Several trends, already firmly established, now seem poised to exert a significant impact on international relations and human interaction. As a result, educators might do well to take heed of four of the more ubiquitous of these trends, which I'll allude to by means of these labels: (1) parallel computing, (2) cloud computing, (3) brain mapping, and (4) the "global dis-assembly line."

Taken together, these four trends could add up to a profound and historic phenomenon: Humanity is developing a network-enabled, computer-assisted global consciousness.

With this broad, unprecedented perspective, we at last have the opportunity to affect our planet and ourselves in ways never before possible. With luck and intelligence, we'll use this opportunity to do more good than harm.

Here's what's certain: We'll need all the science and technology available if we are to fight our way out of the mess we've gotten ourselves into lately. Education and innovation are the keys to success. Luckily, we have more resources than ever before in history to help us out--resources such as ...

Trend No. 1: Parallel Computing. Breaking up is hard to do, but this evolutionary step beyond serial computing gives us enormous powers. Parallel computing is not particularly new, except in the sense that its deployment is about to have an unprecedented impact on our lives.

Traditionally, we think of one computer working on one problem at a time. That's serial computing. When you take one large, complex task, break it into byte-size pieces, have multiple computers process the problem simultaneously, and then reassemble that output into a single, unified outcome--that's parallel computing. Universities are doing this sort of thing routinely now.

The most ambitious application of parallel computing I know of involves the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, near Geneva, Switzerland. (You know, the one some people fear will create black holes that will swallow up the world.) Well--assuming we survive--the collider actually is intended to help us understand the essential nature of matter. It's designed to produce about 15 petabytes of data per year. A petabyte, as you know, equals one million gigabytes--or a million billion bytes. (Facebook is estimated to have 1 petabyte of user photos.)

Therefore, the problem for scientists at CERN, the big European physics laboratory, was how to process these vast amounts of data. Nobody could afford to buy all the computer resources necessary. The solution: parallel computing.

The collider team created the CERN Grid. With central coordination, the grid incorporates both private, fiber-optic cable links and existing high-speed portions of the internet. That enables data transfers from CERN to academic institutions around the world and back again. As a matter of fact, even your personal computer can be recruited to work on CERN data in its down time. In theory, every computer in the world could be yoked together in this way.