The golden rule of tourism is that the most exclusive locations and activities are always the most expensive. Space tourism reinforces this theory a great deal – it’ll cost you $20million to take a trip into orbit and visit the ISS, and should you wish to sample the local sights outside your accomodation, a supplementary spacewalk will set you back another $15million…most of which is probably insurance fees, I’m assuming. High time I got a decent savings plan going.

2006 is definitely the year of the 3D display – the latest contender, the HoloVisio allows viewers to walk around the screens and perceive the changes in angle of the displayed object without any silly glasses or other impedimentia. Multiple viewers can even see different views simultaneously from one screen. Maybe the movie theatres aren’t going to go out of business after all.

It’s the return of that ‘life moving between planets’ meme, only this time with a twist. Instead of being liberated by asteroid collisions with life-bearing planets, what if microbes got caught up in the planet’s magnetic field, and ended up riding the flux lines out beyond the atmosphere, all the while sustaining no damage from heavy collisions and evolving the ability to survive in hard vacuum and high-radiation situations? The mind boggles…and a thousand science fiction authors run for their notebooks.

Building aircraft is a tricky and time-consuming process…so why not let technology take over instead? The ‘Polecat Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’, unveiled at the Farnborough Airshow here in the UK, is the first flying vehicle to have built from parts that were ‘printed’ by rapid-prototyping fabricators, as an experiment into lowering production costs. This is a sign of things to come – manufacture will involve the human hand less and less as time goes by.

The web is crawling with reports about Geminoid, a prototype body-double droid with ‘real’ presence via telemetry. It was built by a Japanese professor ‘in his own image’, to coin a phrase, though it looks a little meaner than (what I assume to be) the real person. Videos of Geminoid in action are available. Welcome, android overlords!