directing businesses to effect the changes in an environment of global standards.

You will encounter extreme resistance to the identified technology changes, for that part of the Human Condition that is territorial in protecting wealth and power will do everything possible to delay real progress. Simply recall the utter drivel of the latter 1970's regarding oil shortages and forecasts of running out of oil shortly after the turn of the century, which were promoted by our oil companies and our federal government. You will realize that political and business "leaders" routinely and willfully deceived us to accomplish their short-term objectives. Where is that oil shortage today? Your only reasonable recourse is to force progress politically with referendums, proposition laws and education. You must vote Destiny-minded individuals into office.

Learning to undo useless or harmful human activities will not be easy either. As you will learn later, the tools used to impede progress are indeed powerful, like the television media and its direct access to our emotions via audio-visual exposure rather than rational dialogue. In short, your expectations should include major political and business upheaval, in a high intensity environment of resistance to change. Fortunately, you still own the right to vote, and if you are wise and careful, you will use that power, fully, for the benefit of all Humanity. And you will have to use it in combination with citizens of all developed countries, for global projects must be authorized and funded jointly, not to mention staffed with the best people available.

Undoing the harmful human activities, such as the murders committed by abortion activists, and the dissembling and hiding of important information practiced today by business and government alike, will not be easy either. Legislated truth and completeness in communication to the populace will not be a popular issue with those who presently hold power.

Identification of people with adjustment disorders and more serious psychological problems will also need to occur from the time people are young children and be continued routinely as children develop into adults. There will be much said about violations of our privacy rights, and those claims will be true relative to our historical perceptions. However, we must proceed to identify potential problems before they happen and then take kind and helpful action, using medical technology, to stop our propensity to damage or kill when we become frustrated. There is no room in an enlightened society for power addiction or other unmanaged mental illness, and nothing good about shootings in our schools.

It is essential to identify individuals who should not be in leadership positions or even walking the streets without the benefit of medical technology to assist their cognitive functions and values. This means drugs, surgery, psychological counseling and post birth use of genetic re-engineering when that tool becomes available. We will, at some point within the next 100 years, have the ability to reprogram the human brain, i.e. after the fact correction of what we ignorantly perceive today as "choice-based" or "free will" behavioral problems.

Taken as a whole, the expectations we have to manage and the changes that need to occur in our use of technology are major and essential, and we can be forgiven if we initially consider the required evolutionary steps overwhelming. They will not all happen at once, but they will happen, none-the-less. Individually, we can contribute to the future by giving our progressive support to our evolution, politically.