One of my favorite TV shows when I was growing up was “The Six Million Dollar Man.” For those of you who are either too young to remember the show or too old to remember much of anything that far back, it told the story of Col. Steve Austin, an astronaut who suffered a particularly bad crash landing which cost him both legs, one arm, and one eye.

Luckily for our hero, the U.S. government was kind enough to replace those lost body parts with powerful artificial (bionic) replacements, giving him virtual super powers. With his new legs he could run faster than any other human being, his new arm gave him super strength, and his bionic eye was like a built in telescope. The whole upgrade cost a very reasonable $6 million, most of which I assume was covered by his insurance. (This is what life was like before HMOs.)

Back then the concept of high-tech body part replacements was still pretty far-fetched, but science always seems to catch up with science fiction eventually and today bionic replacements for aging and diseased body parts has become a reality.

Bionic ears have been in use long enough to be considered rather routine.

Over 70,000 people have had their hearing upgraded via a cochlear implant that costs around $50,000. (Dedicated TV watchers may remember the short-lived spin-off to “The Six Million Dollar Man” in which Lindsay Waggoner portrayed a bionic woman who, among other things, had her hearing bionically upgraded.)

Replacing the eye is a much more complex proposition, but progress is being made in that area as well. A new microchip implanted into the retina of people whose eyesight had been degraded to the point of near total blindness by advancing age or disease can restore to them some limited ability to make out light and shadow. This is still a relatively young technology, but it stands to reason that it is only a matter of time until bionic eye technology does for blindness what cochlear implants have done for deafness.

Any student of scientific advancement and human nature can see where this technology will eventually lead us. In time the technology will advance past the point of restoring normal levels of sensation to the afflicted and allow people to have super senses a la Col. Austin. For a price ($6 million might even be in the neighborhood) you will be able to see farther, hear more acutely, and even smell, taste, and feel things that ordinary Homo sapiens are doomed to miss with their ordinary senses.

Sounds tempting, but I won’t be first in line (even if I could afford it.)

Although I am sure that there are situations where super powered senses would come in handy, the drawbacks would also be considerable. Here are just a few I can think of.

Super sight. Think you’d like to be able to see “like a hawk?” While it might be great to be able to see a tasty mouse from a mile away, you’d also be able to see every tiny imperfection in the people you now find attractive. Even Cindy Crawford wouldn’t look so good if you could see her right down to her pores.

Super hearing. The upside is that you’d be able to hear everything people say even when they don’t want you to hear them. Ditto for the downside. You just don’t want to know. This would almost be as bad as being able to read people’s minds, a fate worse than death.

Super smell. When you consider it, there seem to be a lot more bad smells than there are good ones. Do you really want to smell everything there is to be smelled in your neighborhood? Probably not.

Super taste. This one would completely screw up the art of cooking. The impact to the spice industry alone would be devastating.

Super touch. Revving up one’s sensitivity to touch may seem attractive to the more naughty-minded among us, since touch is the sense most commonly associated with things of an erotic nature. But unless you’re Hugh Hefner, your life probably brings you as much pain as it does pleasure. Let’s face it you’re probably more likely to whack your thumb with a hammer or stub your toe than you are to find yourself in the throes of ecstasy before the day is out.