Beam me up

If you asked me what futuristic invention I would love to be manufactured right now, I would have to say: the holodeck, the replicator, the transporter, and sonic showers.

Clearly the four top choices for any sloth like me.

Forget warp speed, or universal translators, or hovercrafts. Their regenerators and tricorders to heal, diagnose or scam things. Heck, who even cares about space stations. Others can have it all, I am sticking to my inventions.

For the non trek people: A holodeck uses lights and forcefields to create photonic images/holograms of whatever it is that you want: people, sights, simulations. You can program the characters to think, the places to feel and smell the way you want it, and run life like simulations of any scenario. You can run things such as holonovels and actually be in--say, Vampire Chronicles, instead of just reading about it. You can even be Lestat.

Replicators essentially changes the molecular structure of any matter into anything you like. You can turn a spoon into a fudge sundae, or use energy to create ala pobre steaks seemingly out of thin air.

Transporters--trekwise, at least--break you into teeny atomic particles which they can beam down to a location, then synthesize you when you get there. Sort of like hitching a ride on a ray of very powerful light.

A sonic shower rubs you clean in under a minute using sonic waves. Every dirt in your body gone.

If I could get all these, I would probably never leave the house.

Create my perfect holographic environment, along with my personal harem, replicate everything that I need, take ten second showers that probably comes with an exfoliate setting, and in the rare times that I do get bored and actually long for real human connection, I can beam over to any location in the world.

...This is probably why I was never born in that era.

What brought this on?

Someone from my Star Trek Group (don't even say it) posted an article he found on the New York Times about a team of scientists being able to transport/teleport a beryllium atom.

If that isn't a sign of aging...

As an aside, transporting--or teleporting in physics--doesn't necessarily mean scrambling your atoms and getting pieced back togther. It's more of copying your atoms from this place and placing it on the atoms in the desired destinations. The original form dies everytime you get to be transported, so there aren't any multiple copies of you running around.

Of course, if you follow trek, tons of things could happen that will lead you to accidentaly have a twin...but we're not getting unto that. (And the big moral dilemma on dying evertime you transport. Oi!)

Anyway...

I keep wondering if my kids will ask me what a DVD is and laugh at why we all seemed to buy these tiny discs. Ten years ago, it was laser discs. Now they shrunk to a fourth of that size and can hold more information for a cheaper price.

My dad keeps telling me what an 8-track is...I have vinyl, I have tapes, but an 8-track is completely lost on me. I think it looks like an old, old Atari game cartridge. I don't think we--or my dad--ever really owned one. He skipped that one, so I don't know what it looks like.

I keep thinking back to my first PC--a colored AT&T that had a total of, I think, six programs: a game similar to Tetris, Wordstar 4 (or 6, can't remember), Lotus 1-2-3, and Word Perfect. I was 11 and I was ecstatic.

We switched to a clone when I was 13, but I still pretty much just ran on DOS shells until I was 16. When my dad got his PC and I inherited the old 386 clone, I was pretty content...until I needed to research and then it was all over.

I used to be pretty good with computers. In a way, I still know more than the average, but nowadays there's just so much that you have to know and you need a whole four years to understand something that could be obsolete as soon as you're through.

I just hope that I'll never have to get someone to program my VCR for me.