The Speculist

I'll start. Kathy wrote:

>>Could nanotechnology several generations earlier have manipulated their ancestors' genes creating a deliberate mutation that modified their brain waves?

Sure, you could do it that way. But it raises some pretty big questions. Who did this thing? And why? Do these people have sufficient technological acumen that we have reason to believe their ancestors could have done this? If so, why would their ancestors have built this ability in and not told them?

Then again, maybe it wasn't their ancestors. Maybe the latent telepathic ability is the result of a man-made virus that was actually intended to do something else — make people comply with government schemes, make them forget some terrible thing that happened, whatever — and maybe that virus did what it was designed to do, but the unexpected result of the brain-tinkering was (a few generations later) the sudden appearance of this telepathic ability.

Why do I get the feeling that you make up the by-laws as you go along…? But thanks for making me an “ipso facto Regular member of the Posse in good standing.” Now, about your comments:

Why indeed would their ancestors do that? And how? That’s what my characters want to find out. Perhaps the Posse’s ideas will become threads of the plot as my characters try solve the mystery of the past so – as the book jacket might read someday – they can save the future!!

Meanwhile, I'm going to see what I can do to raise that prize money ...

Okay, first of we need to consider the nature of the telepathic ability itself.

It's easy to imagine an electromechanical device, or a system using many nanobots, to facilitate your telepathic communication. Imagine nanosensors implanted into neurons that could detect the electrochemical activity within those neurons, relay that data back to a chip that processes it into a standardized form and broadcasts it, most likely with a low-powered, Bluetooth-like short range radio signal to avoid any detrimental health effects associated with stronger signals. I think you should expect something like that to be available within fifty years. Problem with that is that it should be widely-available, standardized technology, which isn't compatible with the "but only with each other" part of your scenario, unless your characters are some kind of test subjects for the technology, or it was installed in them after some kind Luddite anti-telepathy ban was put into place, or after the fall of civilization.

My sense, though, is that you're looking for something biological, and that's workable too. We know some animals, like birds, can sense the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, and some animals, like electric eels, can generate electromagnetic energy, so a biological system analogous to the one I described above should be possible. The fact that evolution hasn't coughed one up (on this planet... yet...) wouldn't stop a human from engineering something like it. The problem is that genes are so complicated—and such a system is so much more complicated than any of the natural examples I cited above—that figuring how to engineer it would be monstrously difficult. It would probably require the use of extremely advanced computing technology, so advanced that the entirely artificial type of telepathy described in the previous paragraph would likely be available, rendering development of the biological version pointless (though it's quite possible to imagine the development of such a biological system to evade sensors designed to detect the other form for espionage purposes.)

I'm sure nanotechnology could do it. You wouldn't want to try to do it to a grown organism—might be possible, but but even more difficult—but getting nanobots into gametes prior to, or perhaps just after, fertilization to make the genetic changes before any significant growth occurs would be relatively simple. In fact, you wouldn't really even need nanobots for this sort of thing. You could probably do it with something not too much more advanced than today's recombinant DNA technology. The real challenge, as stated above, is designing the genetic changes so that [a] the telepathy works, and [b] it doesn't result in some kind of mutant birth-defect that can't live. A virus might work to introduce the changes, but I don't really think it's plausible for the changes to be accidental. Really tricky ethics to consider here, too. Whoever did this probably wasn't a good guy.

I'm assuming, of course, that you want a realistic, hard SF approach to the problem. If you're thinking in terms of parapsychological telepathy—or magic, which amounts to the same thing—you can make up whatever you want. If "the characters are writing the story," that's a good sign that your subconscious has already figured out what the story needs, and the limits of a hard SF approach may not serve you well. Then again, they may introduce useful complications for your characters to deal with and force you to rethink ideas that may be coming to you too easily. Good luck.

Hi, Kyle.
Thanks for your well-stated comments. I went to your site, which is very cool and worth exploring! I tried to email you but your address didn't pop into my mail program. Send me your email address, if you're so inclined, so we don't clog Phil's blog with our back and forth!

I want to stay within the limits of hard science although, budding speculist that I am, I'm willing to stretch them. If I can't, I may have to tell these characters to take a hike or eliminate the telepathy thing.

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