Holodex!

As some of our readers may not be total future nerds yet I feel I should hit upon the most important make-believe future tech ever. I'm talking about the Holy Grail of the Geek; I'm talking about the universal definition of "If only"; I'm talking about the Holodeck.

The name may not ring any bells if you've never seen an episode of Star Trek (The Next Generation) but I'll lay it down for you nice and simple like. The holodeck is a room that can reproduce and project almost any environment you could possibly describe to a computer which you can then interact with exactly as if it were reality. Say you want to safari across the vast veldts of ancient Earth Africa, or maybe you want to solve devious crimes in 19th Century England, Baker street, or perhaps you'd want to play poker with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking! All is possible with the holodeck!

Although I think they once tried to explain such a ridiculously amazing concept by saying that they used complex "photon manipulation" to achieve the Holodeck but other more actually living people are trying to reproduce the same effects in reality, even today! Of course we are so far from an actual implementation of even a rudimentary holodeck that it isn't even funny. Actually it's really sad because I'll probably die before it happens. Now that I think about it though I'm going to insert a clause for my Will that requires that my ancestry immediately create a holodeck version of me as soon as the technology is available! Of course since every piece of the internet is currently being cached by Google (whether you like it or not), by that time all that will remain for my progeny to use to reconstruct my personality will be Jacob and the Furries videos and witty Facebook profiles. In the future I will live on as a caricature of myself! But any metaphysics philosopher worth his weight in reconfigured photons will agree that that is better than nothin'.

To sum up, in the future we can all have post-humous sex with David Bowie without fear of necrophilia laws or rejection.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck



A really good example from ST:TNG
Einstein cracks me up every time.