It is the year 2019. Logging on to the internet through your nanotech implants, you lean back in your chair and close your eyes. Smiling, as always, at the sensation of weightlessness produced by the tiny robots attached to every nerve ending in your body, you find yourself floating in space at your favorite starting point, fifteen million light-years beyond the Milky Way galaxy. This is far enough outside the “local group” of galaxies to enable you to see them in all their awesome splendor—the massive twin spirals of Andromeda and the Milky Way, the smaller spiral of Triangulum, and over twenty-five other clusters of billions of suns scattered before you, brilliantly glowing against the infinite black void. Although most people choose to start their web browsing from a location a lot closer to home, for some reason you've always preferred taking the more scenic route . . .

Back in 2005, such a scenario may be difficult to take seriously, but it's almost equally hard to believe that the world wide web has only been in existence for little over a decade. For many of us, it has become a crucial component of life—a tool that is indispensable to our work, our personal relationships, our shopping, our entertainment, as well as our ongoing education. It has created new communities, networked by common interests across ages, genders, and continents; new linguistic terms (“blogosphere,” “flame war”); and even entirely new forms of social engagement (discussion forums, IM-ing). Yet if internet entrepreneur Joe Firmage has his way, it will soon be the end of the web as we know it.

As the founder and CEO of ManyOne Networks, Firmage has been working since 2001 to take the internet experience to a new level of sophistication, organization, and most importantly, presentation. His goal is to remodel the web “as it was meant to be,” creating a highly attractive, ordered system out of what is presently, for better or worse, a random mess. The key to his plan's success is his ManyOne browser, a modified version of the popular Mozilla browser with a few unique twists. As a portal to a media-rich environment that Firmage calls the “Digital Universe,” the ManyOne browser will optimize the internet through a graphically immersive experience that Firmage equates to “the kind of 'Encyclopedia Galactica' envisioned by Carl Sagan.” Users will be able to enter a virtual reality of sorts, visiting entire 3-D worlds where they can manipulate objects through fully animated models and learn about their various components at the click of a mouse. With its potential to expand consciousness simply through the holistic, multidimensional ways it will present existing information, ManyOne could become to the internet what Technicolor was to cinema—and maybe a whole lot more.

“The possibilities of this Digital Universe are almost limitless,” Firmage explains. “It can transform education by connecting students, teachers, and parents with the best information in existence, presented within multimedia portals rivaling Sony PlayStation games. . . . It can help people of all ages grasp the complex issues of our time, including global conflicts, climate change, national politics, and economics. It can change our world for the better.”

ManyOne's website (manyone.net) currently allows visitors to download a prototype version of the browser, whose 3-D interface is in the form of a hierarchical knowledge tree. Branching out from universal to galactic to planetary to human levels, this menu already encompasses nearly every conceivable branch of human inquiry, interest, and activity. (We found a link to this magazine's website, wie.org, about five steps in from the planetary level.) And while it is clearly in its early stages of development, the so-called Digital Universe is exactly that—a digitized, animated model of the universe that allows you to travel through space, starting outside our galaxy, zooming in to our local group of stars, and then cruising on into everybody's favorite solar system. You can do a flyby of the rings of Saturn, take a spin around Mars, and watch as Earth whirls from night to day, all the while zooming in and out, up and around, as near and far from the rotating heavenly spheres as you like. Although the digital universe is not much more than an entertaining device at present, the future potential of such technology is clear—and astonishingly cool. As Firmage envisions it, this “rich media landscape” will be “as real and as life-like as possible, enhancing both the visual experience and the comprehension of information presented. These landscapes will include a digitally accurate Earth, with city and landscape reliefs wherever possible and becoming ever more detailed over time; a universe dressed with stars, planets, moons, galaxies, and other objects, accurately positioned and rendered based on the latest scientific observations; a digital human body that can be viewed not only up close, but from inside . . . with many other virtual realities to come.”

Imagine: it's 2019 again, and you're careening toward the Milky Way at trillions of times the speed of light. While browsing an animated menu of frequently visited sites, you remember that you haven't yet bought your spouse a birthday gift, so you extend your virtual hands to the menu and select your favorite bookstore. After a breathtaking excursion through the Orion Nebula, the simulation slows down and your home sun, Sol, begins to come into view as a pinprick of light—a single grain of sand on the beach of infinity. Seconds later, you're heading toward Earth, plunging through its atmosphere and soaring over fields, forests, mountains, and the vast Pacific Ocean as you approach your final destination: Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood, California. After gently touching down on the ground, you hold the door open for some other customers. Knowing that the online version of the store is continually updated to correspond with the real-world version, you try to guess whether or not they're virtual visitors like yourself. Maybe they, too, just dropped in from the sky? As you browse the latest print-on-demand paperbacks, you smile to yourself, marveling that no matter how many times a day you use the net, you never tire of the humbling thrill that comes from observing your precious home world in its true context: a mere mote of dust in the ever-evolving expanse of Cyberspace.