Roland Dobbins, computer mage, has been getting my cyborg lifestyle organized. I have new computers, one a laptop that can plug into my curvy ergonomic keyboard and huge screen, or yank out for travel, and one just for games. I have a new roundabout way of reaching AOL so it doesn’t kidnap my sound and modem.

But that doesn’t get me my AOL address book.

Rain has killed my modem line. I’m in the bar with a cat riding the back of my chair. I’m using my old laptop with its horrible keyboard and a touchpad that moves my cursor without warning whenever my thumb brushes it. But I can reach old friends with my old AOL address.

But all this has started me thinking.

The better we get at communicating, the less we need to travel.

Packing a suitcase is a highly refined skill. If we travel only for pleasure, we lose it. The pleasure goes away, hassles become obtrusive. What did we forget to take this time? Who should we have phoned? Do we need medicines and diet supplements? Could they look like drugs to some hostile foreign cop? How will jet lag hit us this time? What does everyone local know that a travel agent forgot?

Isaac Asimov, no great traveler, did once reach Niagara Falls. Deep into the night he finally realized why he couldn’t sleep. "They don’t turn off the Falls at night."

Lost luggage? Air France lost a passenger in the Soviet Union, because he annoyed them. They dropped Tom Doherty in Moscow when he only had an internal passport for Leningrad.

Are you going someplace dangerous? An American got killed by the bureaucracy in Mexico last year. He was prevented from reaching help after a car accident broke his neck. It reads like an extortion scheme escalated to murder.

Commerce and tourists are what cause plagues.

In history the usual progression seems to be: an exile comes home from the edge of the world carrying silk or spaghetti or horses or gunpowder. A trade route starts up. Then the historical record fades away and doesn’t resume for 30 or 40 years.

When a plague like measles or chicken pox reaches new territory, it typically kills two-thirds of the population. Of the survivors’ children it kills a quarter. Afterward it’s a childhood disease. When syphilis first reached Europe it was ferocious; survivors lost all their hair; you can see it in the paintings of royalty, and wigs stayed in style for centuries. Historians aren’t interested writing it down when everyone around them is dying.

Pasteur and Lister rewrote the future forever.

Sure they did, but the tiny life forms are catching up. Staph infections mutate faster than doctors or sulfa drugs. Natural diseases are bad enough, but we know the shape of DNA now. Biological war is way cheaper than thermonuclear bombs and way harder to trace.

Security at airports is an annoyance we live with; but a serious terrorist can carry a biological weapon in his blood.

Why travel?

Business can be done over the net without jet lag, without facing local preferences in body odor, bed size, alcohol or tobacco or local cuisine.

Dating and courtship? Okay, but we can date over the net before we get physical. We can lie to each other about beauty, accomplishments, health, financial status and gender; but our odds improve. We can learn a little. When we meet, the gamut of inappropriate behavior becomes less a mugging than an intelligence test.

Thrill rides? Roller coasters are not for transport. Some people like speed, or the illusion that they have risked their lives. Disney and Las Vegas and Magic Mountain lead the way. The "Star Tours" ride doesn’t take us anywhere; the whole ride happens inside a bouncing box. Six Flags Magic Mountain swaps roller coasters between their sites.

Tourism?

The Grand Tour was intended to educate a young European man who expected to rule. Bush the Younger and Daniel Quayle can still get laughed at on a million TV screens for making mistakes in geography. But they don’t have to go. They need a book or CD or videotape.

Could these things be done by virtual reality?

The Hajj is the voyage every Muslim is obliged to take during his life. The Koran says Mecca must be seen with one’s own eyes; but getting lost has nothing to recommend it, and viewing a virtual reality Hajj as done by a professional traveler would at least count as preparation.

Here’s how it could go—

Cameras already record electronically and feed through a computer. My nephew has a chair designed for playing deep-involvement war games; it buzzes and hums and moves under him. I don’t foresee this trend getting as far as smell, and cuisine will still take real food. But with sight, hearing and somasthetic senses, we will get better and better at showing travel to people who needn’t go anywhere.

Container technology can move most freight. Fewer human workers get involved. Where we get serious about containing disease, they’ll be clothed like hospital attendants. Elsewhere … cheap labor isn’t cheap if every product must be disinfected.

Is it likely that we’ll all give up traveling? Oh, get a grip. Someone has to take the pictures!

Instead of millions of travelers in the air at any one time, some flying on the spur of the moment…you’ll get a few thousand professionals.

The pro prepares for months. For his massive luggage he needs automated porters with controls derived from martian rover devices. He’s vaccinated for everything plausible. He gets big bucks because something else might hit him.

Of today’s airline companies, the ones who survive will fly First Class from bow to tail, with room to walk around and every seat wired for electronics of every description. Their passengers will be pro tourists wired to record. Remember the 747 Fat Alberts with their observation decks and wet bars front and rear? It’ll be like that.

They’ll return home to quarantine. Biological war isn’t the only danger. Local flu mutates, and without tourists to carry it, we’ll have no resistance.

We who intend to put human astronauts on the moon and Mars and every solid body in the solar system … are used to the notion that it will cost hundreds of millions per astronaut. Why does the general public resist paying for the conquest of Mars? Well, they don’t see why tourism should be hugely expensive and restricted to a privileged few … yet.

A few professional observers chosen with meticulous care, draped with a few pounds of cameras and phones and motion sensors, can send back footage that will put any viewer on Mars. Instantaneous travel, no low-gravity nausea, no fine dust getting into everything, no explosive decompression or poisonous atmosphere leakage. Does it cost? Hey, Mecca costs too.

An attitude change might do us some good.