Acoustic Levitation

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  Even now, though, I’m not posting any of my own material… But I think you will still enjoy this immensely.  Levitation is possible!

Telepathy

I have recently been longing for telepathy more and more, due to the many complicated thoughts that make their rounds through my head that I both want and need to say, but don’t lend themselves easily (and sometimes not at all) to words. So it has become more and more common for me to be quiet for a long time, and then suddenly wish out loud for telepathy.  I now have good news: telepathy appears to be possible.

Scientists are making breakthroughs neurology, and while the technology is currently invasive, we can actually control things outside of our bodies through our brains. One example of this is a robotic arm that (I assume via surgery) is connected to a paralyzed person’s brain, allowing them to directly control that arm. I am also aware of an experiment that was conducted in which two people were connected to each other with a technology that appears to be similar to that used with the robotic arm in the last example. One person sat in front a screen, and the other sat in another room with a video game controller in his hand.  The first person was actually able to play simple video games on the screen in front of him by controlling the other person’s hands on the controller.

With some further insights into how thoughts and ideas are formed and held in the human brain, this same technology could be used to communicate telepathically. A further sophistication would be to actually have a form of transmitter and receiver surgically added to the head so people could telepathically communicate without having to physically connect each other.  You could even have something like a cell phone tower to relay telepathic signals so you could telepath (or whatever the verb form of the word is) to someone on the other side of the world.

But what if the owner of the telepathy relay decided to keep a record of your thoughts, or the government decided to add a memory chip to the telepathy transmitter in your head? So much for 1984! You could have a literal thought police! The more sophisticated versions of this would certainly be very invasive, but it is a very cool idea, in my opinion, and a dream made possible for me.

For literature purposes, you could use this to make a dystopian government with a thought police, or that has a reeducation camp where they install chips that control your thoughts and makes it impossible for you to disobey or at least monitors your thoughts and reports them to the government. You could also use this to make exterior memory chips, so you could memorize stuff more easily.  You could have doors where you have to plug your brain into a security device to open it, or a secret society that communicates in the middle of everyone via telepathy.  You could use this for a fanatical special ops team in which their vocal chords are taken out and they are telepathically linked, thus enabling absolute silence during operations.  You could use this for pet training, drone flying, internet surfing, project planning, car driving, game playing, public speaking, psychology researching, and the list goes on and on.  A lot of this would be possible in real life, though many of them would require research that proves even further that that necessary for the basic idea (such as learning how various pets’ minds work to enable human/animal telepathic links).

X-Ray Vision and the Like

The human eye can only detect a small range—from 390 to 700 nanometers—of the entire spectrum of light—from .001 nanometers to 100,000,000,000,000,000, or 1 picometer to 100 megameters—and we tend to take it for granted that this is the only light that is possible to see. But what if it were possible to see other spectra of light? Bees, and I think some butterflies, as well as other insects, can see ultraviolet light, though they sacrifice the ability to see red light. If they can see other spectra, why can’t we?

The human eye has molecules on the outside of its rod and cone cells that react to the presence of certain types of light. When one of these molecules receives a compatible photon, it results in an electrical signal being sent to your brain, which translates the signal into a color. There appear to be multiple types of these molecules, each of which works differently, but in this post I will call them photoreceptors collectively.

Humans only have a few types of photoreceptors, so we can only pick up red, green and blue light, which our brain combines to make the colors we see. We also have a photoreceptor on our rod cells that picks up all visible light, giving us grayscale night vision. Some animals, however, have photoreceptors that respond to ultraviolet light, allowing them to see it.  There is also some indication that humans have the ability to see the near-visible spectra (at least part of Ultraviolet and Infrared), but that our lenses filter it out.  Read more about that here.

So all we need to see light of different spectra is the photoreceptors to pick them up (and possibly some lens surgery to keep it from filtering them out). However, the way in which we attach them can have different effects on the way the new light is seen.

The first method to be developed will probably attach the new photoreceptors directly to certain existing cones, allowing us to see the new spectra in the same colors we see visible light. The result would be a person that sees both the bones and skin on the same person at the same time, or someone with infrared vision interlaced with normal vision.  While useful in many situations, this would also cause problems, such as the color of an object being dependent on its heat, causing confusion as to whether you are looking at a cold red object or a hot blue object.

The next developmental step would be to incorporate the new photoreceptors into the DNA. We would have to figure out the DNA sequence that would make these photoreceptors, and figure out how to make our DNA make new cone cells in the eye, which is why I have this listed as being developed after the method of attaching it directly to existing cones, but once we figure out how to do this, we will see the new spectra as their own colors. Now, I don’t know how this will manifest—we might still see the same colors, with the visible spectrum showing up as green, ultraviolet as blue, and infrared as red, or we might actually see new colors; I don’t know—but either way, this method is bound to eliminate confusion.

This would lend itself very well to science fiction. You could write a book about a squad where (going with the first method likely to be developed) one member gets a red rim on his vision in the presence of dangerous radiation levels, one has infrared vision, one has X-ray vision, and one can see Ultraviolet, or (going with the second method likely to be developed) you could have one person who can see the entire spectrum of light as new colors (this would have the added benefit of being able to see magnetic fields, because the electromagnetic force works by photon exchange).

Here is another post by someone else that explores current progress in the fields of human infrared and ultraviolet vision, as well as echolocation.

RC Humans

Most people know that muscles contract when they receive an electrical impulse. So is a brain really necessary? Every way I can think of that a human or animal can die is a result of the brain ceasing to function. If your heart stops working, the blood stops flowing, thereby cutting off the food and oxygen flow to your brain, and you pass out and eventually die. If your lungs stop working, your blood doesn’t receive oxygen, so it carries food to your brain, but not the oxygen needed to process it, so your brain runs out of energy and you pass out and die.

So what if you replaced the brain with electrical circuitry, or used some kind of neural helmet to stimulate impulses from the brain? You could raise bodies from the dead. The person would still be dead, but the body would be functional again. Add an AI and you have a semi-intelligent zombie or a recycled body, however you wish to think about it. Also, suppose you programmed the circuitry and added a radio (or other wavelength) transmitter and receiver? You would have a remote controlled human.

Now, suppose we had nanobot technology. We could program nanobots to take over a brain, thereby creating the same effect as the helmet in the last paragraph. While we cannot do this with current science, it is a much more useful form. You could package the nanobots together in projectile form, and create a weapon that would turn the enemies to your side instead of killing them, creating an army that grows with every casualty it inflicts.

There are a few obstacles to the use of this idea. First, if any other vital functions were compromised, the body would not live very long. Take the heart or lungs, for example. The body would only last until the muscles ran out of energy from lack of oxygen. Also, I highly doubt we understand the brain fully yet, and for this idea to work, we would either have to duplicate all of the brain’s functions exactly (in the case of replacing it with circuitry), be able to take control of specific parts of the brain (in the case of the nanobots and helmet when used on living people), or be able to stimulate every part of the brain and take specific control of specific parts of it (in the case of the nanobots and helmet when used on dead bodies). I doubt any of these are currently within the reach of today’s scientific community, but I would not be surprised to see us gain those abilities during this generation.