> If my memory serves me, we covered this subject on this forum many moons ago.
>
> So without reading the other replies, I'm going to say that the one that interests me the *least* is instant teleportation. That would take all the fun out of traveling. Getting there is half the fun. Getting back home is the other half. With a little luck, the third half between coming and going, will be fun too.


Which is why I would pick flying. I mean, I love to drive if it's a long trip, and I love plane rides, but duuude... I wanna fly. I realize it would help less with day-to-day annoyances than some of the other abilities, but then I'm of the school of thought that says the net amount of annoyance in human life remains constant regardless of technology or other kinds of increased power. All our little gadgets do is move the annoyance around, clumping it together or spreading it out. I guess that would be the Conservation of Annoyance theory?

Flying, however, without machine assistance, would be a joy outside the current bounds of human experience. Those bits in the Hitchhiker books almost make me cry. I will never forget the first time I rode in a plane, when I was about ten. It was a cloudy day... until we got high enough, when suddenly there was this whole vast sunlit landscape of rippled glowing white, with big billowing mountains in the distance. I had never imagined that a sight like that could really exist on earth.

My father has said that when he gets very very old and is ready to die, he wants to get into his boat and just sail away. I think I'd like to be helicoptered up to the top of one of those really high mountains that pokes up through perpetual cloud cover. I would die happy.

Lire"yet another reason I've always wanted a superhero boyfriend... the flying, I mean, not the dying on a mountaintop"lyn