Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10²⁸ MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation—individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 10³³ MIPS and rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake.

Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33 MIPS - thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn’s rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.

There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human—human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.