Contact lenses

When you want to do it with someone miles away, you pick up a phone and talk.

Once the novelty wears off, the idea of being part-human, part-machine will cease to seem abnormal.

Indeed, the day may well dawn when only the extremely economically disadvantaged will be purely human.

Today, we are conditioned to see death as inevitable.

But does it have to be?

What if humanity evolved into a new species of cyborgs?

Body parts would be replaced whenever required, and would be far more durable than the ones we have to make do with today.

But what of consciousness?

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, postulates that we will eventually scan our brain to map the locations, interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components.

All this will then be recreated on a neural computer.

"Well before the 21st century is completed, people will port their entire mind file to the new thinking technology...

Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware.

When the hardware crashed, that was it.

As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file.

We will be software, not hardware.

Our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups." Think of an artifici...

The Deadly Assassin in 1976 is the only story to feature the Doctor without a companion.27.

The fourth Doctor's trade-mark long scarf was never designed to be so.

The costume designer gave balls of wool to a knitter, who just kept going till she ran out of wool!

28.

Tom Baker was bitten on the lip by a dog while recording the 1978 story The Pirate Planet.29.

The Doctor's robot dog, K-9, was originally called Fido.30.

During his final series, Tom Baker fell ill and his naturally curly hair turned straight, so he was given a perm.31.

City of Death in 1979 is the first story to be filmed outside of the UK.32.

Tom Baker broke his collar bone while shooting his location work as The Doctor.33.

The story Shada began filming in 1979 but was never completed or broadcast.34.

When Tom Baker was unavailable for the Five Doctors reunion story, scenes from the abandoned story Shada were used.35.

Fifth Doctor Peter Davison is the youngest actor to have been cast in the lead role.36.

The final part of Earthshock in 1982 was broadcast without end title music as a tribute to companion Adric who died in that story.37.

Peter Davison's first adventure, Castrovalva, was actually the fourth story he recorded.38.

In 1986, a young fan called Gareth Jenkins starred in his own episode with Colin Baker for Jim'll Fix It.39.

Sixth Doctor Colin Baker appeared as a Time Lord commander in a ...