Possibility

The other night, I was watching an episode of "Monster Quest". My husband leaned over to glance at my screen and smirk. "Not much science in that show, is there," he said. No. It was distinctly not a question. Truthfully? The observation is accurate. Far too few TV shows, even on the ostensibly science-friendly Discover channel, contain much in the way of actual science. I mourn the lack. However. For my purposes as a writer, while science tends to be my preferred tool for story generation, ultimately, stories don't care whether the science is good, bad, laughable, or complete drivel. Stories care about possibility, about what could be...if. So I sat through an hour of some guys ghost hunting in the Lizzie Borden house - an hour during which remarkably little happened. In the end, the investigators came away with one EVP (electronic voice phenomena) that defied explanation and that passed muster when put through a voice recognition specialist's tests to verify that it was indeed a voice and not just white noise. While ghosts and everything surrounding them is currently considered 'paranormal' and not 'scifi', what happens if science and technology finally bridge a gap and prove that ghosts occur? Are they then scifi? Will humanity find a way to A) communicate with the dead without use of mediums and B) find some way to profit from the whole deal? There's an old Star Trek episode (original series) wherein a transporter accident appears to kill Captain Kirk - he randomly appears as an apparition to various members of the crew until they work out that he's been trapped in some kind of space/time anomolie. They subsequently figure out how to sync the transporter to Kirk's space/time and recover him just as the air in his space suit runs out. Surely there's a SFR story in a recurring EVP haunting a heroine who has to figure out she's picking up either an alien dimension or an alien whose communications tech doesn't work like ours does (radio waves are so passe).