Recently, I nerdsploded. In fact, I have been nerdspoding for a while now. Because I read a news story and watched a video that told me something that just plain buried the needle on my geek excitement meter.

They have invented the fucking tricorder.

Well, okay, not exactly. For one thing, this device has an actual display (your smartphone/tablet) instead of just making vague sine wave type sounds.

But the basic idea is that it’s a little gizmo that can read the exact molecular structure of anything you point it at. You can get a whole spectrographic reading on absolutely anything as easily as you could take a picture of it.

And this BLOWS MY FREAKING MIND. I want one of these things SO. BAD. I want it so bad that I am pretty sure I am maxing out my capacity for acquisitional avarice. Just thinking of it makes me do the grabby hands.

And not for any of the rather sad sounding “practical” uses they go on and on about in the video. I mean, I am sure it can do those things and much much more, but hey, you can use a microscope as a doorstop if you really want to. That doesn’t mean that is what it is made for.

No, I want it purely because it is the single coolest piece of technology ever to me. It’s entirely gizmo appeal. The ability to simply know what everything is made of is the most amazing and thrilling extension to human senses since the invention of the camera. So much genuine, direct knowledge at your fingertips…the prospect makes me dizzy with anticipation.

I realize that not everybody will be with me on this. I imagine that most people would find it hard to see what I am so freaking stoked about. To most people, I would guess, this piece of technology is sort of neat at best and pointless at worst.

But I don’t care. I am happy to just sit here and revel in how much this makes me feel like I am truly living in the future. The ability to learn exactly what any random object is made of makes me feel like we are living in Star Trek. That we are one step further to that utopia. And that we are opening an astounding new vista in public knowledge.

I hope this thing really catches on. I mean, I know the average person won’t care like I do, but I hope it catches on as a curiosity or a hobby like metal detectors. It would take someone dreaming up a killer application for it, something that would either save or make money for people, or give them another kind of knowledge that they desperately want.

Find out if your mate is cheating? It could work.

The reason I want so badly for it to become ubiquitous (hey, maybe it will start to be built in to people’s smart devices!) is the incredible wave of improved accountability that would unleash on capitalism consumerist economies worldwide.

Companies that had been getting away with cutting corners on their products would suddenly find themselves up to their asses in alligators (or litigators, which are far worse). Say your chairs are rosewood when they are really just oak? Busted! Claim your herbal remedy is full of exciting sounding ingredients and it’s really just aspirin? Busted! Is that chemotherapy medicine counterfeit? SO DAMN BUSTED.

Capitalism thrives on those kinds of things. The bad players get driven out of the market and the good ones take over their market share. And we the consumers get better product cheaper.

And the thing is, we are just getting started. If this product catches on, there will be countless imitators, and where there are imitators there will be innovators who are looking for the edge that will make their version of the same thing better than the competition. In the future, there may well be versions that are more accurate, more helpful, or even versions that do things that are so cool and handy and wonderful that we will wonder how we ever got along without them.

What I am hoping for is the invention of a kind of Wikipedia of substances. A vast database of what things are made of (and what they SHOULD be made of) created by all those people scanning all those things all over the world. A database that anyone can access for research or just plain curiosity.

What an amazingly rich and deep dataset that could be! A database like that could replace dozens of years of research for many important projects and form the jumping off point for innumerable worthy studies of things too obscure to justify a big expensive study, but perfectly suited to small studies based on deep diving into deep data for analysis.

Heck, think of what it could do for medical diagnosis! So much of what now requires sending the patient to a lab and then waiting for the results could be done right there in the office. No pipettes, no centrifuges, no technicians. The doctor could take the samples right there in-office then point the SCIO at it, and boom, all the answers they need.

This device, the SCIO, and its offspring have the potential to create massive new efficiencies, and that is always where progress in the modern world starts. Someone invents something that replaces something expensive with something cheaper, and suddenly a brand new capacity is put into the hands of the masses, and great change comes about as a result.

This could be such a game-changer. It might not change things on the same scale as the changes made by the Internet or the smartphone, but then again, nobody could predict all the things that would come of those, either.

Try to imagine a future where everyone has a tricorder in their pocket. It beggars the imagination, or at least, it beggars mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, and I totally meant to do a video roundup today. Tomorrow, I promise!