L.U.E. - An Anarchaotistic View

A coworker once asked me what superpower I would I want if I could choose. She had received responses such as super-healing, telepathy, laser beam eyes, and the like. She knew I was nerdy enough to have given this thought , and wanted to know my choice. I asked if I had to pick one that already existed in a comic, or if I could make up one. She encouraged creativity, so I cast my mind back to the last piece of speculative science I had been researching and came up with this response.
I would appreciate being able to create a Nano-Electric Stratospheric Cloud of Arrow-Gel directly above me, allowing me access to all information within a 16 block radius. What I got from her then was a blank stare. The reply came after a long pause, "You're such a nerd", before the request to explain it in further detail.

Nano-electric Arrow-gel.
It's a conceptualized substance with the consistency of soap suds with nano-circuitry grown all over it. It moves about the stratosphere and uploads conciseness into itself, in order to migrate the consciousness of a species through an upload. Up in the stratosphere there's enough ambient energy flow to keep the Arrow Gel flowing around the planet like the jet-stream and keep the electricity going through static-electricity to keep these nano-modems going over time. Allowing for humanity to transfer itself into a more Gaian state of being through the inclusion of Virtual Reality interface to keep our minds occupied through day to day living. This would allow us, as a species, to integrate with a world wide consciousness. Computers and internet connectivity would be a thing of the past. This would replace it.
On the ground, we would live as our ancient ancestors did, nomadically. We would gather food, and construct shelters, and take care of each other throughout our lives. Whenever boredom sets in, we shut our eyes, and jack into the global mainframe. Within the global mainframe, we could simulate any and all states of being, through its index. I view this as a kind of technologically assisted Dreamtime on a global scale.

This scenario was constructed by Terrence McKenna during a psilocybin mushroom trip, in which he sat staring into the night sky having a "discussion" with the mushroom.
This was back in 1997, before the internet was as all-encompassing as it is now, but back then he described something that seems like a not so-distant possibility from my perspective.
I just got done listening to a series of his lectures entitled "Technopaganism at the End of History" in which he and Marc Pesce talk about how virtual reality may invertantly lead to an "archaic revival" in our species, but on a more advanced technological level.
The argument goes something like this:
We continue to evolve, and increase our complexity as a species, until our current patterns of behavior are too hazordous to ourselves, and we hit the reset button. This reset button activates a mainframe of some comic source, which backs up the data and sets a developing species back a few hundred thousand years. But only in regards to their physical interaction with their environment, their consciousness would be advanced as it is today, or more so. The "Archaic Revival" argument states that as our world and our lives grow ever more complex and fraught with confusion, the mental state of the average person casts itself back through the genetic memory in search of the last sane moment humanity knew, which exists back in ancient shamanic cultures. The Archaic Revival shows itself in pop culture with a renewed interest in tattoos, body piercing, and other forms of self-expression that were once used in ritualized societies.

This goes hand in hand with Peter J. Carroll's model of Psychohistory in which he shows the ebb and flow of aeonic paradigms. In this he argues the cyclical pattern of paradigms over time in relation to how humans view the universe around them. Starting from the aeon of the shamanic, he illustrates how magical paradigms rule for a period of time in history, up until the Transcendental paradigm takes over which gave birth to the religious aeon. After the height of the transcendental, the materialistic paradigm ramps up to start off the aeon of the Rationalist, which we are currently experiencing. The ideas of the rationalist are widespread with the advent of the industrial revolution, which started the need to explain everything within a Newtonian/Mechanical model of the universe. Modern science was born, and all the dogma it contained was carried over from the previous aeon. I say dogma only in the sense that if something cannot be proven by science, it cannot exist by established scientific authorities. This goes right along with monotheism of the religious aeon, where one deity ruled over all others through the control of popular opinion.
Following this ebb and flow of a trilogy of paradigms in Peter Carroll's model, we see that there is a repeating pattern. When one paradigm is at its height the other two are alternately ramping up, or decaying, in popularity. If this model has any basis in reality, then it suggests we are about to begin another paradigm shift, into the magical and shamanic once more. Considering our current perception of a world dominance and dominator culture through technology, I would take a guess that our technology will begin to reflect a more integration of humanity with a Gain model of chnscienceness, and competition and domination over each other will begin to fade over the next few years.
The Religious and Rationalist aeons will come back eventually, but it will be in a completely different form, and several hundred years from now. Now is when we embark on a Shamanic aeon that works with the new technologies, rather than technologies working for the will of the materialist paradigm.

I've found that as I watch the evolution of technologies around the world and the development of theories in the field of quantum physics, that not only is this a possible future, it seems a likely one. We have such a negative association with advancements of technology to cyborg status, but if one were to examine the definition of cyborg, we've been this way all of our modern lives.
Cyborg: A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.
Given this definition, humanity has been a cyborg population ever since the cotton gin was used on a mass scale. And we've been accelerating this tendency ever since.
The Borg villains from the Star Trek series are a dominator culture paradigm version of advanced cyborgs, pushing their will upon others in their march for perfection. It need not be that way, and I dare say it will not, as we leave behind the ideas of competition in the next aeon. We're ready to be explorers of the universe, and to leave behind the funk of an obsolete aeon. The competitive nature of capitalism seems more and more juvenile the more widespread information becomes. Fighting amongst ourselves is getting to be boring, and we all feel the need for something new, even if we don't know what it is. I hypothesize this feeling is a mental preparation mechanism for the paradigm shift that's to come.

So not only did I pick a "super power" that is useful to my personal mission of gaining information, but from my perspective is likely to happen in my lifetime for more people than just myself. And if the McKenna/Pesce predictions of virtual realities being a method of interaction with information, then all the other superpowers are possible too. Given the right interactions and perceptions as we head into this paradigm shift, anything can be possible.