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This weekend, along with a sizable portion of the rest of the country, I saw the movie Avatar. Through my 3-D glasses, I entered into the bioluminescent forestlands of a fictional distant moon named Pandora, where flowers bloomed rampantly, trees stretched into the skies, and rivers glowed. Although the plot was a little trite and silly, the Pandora landscape was a true escape. Much like an avatar, while my body sat in a darkened theater surrounded by hundreds of others in our dorky glasses, the rest of me entered into this forest world for 2 ½ hours. On a year when I’d opted not to travel for the holidays, this movie was my ticket to a realm beyond San Francisco, somewhere exotic and indelible—and not once did I have to step on a plane.

It’s a cheap excuse for a vacation, I know, but in the wake of the disruptions caused by the attempted terrorist attack on an airliner on Christmas Day and all its ensuing security tighten-ups and regulations, I can’t help but wonder if one day, we’ll all just be able to skip the travel part altogether. Maybe 100 years from now, we’ll be able to go on Travelocity to reserve a high-tech vacation in which we arrange to put our physical bodies into a pod, hook up to a bunch of wires, swipe our credit cards, and beam our consciousness to a ready-and-waiting body in the destination of our choice: Tahiti, Pamplona, the Moon--even Pandora and beyond. If you’re old, you could choose an avatar that allowed you to vacation while young again. If you were going to a distant planet without oxygen, you could choose an avatar with lungs adapted to that planet’s composition.

No security lines required, no flight delays, no worries.