Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California.

Imagine swimming around an island or across a channel or in a massive open water race and being able to immediately and neurologically tap into information from the Internet on the currents, chop or competition?

Within one generation, open water swimmers and triathletes may be able to think, swim and access the Internet as easily as rounding a turn buoy.

What possible benefits of this accessibility will there be? Many.

200 million years ago, human’s mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This tissue is the key to what humanity has become.

Google’s Director of Engineering and renowned scientist Ray Kurzweil foresees a time when nanobots in the brain assist our natural biological assets to exponentially expand our innate brain power by accessing online information in the cloud.

20 to 30 years from now, Kurzweil predicts that search engines will be able to read for understanding the information on the cloud. Additionally, humans will have nanobots that will flow through the vascular system and enter the body through our capillaries. These smart nanobots will connect the brain’s neocortex to the synthetic neocortex of the cloud. So in order expand the capacity of the 300 million modules in a human’s neocortex, the nanobots can access a few billion more online. “Our thinking will be a hybrid between biological and non-biological thinking.”

Since the non-biological information will grow exponentially, “we will expand our neocortex and it will be expanded without limits. That additional quantity that be the enabling factor in another qualitative leap in culture and technology.”

So imagine standing onshore and being able to access all the available information on the marine life, competition, tides, and weather predictions that you may encounter during your swim. Imagine thinking and accessing all the available information on previous swims in the area and comments on the social media (or whatever will take its place) in the same time that it takes to clean your goggles.

This presents fascinating possibilities for sure. So open water swimmers will certainly continue to think large…but they may also be thinking small on a nanoscale in the future.



Note: Nanobots or nanorobotics is the emerging technology field that utilizes extremely tiny robots that range in size from 0.1–10 micrometers and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components.

Copyright © 2014 by World Open Water Swimming Association